Wilkinson [excuse me, "W.W."] is no idiot, but look at what his commitments are forcing him into here: he's allying himself with someone whose racial politics _he_ describes as "toxic", and endorsing inherited privilege because reasons, that's why. In other words, he's agreeing with Flynn that meritocracy is sociologically incoherent, and embracing its devolution into aristocracy, if it can be used to upset enough liberals, and ennoble enough proles to damp down unrest.

It's as though they look at public choice theory and see a blueprint not a critique.

"This history is truly what makes the lamentations of present-day conservatives for a conservative think tank (or think tanks in general) dedicated to rigorous policy development so hard to accept. In the sixties and seventies conservatives in places like AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and the Cato Institute did more than anyone else to discredit the idea of policy making as a social-scientific endeavor. Instead, policy debates became primarily concerned with political identities and political combat and provided the foundation for the elite media discourse within which Americans live today, where “balancing” public policy debates between “two sides” in a “marketplace of ideas” effectively takes precedence over policy content and, dare I say, truth.
"Likewise, this history makes the lamentations of Julian Sanchez at Cato equally hard to have sympathy for. As the brief history I’ve outlined here suggests, the political subjectivities and biases of the wealthy funders of conservative think tanks were integral to the success of these institutions. Obviously, such monies were used to develop the institutional infrastructure, but even more importantly their biases and subjectivities were used as a way to change and enter public policy debates. So, it is hard to feel sorry for those at Cato who are now lamenting what Koch may or may not do to the institution. When the history of the institution is wrapped up in a project which uses the biases of wealth funders to gain power and change the way people discuss politics and public policy, you can hardly be angry when those funders want to change the political identity that you’re promoting.
"And this, ultimately, is what the debate at Cato is about. Since it has been a long time since the technocratic ideal held (if it ever truly did—that is a discussion for another post) this is not a debate between one side that wants an institution dedicated to Republican Party political combat (Koch) and one side that wants rigorous truth-seeking and a development of policies that “work” (people like Sanchez at Cato). No, it is instead the battle that conservatives (in think tanks and elsewhere) have been wanting for the last four decades—a battle of identities in a political marketplace. Who will win: the millionaire who is seeking to “re-brand his product” or the old-school libertarian brand? According to the narrative conservatives have been offering us, only “the market” can decide."

"So if liberty is the absence of coercion, as many libertarians claim, and if the capacity to act—say, by enjoying material conditions that would free one of the costs that quitting might entail—limits the reach of that coercion, is it not the case that freedom is augmented when people’s ability to act is enhanced?
"More to the point: is one’s individual freedom not increased by measures such as unemployment compensation, guaranteed health insurance, public pensions, higher wages, strong unions, state-funded or provided childcare—the whole panoply of social democracy that most libertarians see as not only irrelevant to but an infringement upon individual freedom?
"In one sense, of course, the libertarians are right: such measures require taxation and redistribution, limitations on what people can do with their property, all of which do infringe upon some limited group of people’s freedom. But by providing to others some version of the freedom from material constraints that Sanchez already enjoys—state-sponsored childcare, for instance, being in one limited respect the financial inverse of not having children at all—such measures would also enhance the freedom of a great many more.
"That, it seems to me, is the great divide between right and left: not that the former stands for freedom, while the latter stands for equality (or statism or whatever), but that the former stands for freedom for the few, while the latter stands for freedom for the many. ”We are all agreed as to our own liberty,” wrote Samuel Johnson. “But we are not agreed as to the liberty of others: for in proportion as we take, others must lose. I believe we hardly wish that the mob should have liberty to govern us.” That’s why libertarians like Sanchez can sense so clearly the impending infringement of his freedom while remaining indifferent to the constraints of others."

"Republicans are worried this election could be their last chance to stop history. This is fear talking. But not paranoia."

