if you go down to bretton woods today...

[dubdobdee]

mummy bear
daddy bear [edit: may be better to start with this one!]**
(baby bear to follow, we're promised)

why i prefer stirling newberry to eg krugman:

ok SN is NOT an elegant or a clear writer -- he sure doesn't have krugman's gifts as a columnist -- but i think krugman, though currently gloomy, still has an "oh ultimately things will work themselves out" bias (the assumption that capitalism is self-correcting is endemic to economics as a post-marxist discipline); newberry seems to rely too much on the glamour of disciplinary jargon to lay out a far darker picture, but my sense* from the density of his argument is that these questions he's raising go untranslated because they're not being addressed (if they were easily dismissed within the jargon, they already would have been; if they were discussed outside the jargon in the terms he's discussing them, they would be easy to translate); i have no idea if he's correct on the merits, but i want the questions he raises squarely faced -- this facing would require the jargon he relies to be brought alive (i don't want it dropped necessarily, i want it animated) in the process of the broader public discussion

*(this sense based solely on my intuitions as a sub editor routinely tasked with clarifying the arguments of others, in areas where they are experts (or claim to be) and i am not: these intuitions MAY BE FALLIBLE obviously)
**(haha maybe i should provide a really tough sub-and-proof!!)

Comments

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

could you maybe explain it using dinosaur comix? i got about two paras in and my eyes started going swimmy...

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i guess the ultrashort version is

"normally" booms and recessions are taken to balance out cyclically, give or take a certain level of misery, bcz resources are treated effectively infinite

the crisis in this model occurs when a given key resource proves non-infinite (as happened a century ago with coal)

the reflow process can be made smooth or rough -- in other words a non-catastrophic cycle can "designed for", to ensure minimal roughness -- providing we recognise that a crisis in the model has occurred

the minimal=roughness design requires attention to machinery in place (hence the jargon) rather than hopeful dreaming about rival fantasy machines (the infinitely smooth neoliberal self-correcting if never touched machine vs the rougher-than-rough marxist must-change-every-part machine)

newberry's nerdy jargon is nothing if not "attention to the extant machinery": but i don't know if he's a smart mechanic or a cowboy

(yes plainly newberry's flaw is he is tough to read: i've never seen a convincing rebuttal though, plain-speaking or technical)

[koganbot]

I merely skimmed these and am sure I don't know enough about Newberry to evaluate him. In fact, I'm sure I don't understand Krugman's ideas well enough to evaluate him or them, and even if I did the evaluation might not be worth much, since I don't know enough about economics. But I doubt that you know enough about Krugman either. And your vague sense about his vague sense doesn't take account of, e.g., what he actually said about why the current inflationary situation doesn't seem like it's equivalent to the '70s (if I understand it, in the '70s high inflation had worked itself into people's planning, so that labor contracts demanded and got increases on the assumption that the inflation would continue high, and the employers assumed that the inflation would in turn pay for the increases). Also, I don't see Krugman as saying that markets take care of everything. His last book is in part about the impact of politics on markets as well as the impact of markets on politics. (I say this without having read the book, just his brief summary.)

But I distrust Newberry for a very good reason. He wrote this:

As Carter cleaned up Nixon-Ford, and was defeated by Reagan for his troubles, as Clinton cleaned up Reagan-Bush, and was impeached for his troubles...

I have two potential explanations for this sentence: (1) Newberry gets caught in his rhetoric and this makes him say some stupid things or (2) Newberry is deeply stupid and fucked up. In any event, the two parts of Newberry's statement are not remotely equivalent, though he writes them as if they were.

By the way, Krugman thinks that Bill Clinton didn't do nearly enough to break away from Reagan-Bush, and he fears that in this regard a President Obama would do no better than Clinton.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/30/opinion/30krugman.html

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i think you must be discerning some buried point being made in that sentence that i'm missing -- ie in ref the relevance of the nature of the equivalence -- because what i get from it is just the implication that dems will never get thanked for cleaning up repug messes (as exemplified by two kinds of non-thanking on the part of repugs)

that on its own doesn't make me not trust him, because the larger argument doesn't depend on any argument about equivalence (the suggestion of which i suspect is more a function of a doomed attempt at swift and stylish writing than it is a function of any argument he's making; though i could be wrong) (i like the ambition of the project i think he's attempting, though i may be giving it way more leeway than it merits)

the krugman i've read -- his column, not as regularly as you, but also longer pieces in the nyrb -- never makes me want to read more; or points me to stuff i want to get my head round, about how things connect; newberry actually gets me interested in the machinery of modern economics and how it works

[koganbot]

Er, maybe you're right and I am reading too much into it, but the reason I did was because a few sentences earlier he'd written:

Barack Obama is destined to be a catastrophe for America, for the Democratic Party, for the Progressive movement which backed him. He is going to destroy his would-be friends, reward his enemies, spend money he does not have, make promises he will not keep, and plunge into ruin an American Economy that he and his advisors do not understand, because they are a generation out of date. The same ideas that put an end to Jimmy Carter, are the ones that he would enact now. Barack Obama is running for a repetition of Jimmy Carter's first term in office, as much as John McCain is running for George W. Bush's third term.

