I usually like Matt Yglesias, but I don’t like this kind of thing:
I wrote about “optimism inversion” back in January 2009, noting that over the previous five years liberal commentators had been consistently more pessimistic about the economy than conservative ones. I saw three factors at work:
1. I believe left-wing politics and pessimism are generally correlated traits.
2. Left-of-center commentators are generally smarter than right-of-center ones and pessimism was the correct position.
3. People inclined to be hostile to the incumbent administration are naturally disposed to believe that disaster looms around the corner.
This is one of those things I don’t understand in general: why is it necessary to psychoanalyze people when they arrive at the correct conclusion? We saw this with the war too, where it was claimed that liberals only opposed the war because Bush was for it. Not only were the anti-war people I spoke with smart to be against the war, their arguments against the war were completely correct — “we won’t be greeted as liberators”. Similarly, the pessimism I heard about the economy (from Krugman and from a friend on Wall Street) were of the form “we have a big real estate bubble and it’s going to burst”.
When people not only predict something correctly but also accurately assess the reasons why that something will happen, isn’t it enough to just “they were right” without wondering whether or not they’re naturally pessimistic or ill-disposed to the administration?
I’ll grant that number 2 goes partly to this, but I think the real answer here is that left-wing commentators, to some extent, engaged in reality-based economic prediction while right-wing ones did not. I’m not sure that makes the right-wing ones dumber though: how many of these right-wing commentators lost their jobs?
Update. Sorry for the weird disappearance issue with this post — I pushed it back because I don’t like to step on the “call your representative” posts.
aimai
Yes again Yes again Yes again Yes.
aimai
DougL (frmrly: Conservatively Liberal)
Because then they can dismiss you as having been right for the wrong reasons. IOW, you were lucky. It’s how they justify their missing the whole thing, passing off our ‘knowing’ the looming disaster on pure chance.
They are great and we are not, let the games continue!
V.O.R.
“why is it necessary to psychoanalyze people when they arrive at the correct conclusion?”
A: To justify discounting their “opinion.”
But I’m sure you know that. I just like answering rhetorical questions.
Actually, there should be scare-quotes around “justify”, too.
On to other things: It can be hard to separate “pessimism” from just wanting to talk more about problems and what to do about them than ruminating about how swell other things are going.
I’m pretty sure an inability to make that distinction is why wingers so often accuse lefties of being anti-American.
My anecdotal take on winger/lefty forums is that wingers do spend quite a bit of time boosting themselves or their side, while lefties engage in a lot more self-criticism. (Sometimes too much.) My explanation is that wingers tend to be significantly more insecure. (Other evidence: Winger foreign policy, economic policy , and well, policy in general.)
El Cid
Apparently we were also wrong and emotionally over-pessimistic when a lot of us saw the SURGE as the tail end of a successful campaign of ethnic cleansing by Shi’a in Baghdad and by the Sunni in peripheral neighborhoods which would at best tamp down violence a bit with extra troops and concrete walls isolating ethnic neighborhoods.
I assure you that if I am judged as being too ‘pessimistic’ on the future economic performance of the nation assuming what appear to be likely government policies (always allowing for being pleasantly surprised by actions I didn’t expect), it is because that is exactly what I think is most sensible [in terms of describing reality as I see it].
Just like I felt pretty pessimistic about the economic growth based on the housing bubble throughout the 2000’s as it clearly looked like ridiculously unstable and unsustainable growth.
Dork
blockquote fail
ed
Here’s where I and many other NonSerious America-Hating Commie Pussy Faggots were at at the time:
1. It’s a really fucking stupid idea.
2. Iraq had nothing to do with 9-11.
3. Where’s the fucking threat?
4. Where’s the fucking WMD’s? (recall Slacktivist destroying Coward Powell’s UN presentation in near real time)
5. The rationale keeps shifting.
6. The Administration is made up of incompetent boobs and/or insane war mongers.
7. Holy fucking shit is this a really fucking stupid idea, it sure seems obvious as hell.
8. And many, many more.
And guess what? Unlike Judith Miller, I (and others) was proved fucking right. And guess what I (we) won? Fuck all.
slippy
It almost sounds like “yeah, you were right but you’re a dick,” kind of spiteful bitterness.
