Brad DeLong Has Poop For Sale!
Dr. DeLong invests in toxic assets: Tim Geithner, and a compulsive need to oppose left-populism. Will he find a buyer? Or will he need bailed out?
Brad DeLong, a former Clinton official, says that every banking crisis – barring the Great Depression – has been resolved by government recapitalisation of the banking sector, as Mr Obama is likely to attempt in the near future. Nor, says Mr DeLong, is it fair to paint Mr Geithner as a creature of Wall Street. “Hank Paulson is a man who grew up in American finance and cannot imagine a world in which America does well and its financial sector does badly,” he says. “Tim Geithner, by contrast, is a bureaucrat and a policymaker. He has never pulled down a multibillion-dollar bonus. They are not the same type of people.”
Like hell they aren’t, DeLong just refuses to see it. Paulson worked directly for and with the scum who got us into this mess; Geithner, rather like Brad DeLong, worked or works indirectly for them, in government and Academe, charged with inventing scientistic and legal means of enabling the wealthy criminal class’s depredations. Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The amounts on their checks are different, and signed by different entities, but they all work in a more-or-less cozy accord [1].
“We have to ask ourselves: Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?” says Mr DeLong. “I don’t agree that we can do both.”
[head/desk]
In all other spheres except the one he’s chosen as a career, Brad DeLong is a moralist and humanitarian — and damn good at it. But when it comes to economics, and more specifically to a class sensibility, he utterly fails: just as he refuses to sympathize with the outsourced factory workers whose livelihoods have been destroyed by his beloved free trade policies, he also refuses to not sympathize with the modern robber barons who’ve so fucked-up the country. Functionally, he regards them little differently than does a Randroid: after all, there’s no practical difference between a “Captain of Industry” and a ‘necessary economic engine,’ because what matters is the importance (in moral and utilitarian weight) assigned to them. For DeLong as for the Randroid, such “prime movers” are shiny things which must be saved but the dun-colored little people are more or less expendable. Crazy, huh? But then Brad DeLong is perhaps the only self-described ‘social democrat’ on earth who admires Milton Friedman.
The diagrams of contrived bullshit on the typical economist’s blackboard in the end implore this and only this: be, or abet, evil. Benjamin Jowett, over a century and a half ago, had the profession pegged:
I have always felt a certain horror of political economists since I heard one of them say that the famine in Ireland would not kill more than a million people, and that would scarcely be enough to do much good.
But all the economist sees on that blackboard are laws and “proofs” as pure as those of the physicists and mathematicians — beyond good and evil, baby! And so unlike, he thinks, systems and laws created by, say, anthropologists and identity studies people[2], whom he considers artistic hacks at best and degenerate ax-grinders at worst. Meanwhile, the robber barons thank him for his contributions to “science.” The economist happily accepts, and if he has an utter lack of self-awareness (as it seems most liberal economists, including Brad DeLong, do), never considers himself their tool, employed in a horrifying profession of astounding douchebaggery[3]
- Notes: [1]
Which is to say, under the banner of Free Market and Free Trade Uber Alles. Or in the words of Delong’s and Geithner’s mentor, Larry Summers: “[W]e are now all Friedmanites.”* Not that DeLong is corrupt (he is not); he buys into this bullshit honestly and “intellectually.” Yes, he is one of those dread “Sensible Liberals:” i.e., a conservative, and in DeLong’s case one who has the nasty habit of calling everyone to his left a communist. So I’ll turn the other fist, as it were, and throw his his favorite J.S. Mill quote back on him, for as A.J.P. Taylor wisely if snarkily observed apropos the Tories, “to be stupid and to be sensible are not that far apart.”*Itself a nicely ironic echo of the 37th President’s famous declaration that “we are all Keynesians now.” But then Nixon — yes, Richard Fucking Nixon — was objectively to the fiscal left of some of these modern, so-called liberal economists. It’s not too much of a simplification to say that the extent of Brad DeLong’s “liberal” economic beliefs amount to a higher income tax rate for people in the top bracket, some education and token retraining spending; meanwhile, it’s laissez-faire and enjoy your retail-slavery, peons! How utterly radical! I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: When the revolution comes, the first people I’m for Cheneying in the face are “liberal” economists.