" But it’s not a philosophical dispute. It’s a simple case of her making up false claims based on extremely elementary errors.
And this is why I am forced to be so mean. There are just a lot of people out there exerting significant influence over the political debate who are totally unqualified. The dilemma is especially acute in the political economic field, where wealthy right-wingers have pumped so much money to subsidize the field of pro-rich people polemics that the demand for competent defenders of letting rich people keep as much of their money as possible vastly outstrips the supply. Hence the intellectual marketplace for arguments that we should tax rich people less is glutted with hackery. "

"To understand what Murray does in Coming Apart, imagine this analogy: A social scientist visits a Gulf Coast town. He notices that the houses near the water have all been smashed and shattered. The former occupants now live in tents and FEMA trailers. The social scientist writes a report: 'The evidence strongly shows that living in houses is better for children and families than living in tents and trailers. The people on the waterfront are irresponsibly subjecting their children to unacceptable conditions.'
"When he publishes his report, somebody points out: "You know, there was a hurricane here last week." The social scientist shrugs off the criticism with the reply, "I'm writing about housing, not weather." "

---All parts of Frum's review are worth reading.

"If we are to take the version of events proffered by Ron Paul's defenders, the Congressmen voted for a holiday which his Chief of Staff publicly denounced as "Hate Whitey Day." In Ron Paul's own name, no less. This version of events should inspire skepticism even in a Paul admirer. I am happy to report that in some, it did.  

I want to reiterate--again--that I make no claims on the heart of Ron Paul. How he truly feels about black people is best left to Paul and his conscience. His actual record, however, is wholly subject to the wiles of google."

"Hate Whitey Day is actually one of my favorite holidays. It doesn’t have all the pressure to be perfect, like Christmas, or everybody getting along, like Thanksgiving. Just white people cowering in their houses/retreating to their heavily armed compounds in rural Oklahoma while America’s non-white population runs riot, more or less totally burning shit down. And the clean-up and re-building costs always add a bump to the January jobs report, as Matthew Yglesias has noted."

Economics as right-wing ideology, iteration #5,678,183 in a series of aleph-null.

"Dick Cheney was a self-aggrandizing criminal who used his knowledge as a Washington insider to subvert both informed public debate about matters of war and peace and to manipulate presidential decisionmaking, sometimes in ways that angered even George W. Bush. 
After his early years of public service, he capitalized on connections he made while being paid by taxpayers to earn tens of millions of dollars presiding over Halliburton. While there, he did business with corrupt Arab autocrats, including some in countries that were enemies of the United States. Upon returning to government, he advanced a theory of the executive that is at odds with the intentions of the founders, successfully encouraged the federal government to illegally spy on innocent Americans, passed on to the public false information about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, and became directly complicit in a regime of torture for which he should be in jail."

Shorter; Incentives fail to elicit more effort when people are already working as hard as they can.

"the Borat humor is taking people whose jobs are to behave a certain way under a familiar, professionalized script and then start acting like a weirdo. ... They all try to keep to their scripts while the person opposite of them acts like a buffoon,,,, instead of going “stop acting like a buffoon.” ... These right-wing videos take this and amplify a particularly interesting part of the service/professionalized economy. When so much of our economy is driven by professionals there is a lot of work done in making sure that there are layers of people between the consumer and the professional. ... You don’t want the expensive brain surgeon making sure you’ve filled out your address and contact information correctly or taking your temperature – that’s why there’s a secretary and a nurse in-between these steps at the hospital.What the right-wing videos do ... is present the front-line staff as the actual decision making professionals. ..."

I am happy to endorse this, despite having read and admired Gross & Levitt's book as soon as it came out.  In retrospect, there was a fair amount of quarreling among natural allies "while Sauron was gathering his forces in Mordor" (as Krugman put it) going on in the 1990s.  (Which is not to say that irritating relativists weren't and aren't irritating, and wrong, just that they were never the real threat.)

F. A. von Hayek as a "useful idiot".

The ownership society, brought to you by a promiscuous causal interpretation of logistic regression coefficients.

Not that it's not great, but WTF is this doing in _Esquire_?

Sometimes, good taste is inappropriate.

To be fair, without a similarly-constructed list for earlier times, this does make it hard to say whether the problem is actually getting _worse_.

Why am I not surprised?

Is it possible to call someone an incompetent hack any more politely and subtly than this?

"respectfully administering the occasional reminder as to the precise nature of the motherfuckers you are dealing with"

"Obviously, this data I’ve cited is perhaps open to some criticisms or alternate interpretations. But Flanagan doesn’t dispute it, doesn’t cite alternate data, and doesn’t even seem to be aware of the possibility of discussing social trends in terms of evidence rather than assertion."