And then onto his next sentence/paragraph:

This result is going to pass through several phases.

which led on to the statement I posted. So his argument seems to be running along the lines of: Obama, like Carter, is going to implement ultimately disastrous economic policies that lead to his undoing and the election of a Republican reactionary. Now, Bill Clinton's electoral success and (middling) economic success would seem to be a counterargument here, in that Clinton didn't ruin the economy, and the genuine parallel (Bush "defeating" Gore) was hardly the voters' punishing the Dems for Clinton's economics. Nor of course was the impeachment of Clinton, which didn't have the support of most of the voters and didn't result in a conviction and wasn't driven by voter dissatisfaction with the economy. So if he's merely saying that the Dems don't get credit for cleaning up Republican messes, that's a non sequitur, since that's not the thrust of his argument, which is that Obama is going to set in place economic policies that lead to his defeat. So maybe it's merely a non sequitur that reads like a false parallel - he's not actually implying that Clinton was impeached owing to voter dissatisfaction with failed economic policies, he's just too disorganized a writer to realize that it reads as if he's implying something of the sort - but this sort of bad judgment as a writer makes me think he's got bad judgment as a thinker, that he really does think he's making meaningful parallels.

Btw, I think it's true that Dems don't get credit for cleaning up Republican messes, but that's irrelevant to his argument about the need for greater change than Obama's going to give us. But what his real argument needs to be is, e.g., even if Obama is as canny and smart economically as Clinton had been he still won't give us the relative prosperity of the Clinton years because, since Clinton, the problems have simply become more endemic.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

re disorganisation: my experience working with people who are extremely smart about certain technical things -- which for the sake of argument includes modern political economy -- are often not AT ALL smart about writing about it for lay people, so i'm less inclined not to jump to the full-on orwell version of "disorganised writing = bad thinking top to bottom" the way i probably would with non-technical political writing

i think newberry slightly reminds me of me when blogging -- jumping across things at fairly high speed, and being extremely compressed, and using sign language a lot, except i think i have a better ear (than him) for actually misleadingly bad inadvertent signals (since my area of technical expertise is writing); maybe this is why i cut him slack?

anyway, the key to the entire second part is surely this (concrete) claim, which he explicitly argues that krugman (and roubini) are smart enough to think about and discuss, but (so SN says): "This is because the great engine of development as we have known it, the internal combustion and analog communication economy, is not sustainable under the conditions of tripling the global middle class and halving the amount of oil bandwidth available to use."

in a sense i guess the issue i'm raising is style versus scope -- we can agree newberry is a poor writer in several ways, and poor at the politics of political writing also, if you see what i mean (ie the question of "what his argument needs to be"), but i like that he consistently speaks to this bigger-picture systemic analysis (ie SN is arguing to get across a connectivity of apparently distant economic, social and political effects, which i think he does) (but sometimes at cost of very sharp shortcuts which i either don't follow or think are dubious)

(as a columnist at the times i'd expect pk to be topical and often parochial, of course: so this isn't entirely a comparison of like with like, but his larger pieces at the nyrb haven't gone in this direction either)

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

s/b "but don't (so SN says)"

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

i'm not sure that clinton IS a counter-example to this key point, since his boom rode the expansionary period of the non-analog communication industry?

(but i agree that newberry fudges the requirement to say why he's not a counterexample clearly: i suspect from other things he's written elsewehere that "impeachment" is a massively compressed metonym for the failure of the analog media's to grasp the dynamics of the situation, economic OR political at the time --- he's very much an internet-culture booster -- and thus extrapolating from obama's uneasy and rather controlling relationship with this new polity back to an analogy with the gap between the clinton administration's relative voter popularity, and failure to get any kind of decent break from the established "grown-up" media) (thusly: an obama boom when it falters will NOT have generated old-media love and will not effectively harness new-media solidarity: result = after obama another republican)

but i think this metonymy -- and this entire argument -- operates more in his head not on paper anywhere!

[koganbot]

Sorry I'm being such a sourpuss. This guy seems as if he could be interesting. Actually, he seems like a crackpot and an oddball - he promises that his new paradigm will include Adam Smith and Plato! - but that hardly means he couldn't inspire me to look into the actual economic processes.

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

haha well i think he IS a bit of a crackpot in some ways -- he is notoriously, vituperously combative with those who take issue with him, and has got into entirely unnecessary flamewars in fairly robust (if hyper-flamey) communities, like dailykos (which i think he ended up being banned from; but he might just have taken his ball home)

he also writes string quartets! (and discusses the relationship between composition and modern pop in a way i'm not particularly attracted to)

and the portraits of him round the internet look like an onion parody (slick down hair and bowtie)

[koganbot]

I have my own particular blinkers, which go along the lines of, "You say the world is changing under our feet, but if this is true, how do you explain that popular music still mainly consists of four-minute songs that are about self-actualization through or in spite of romance? Huh? Huh?"

I do get the idea that this guy is fundamentally apocalyptic, which is something I prefer in song* rather than in economic analyis. He seems to be in favor of a market-driven apocalypse after which cleansing moment we'll be ready for true change, whereas I think that Krugman wants us to intelligently shape the market to useful ends.

*See my discussion of Hilary Duff's "Come Clean" over on Lex's livejournal.