[2] cf. Larry Summers’s time at Harvard, and Brad DeLong’s defenses thereof.
[3] It wasn’t always this way, and I’m not just talking about J.K. Galbraith. Once upon a time a few economists were philosophers, not “scientists;” and they took moral duty to humanity seriously, by which I mean that they operated under the assumption that the rich were not only up to no good, but had an abiding interest perpetrating evil. A nice quote of Adam Smith, courtesy of Dr.Dick.
Or will he need bailed out?
Boy, does that syntax evoke my only marriage so far, to a gal from a blue-collar timber town in the Oregon mountains.
DeLong a humanitarian? You must be joking. He still responds like a bull to a red rag to any mention of Noam Chomsky since the latter had the gall to point out the evils America is responsible for with its foreign policy long before Dubya came along. Not to mention having worked for a regime responsible for its share of human misery around the world in Iraq and Yugoslavia.
DeLong’s a weathervane of one part of the ruling classes and what he’s saying now is “hey now, don;t get too radical you little people”.
Goodness gracious yes! We need to give hundreds of billions, nay, trillions, to those Wise Bankers who have so splendidly demonstrated their complete and utter inability to job their job of risk management. What could possibly go wrong?
DeLong misses the point that, like the Great Depression, this is a problem with the banking system itself, not some other sector the banking system can recapitalize and restructure. It’s precisely the exception he’s pointed out himself.
You could say, arguably, that this is akin to a hostage situation, and that certain sensible steps are necessary so that we all don’t go down the shitter. (There’s a photo that was featured on nakedcapitalism.com today that illustrates the point quite nicely.) But please don’t go pretending that this is anything but a hostage situation.
Also please don’t pretend that all the bad people have left the banks and it doesn’t make any sense to punish them any more. (I get the same sort of feeling whenever a college gets an NCAA sanction for recruiting violations after the coach has resigned. Oh please don’t punish the players for the stupid things that the coach did! Well, first off, the boosters who pushed to have such a hot shot coach hired are generally still there, and the players that the coach recruited (and who benefited directly or indirectly from the coaches recruiting violations) are still there. Point the second, when you join a firm in real life, and the leaders of the firm make stupid decisions and the firm goes under, you don’t get to keep your job even if the people responsible for those decisions leave. So there’s a life lesson here: if you don’t like NCAA sanctions, don’t push to hire stupid coaches, and don’t sign up to play at schools that employ stupid coaches.)
And pretty please don’t pretend that better regulations are going to save us from future fixes like this. The regulations were on the books back in 2000, and we got rid of them. And actually, we had regulations to keep AIG from getting into so much trouble, but the regulators didn’t have the people or resources necessary to enforce the regulations. If you don’t want something like this to happen again, don’t allow firms to become too big to fail.
If you don’t want something like this to happen again, don’t allow firms to become too big to fail.
I’d say a combination of this and some really big regulating would be ideal. Keep them small and keep a thumb on them.
I’ve been telling Brad for about a year that, instead of looking for honest conservatives to dialogue with (which he often does), he should realize that that’s exactly what he is. Brad already is the change he wants to see in the world. It’s like a guy looking desperately for his glasses while he’s wearing them.
I’ve had pretty nasty fights with him about Chomsky, Ehrenreich, and Gunter Grass. There’s also a professional economist, Robert Waldmann, who’s always there with . He’s always been respectful or even friendly to both of us, and he seldom bans someone for sharply disagreeing, if what they say is contentful by his standards.
He also has a much broader range of interests than most economists, and really is as much a historian and politico as he is an economist. A lot of those guys combine blind spots with incuriosity and horrible bland, tacit cruelty of the type that Jowett was talking about.