“I would have given a lot to be at Rush Limbaugh’s wedding last night, where Elton John (his fee a reported I million bucks) performed for America’s leading homophobe, and not only because I would have enjoyed that moral dichotomy. I imagine the event to have been more rite than celebration, a frog on a throne, something darker than blood flowing from the champagne fountain, some tincture of BP spill mingled with something more Lovecraftian, a conjunction of Bacchanalian and Bactrian purposes and flavors. I’m certain it was just the usual bad taste scenario, overweight men flirting with women half their age, a toga party for grown ups, as we’ve seen before with certain corporate entertainments; but you can’t completely disassociate the idea of ancient evil from Limbaugh’s buffoonish act. He’s the clown at the party of the damned, dressed in a froggy zipskin suit and playing with a string of mummified human hearts, flicking out his whiplike tongue to snag Viagra from a crystal bowl.”

"Funny, isn’t it? The Ford-Carter years look no worse — in fact, somewhat better — than the Bush years, especially if you look from business cycle peak to business cycle peak. And that was in the face of two very severe oil shocks. So a question for all the people who say that the economic troubles under Jimmy Carter discredited postwar economic policies: why don’t the troubles under Bush similarly discredit post-Reagan policies? ... [I]nflation did have to be brought down — and Paul Volcker, not Reagan, did what was necessary. But the rest — slashing taxes on the rich, breaking the unions, letting inflation erode the minimum wage — wasn’t necessary at all... In the modern vision, the old US economy is seen as an absurd, unworkable thing. Where were the incentives to grow super-rich? How did you manage with all those well-paid, organized workers? ... Radical change happened because a powerful political movement wanted it, not out of economic necessity."

In which MY is correct: "Whenever I bring this up, people quickly rush to assure me that Goldwater didn’t stand shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important political issue of his time out of racism, instead at the decisive moment in his career he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists out of principled constitutional reasoning that made it impossible for him to do otherwise. But this is actually more damning. You could imagine the founder of a movement being afflicted by an unfortunate character flaw that his followers lack. But the argument is that Goldwater didn’t suffer from a character flaw. Instead, having acquired a major party presidential nomination he stood shoulder-to-shoulder with white supremacists on the most important issue of the day because his sincere political ideology led to horribly wrongheaded conclusions."

"One major analytic error I think liberals tend to make is vastly overstating the level of dishonesty among conservative pundits, analysts, advocates, etc. The crux of the matter is that the overwhelming majority of smart people with conservative political opinions are working as businessmen. If they think about public policy at all, they’re thinking about how to cheat on their taxes or clever knew ways to bilk the public, and certainly not talking about it. So you’re left with a kind of denuded population in terms of brainpower. But at the same time, smart conservative businessmen have financed a staggering array of conservative institutions creating a tremendous number of jobs for conservative pundits and so forth despite the shallow talent pool. The result is a lot of people saying dumb things that they genuinely believe."

"Still, just as a brief refresher, recall that over the past two years, the movement’s flagship publications and most prominent pundits have found it urgent to discuss: Bill Ayers’ potential authorship of Obama’s memoir, the looming threat of death panels, the president’s crypto-Islamic background and allegiances, his attempt to create a “private army” via the health care bill, his desire to see America come to ruin, the imagined racism of Sonia Sotomayor…"

An interesting essay with a false central premise, viz., that the American right ever _did_ have a genuine openness to innovative ideas. There is a natural antipathy between that and being _conservative_...

A marvelously-written little post. The final sentence is worthy of Mencken: "This is who they are--the proud and ignorant. If you believe that if we still had segregation we wouldn't "have had all these problems," this is the movement for you. If you believe that your president is a Muslim sleeper agent, this is the movement for you. If you honor a flag raised explicitly to destroy this country then this is the movement for you. If you flirt with secession, even now, then this movement is for you. If you are a "Real American" with no demonstrable interest in "Real America" then, by God, this movement of alchemists and creationists, of anti-science and hair tonic, is for you."