Yeah. We were fucking right. We were right for 8 years and Repukes were wrong.
Some people just can’t accept being wrong, and have to come up with some kind of perverse logic where they really weren’t.
The Republic of Stupidity
@V.O.R.:
Like with their ‘Guns and
ButterMore Guns’ approach to everything?Why
usebother with a hammer when an M1 Abrams tank will work just as well?Brien Jackson
Maybe it’s just me, but it seems that Matt’s whole point is that progressives are far less likely than conservatives to hue to #3, or more precisely, to the inverse of it. That is, conservatives and conservative commentators are more likely to believe that the presence of Republican governments means everything is, or will soon be, totally awesome than lefties are with Democrats, and progressive commentators are far more willing to point out where Democratic governments are making mistakes.
bleh
I think a big part of it is that lefties are far more inclined to public psychoanalysis than are righties. It’s as much that they do it less as that we do it more.
The Right is authoritarian, which means (1) stay in line and keep quiet in public, and (2) trust in the dogma and the leadership, and quiet the doubts in your own head. They are ruled much more by fear — personally and organizationally — and they don’t like things stirred up.
In a way, we do it because we can. (Although I think we can’t really help ourselves.)
mattH
I don’t read Yglesias anymore, so I have no clue on how his record is on the economy, but he was quite the booster for Iraq and took it quite badly when it became blisteringly obvious that the Bush admin was going to screw it up even for his seemingly low standards. Makes me wonder about him now.
JR
Stumbled across this old Radley Balko piece from 2003 last night.
http://www.theagitator.com/2003/04/25/white-house-on-iraq-just-kidding/
Read what he writes, then scroll down to comment #17.
Pangloss
Funny how the fiscal conservatives kept their freakin’ mouths clamped tight when GWB was misplacing pallets of cash in Iraq, financing wars with supplimentals, ramming through the Medicare Prescription Drug giveaway to Big Pharma, and giving away no bid contracts like dentists pass out lollipops.
t jasper parnell
@mattH: I can’t stand Mattyboy he is like the center-center-left version of Ross D, only with more typos.
J.W. Hamner
I think there is definitely a pernicious tendency on the Left to claim “If you don’t do things EXACTLY like I say then some Very Bad Thing is going to happen.” Most often, what they say we should do isn’t even on the table as an option, and the Bad Thing isn’t specified. Regardless, then we get people pounding their chests and pulling a muscle patting themselves on the back whenever things aren’t roses and gumdrops. Next up is to get mired in arguments about what would change if we had time machines and could do it over.
This is not something I’ve ever seen Republicans do.
drew42
It’s the ol’ revese cause-and-effect. The cheap argument is “Person X takes position Y because he/she is a liberal.”
Wrong. Person X (me) is considered a liberal because the positions I take fall into what’s considered the liberal range of American politics. Even though my positions fall well inside the mainstream of general intelligent human thought.
Much of what makes conservatives conservative is that by definition they listen to the authority of entrenched power, rather than true expert opinion or new ideas. So yeah, those who obsessively listen to someone like Rush Limbaugh are going to take the same positions that Limbaugh takes. He appears powerful and has an aura of authority. That’s good enough for them.
It also explains why Republicans are so loathe to publicly disagree with him. It goes against their nature. Only that which is “different” must be attacked.
But (and I know this is arrogant) when liberals agree, it’s more that great minds think alike. Like an algebra problem, we can all work independently through it, but come to the same answer, based on the facts.
Martin
Mostly because armchair psychoanalysis requires no work, unlike investigating and accounting the facts.
We were right on Iraq because we listened to the UN inspectors and others that, to be blunt, were in a much better position to understand what was going on. Basically, we were better informed and better skeptics.