In short, DeLong is the rightward extreme of the population worth talking to. He’s less hip and less fun than Tyler Cowen or the Freakonomics guy, but those two are really horrible in their bland, cute incomprehension of the non-yuppy world.
“always there with pointed criticism. DeLong has always been respectful….”
That man has stolen my theory!
I found DeLong was unredeemable about five years ago when I emailed him a few questions about how outsourcing (something he was quite in favor of) helped anyone in our country, including specifically me after my job was outsourced. Having corresponded with him about other subjects, he didn’t deign to reply to that one. I guess it was too distasteful for him to answer that directly to one of the rabble who lost his job. I think he’d rather have abstracted me away.
In all other spheres except the one he’s chosen as a career, Brad DeLong is a moralist and humanitarian — and damn good at it. But when it comes to economics, and more specifically to a class sensibility, he utterly fails
DeLong is a deeply moral person in every sphere except the one in which he has professional expertise? My alternate, I daresay more plausible theory is that when DeLong is being a moralist and humanitarian about, say, torture and academic freedom, you understand the issue. But when the subject is economics, your singleminded focus on the “wealthy criminal class” and childish notions of agency/accountability dim the picture somewhat.
I’m confused here. Is the highlighted text supposed to represent the view of the target and the unhighlighted text is the satirical response — or is it the other way around? Oh, nevermind. I get it. April Fools! You got me.
When did agency and accountability become obviously fallacious notions? I see that assumed all over the place.
Probably Phil 101, which is as good a pidcture of reality as Econ 101.
DeLong suffers from trained incapacity or occupational psychosis. Only his doctor knows for sure.
Cheney-ing him in the face?
I mean, of course you don’t actually want to shoot him, but I hate hearing that kind of talk coming from liberals.
Please do not give Wingnuts the ammunition they need to draw parallels between comments like that and the kind of stuff people say on the Hal Turner board. You know they jump at any chance to try to turn the tables and paint liberals as violent people.
C-bagging.
When did agency and accountability become obviously fallacious notions?
When did I say they were? I said Mr. Mencken’s notions of agency/accountability were childish because he seems to believe that were it not for nefarious dealings on Wall Street there wouldn’t be a financial crisis.
I mean all sorts of bad practices were and still are rampant in the financial industry, and Obama’s been more slow than I’d like to correct them, but a LOT of what happened would have happened anyway. People’s houses weren’t worth as much as we thought they were. Anyone who sold a home in 2003-07 could easily be said to have enriched themselves from “fake profits.” It doesn’t mean they knew as much at the time.
Selling houses is not quite the same as 30 to 1 leverage in order to shuffle paper and loot via commission before the crash.
http://tpmmuckraker.talkingpointsmemo.com/2009/03/did_risk_team_look_at_cassanos_deals_aig_execs_off.php
C-Bagging.
Okay, that’s pretty funny.
It just annoys me when I see the party of guns and intolerance trying to paint the left as a bunch of violent fanatics, based on comments like the one made in this article.
Not everyone on the right is a violence-advocating nutcase, of course. But just about every violence-advocating nutcase is on the right. That should their cross to bear, alone. I mean, they’re a bunch of right-wing nationalists, by gum! Of COURSE they’re more into violence than the left. They’ve got the martial spirit, and they’ve got the freakin’ guns!
I mean, you can read the roll of right-wing hate groups, and what can they respond with?
Bill Ayers?
Rage Against the Machine?
Nonetheless, there’s a big push on the right to co-opt the left’s pro-tolerance rhetoric in order to paint liberals bunch of nefarious violent fascists (listen to them whine about anti-Mormon church vandalism, and it bugs the hell out of me.
What? You mean AIG was doing risky things and not being honest about it after the fact? Je suis etonne. I mean, get as mad at you want at the people who didn’t understand things that their salary depended on them not understanding. I just think it’s pointless to expect otherwise.
What needs to happen is for actual regulations to be imposed that would prevent 30-1 leverage and liar loans and option ARMs and CDO squareds, and there’d be a central clearinghouse for CDS, etc. etc.