On the National Review holding a symposium on black unemployment with all white symposiasts, none of them an expert on the subject: "That's fine, it's just amusing to see a magazine opposed to affirmative action exemplifying why such a policy might be needed. Rather than pick for the most qualified minds on the subject, it seems like they went with people to whom the magazine has social and ideological ties, and those people happened to all be white. It's certainly good that NRO is treating an issue like black unemployment seriously, but the symposium itself is a pretty good example of something that affects black unemployment in the real world: how black people, even those with impeccable qualifications, get overlooked based on formal and informal social networks rather than simply not being right for the job."

"Did You See John Yoo's Easter Sunday Op-Ed? In the Washington Post: "Crucifixion is legal when ordered by the president in his role as commander-in-chief of the armed forces.""

I was unfortunately drinking coffee when I read this line: "hard-driving captains of industry are not putting down cash on some vague promise of overturning Roe. Apparently, rich Republicans won't cough up the big bucks until they actually see women in bondage."

What exactly was the polling method here?

"Special guest post by the intellectual leader of the Republican Party"!

Ladies, gentlemen and distinguished others, your major party vice-presidential candidate of 2008.

"Like Glenn Beck, the paranoid American TV sensation, with whom he shares many traits, Hamid is channelling the deep misgivings of the middle class and offering them visions of a glorious future – one whose realisation requires nothing more than blind fidelity to the supposed foundational truths of the nation. For millions of young Pakistanis, it is proving to be a heady brew. But the hangover, when it comes, will be staggering."

"My gut reaction on reading Marc Thiessen's new book ... was: "Why is a speechwriter who's never served in the military or intelligence community acting as an expert on interrogation and national security?" Certainly, everyone is entitled to a voice in the debate over the lawfulness and efficacy of President Bush's abusive interrogation program, regardless of qualifications. But if you're not an expert on a subject, shouldn't you interview experts before expressing an opinion? Instead, Thiessen relies solely on the opinions of the CIA interrogators who used torture and abuse and are thus most vulnerable to prosecution for war crimes. That makes his book less a serious discussion of interrogation policy than a literary defense of war criminals. Nowhere in this book will you find the opinions of experienced military interrogators who successfully interrogated Islamic extremists.... Courting Disaster is nothing more than the defense's opening statement in a war crimes trial."

"I totally get that Tom Coburn is a man of principle. He thinks that minimizing federal spending is very important and preventing the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is much less important. Those aren’t my priorities, but politics is all about the fact that priorities differ. To me, with interest rates so low, borrowing some money to minimize the rape, kidnap, and massacre of children is an investment worth making, but Coburn sees it another way. Which is exactly why you need to settle these things through votes. If Coburn doesn’t like the Lord’s Resistance Army Disarmament and Northern Uganda Recovery Act, the appropriate way for him to express that is by voting “no” on the legislation. Plenty of other people aren’t as nutty as Coburn and are happy to vote for it. But this business of holds is simply unacceptable." (A very Yglesian paragraph.)

"So there are a lot of people out there who think that we need to kill the moral hazard of having your savings account insured. Grandma has $12,000 in her savings account, and doesn’t worry about whether or not the bank is solvent – so let’s force her to worry by removing the FDIC protection. This worrying will result in her providing discipline to her bank on their risk. ... How will grandma know what to do? ... I know the simple way you do it, some techniques that I’ve had some training in: You place out the payment structures using monte-carlo simulations with lognormal random walks; you take a metric of correlation in the market, perhaps in a gaussian copula structure and use that to run correlations at each step between the instruments; you take the distribution you generate and apply a “value-at-risk” logic to it, looking at some piece of the tail distribution.
... a 16-year old who wants to open a savings account for his part-time job will need to know these techniques..."

"what I worry about when I hear that there are too many “relativists” around: that the people complaining the most about that supposed surplus are the most supremely relativistic folks you might ever imagine encountering."

A battle of wits with a room full of unarmed men.

I thought I was joking in http://bactra.org/weblog/524.html, but we really haven't moved on at all from nineteen-twenty-fucking-two.

I am dubious about explaining political movements by reference to personal psychology. On the other hand, this looks like it would be a fun read...

Wow does Caldwell sound like a thoroughly unpleasant idiot.

How can this appear in the Washington Post? (But I'm glad it did.)

This should make for some ... interesting discussions the next time DeLong gives a talk at Harvard. (Or make sure it will be a long time before he does.)

Text classification PRECISION FAIL

To be clear, the utter_stupidity tag refers to the people peddling the meme, not Silver.