You can get all that stuff without pretending that the only reason all our wealth disappeared is because Wall Street Bankers stole it all.
“The first people up against the wall should be the [whatever]” is a well-worn joke and I don’t see this as straying far from that. Besides, CHENEY DIDN’T GET THE JOB DONE.
Yeah, yeah, I know… obviously, he’s being facetious. I wasn’t “offended” or anything like that.
It’s just the “revolution” thing… y’know, you go over to ultra-right message boards and they talk quite seriously about “revolutions” and “putting people up against the wall” and that kind of shit — and yet a lot of people still think that extreme left-wingers are “just as” wacko as extreme right-wingers.
Well, I say fuck that.
So I think that liberals ought to refrain from using violent rhetoric entirely, as a matter of course–not even jokingly.
Joestork, and your plan to sit and ask nicely for people to surrend their malignant power is going to go just great! It always happens! Because… it happened once 50 years ago when the people in question just wanted to GTFO anyway…
The other couple of hundred times that violence solved injustice, well… just forget about that and let our overlords do whatever they want to us while the court gives them a pass for everything.
But when the subject is economics, your singleminded focus on the “wealthy criminal class” and childish notions of agency/accountability dim the picture somewhat.
Speaking from the point of view of a mathematician, I’m with HTML. It always gripes me to hear economists talking about laws and proof and all that, when I know that their proofs are full of holes and complete bullshit.
They’re acting as though they’re physicists ‘discovering’ natural laws, when in reality they’re just like some psychologists who make stuff up and then write a paper about it.
The problem is that we have an economic system that’s been set up by, and for the benefit of, rich people. There’s nothing natural about it – some folks sat down and designed some rules to play by, and then effectively decreed that as holy economic writ.
We don’t have to stay with that system, but it’s hard to even bring up the point when everyone believes in their flat earth economic system as the only possible one.
Sorry. Miss Grumpyface today.
Don’t be sorry Just Alison, you made cogent points in a manner simple enough that even idjits like me could grasp ’em. You’re a mathemagician.
Joestork, and your plan to sit and ask nicely for people to surrend their malignant power is going to go just great! It always happens! Because… it happened once 50 years ago when the people in question just wanted to GTFO anyway…
He said something like that?
Well put, Ms Grumpyface!
“Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?”
Bankers love this rhetorical question and serial killers wish they could get away with murder too!
“the only self-described ’social democrat’ on earth who admires Milton Friedman.”
Really? I thought ’social democrat’ was the complement of ‘social conservative’ and just meant “doesn’t go to an evangelical church” or “knows a few gay and/or black people and nods when they explain how they’re hard done by” in contrast to “does go to an evangelical church” or “thinks gays and/or blacks are all under the influence of evil forces”.
“some folks sat down and designed some rules to play by, and then effectively decreed that as holy economic writ.”
Along with getting some favourable court decisions.
“So I think that liberals ought to refrain from using violent rhetoric entirely, as a matter of course–not even jokingly.”
So you think violent revolution is never justified? When will you be obtaining your British citizenship and vowing loyalty to the Monarch?
“Do we want to revive our economy, or do we want to punish the bankers?”
Everyone knows that ‘banking’ is an esoteric skill, passed down in an oral tradition of secret initiations, so if you do punish the current batch of bankers then it will be impossible to acquire a new lot.
I don’t know how joestork can talk with all these words being put in his mouth.
Just, that’s a bit hard on psychologists. They are trying, at least, to find a way to help people and manage something that is currently beyond science (human personality disorders). They use real data points and don’t pretend that they can hold everything but what they’re looking at constant, ignoring all other variables.
Economists are just making up random crap, can never prove anything, and South America shows that when they try to help people, death squads and dictatorship is the only result.
Me, kind of reminds me of the Republican reaction to ‘V for Vendetta’.
Revolutionaries are troubled heroes, but they are often enough the heroes of the story. Dictators and autocrats never are.