We were right on the economy for precisely the same reasons. It wasn’t too hard to see either. In my city the median home price at the peak was $990,000. The median income was $110,000. You don’t have to be Warren fucking Buffet to realize that median home prices 9x the median income is only sustainable if a fuckton of people are getting loans they can’t afford. And just in case the housing was temporarily decoupled from the local income (people from the next city over with a higher median income moving in, but not yet registering their income locally) I checked around for my entire county and it was happening everywhere. I wasn’t the only person seeing these clues. It had nothing to do with pessimism and everything to do with knowing what the fuck is going on and not being a cheerleader for whatever the tv people are trying to sell.
Silver Owl
Not many sane people sit there and say, “Yay!!!! We’re going to have a serious mess to clean up because of poor decision making! I can’t wait for that! I have nothing better to do! Woot! Woot!”
Predicting the outcome of poor behavior and decision making is depressing. Watching it happen over and over again is like watching a train wreck over and over. Pretending otherwise still does not change the reality.
Maybe Klein is hoping for a marketing bs front from everyone. Not sure why since it’s marketing bs that has gotten us some truly wretched leadership.
Tom Hilton
Well…yeah, there’s a constant effort to discount what liberals think when they’re right. That said, I think it’s always worth asking why people believe what they believe, whether they’re right or wrong. There’s a really important difference between being right because you made a rational assessment of the situation and being right because you reflexively oppose the other side; the first should get you some credibility for future judgments, and the second should buy you nothing.
And I think someone like Jane Hamsher illustrates the importance of the distinction. She’s been ‘right’ a lot of the time, and for that reason a lot of people gave her credibility she never deserved–credibility they wouldn’t have given her if they had looked more closely at why she was ‘right’.
DougJ
@J.W. Hamner:
Sure, but still, when they’re right, they’re right.
For example, Atrios was bitching about HAMP and the stimulus and saying the economy was headed deeper in the crapper than Obama’s people said…and he was right. I always assumed that he was basing this on something quantitative, not on his “pessimism” and supposed hatred for Obama.
Aaron S. Veenstra
FWIW, I don’t think there’s any evidence for #1. At any given instance you may find that liberals are generally more pessimistic than conservatives, but the public opinion literature doesn’t suggest it’s a static dispositional thing. You might find that conservative elites are generally more supportive of the status quo, and more likely to speak well of it, but that’s a conflation of the nature of conservative ideology and the nature of optimism, IMO.
DougJ
@Tom Hilton:
And I think someone like Jane Hamsher illustrates the importance of the distinction. She’s been ‘right’ a lot of the time, and for that reason a lot of people gave her credibility she never deserved—credibility they wouldn’t have given her if they had looked more closely at why she was ‘right’.
That’s a good example of how you could always be right by just saying the opposite of what Bush was saying.
But there were plenty of people out there who understood why Iraq was a bad idea and why an economic crash was coming. And I don’t think it’s just that they are pessimists.
Martin
@bleh: Um, they blame everything from the bad economy to earthquakes on people being gay, amoral, etc. Not only is that public psychoanalysis, it’s also marinating in magical thinking. Everyone on the left wanted the terrorists to win. Everyone on the left wants to destroy America and displace English by letting in illegal immigrants. Etc.
No, they do it at least as much the left does it, if not more. Just hang out on Fox News for 8 hours.
That’s no excuse for the left doing it, mind you.
J.W. Hamner
@DougJ:
I don’t know specifically about Atrios’s argument, but in general, I don’t think “Obots” have said he or Krugman are necessarily wrong… they (or I to be honest) tend to argue that it’s “politically impossible” to get a bigger stimulus or do a different kind of bailout.
I mean, how many people on the Left said Krugman was wrong that the stimulus was to small? Obviously people in the Administration weren’t going to say that… but other left-ish economists? I think they mainly said “I hope he’s wrong, because this is the best we can get.”
Now we have arguments about how many different things Obama has failed at in not getting us a bigger stimulus. Republicans, on the other hand, would get their paid hacks to lie through their teeth about how AWESOME things are.
I know which side I prefer, which is why I’m here, but it’s hard to argue that the GOP’s version isn’t more effective at driving the narrative at least.
toujoursdan
Maybe because more liberals are aware of this: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/our-debt-time-bomb-is-ready-to-go-ka-boom-2010-02-02?dist=beforebell and know that these problems are largely caused by conservative policies.
(Besides, if there is an academic discipline that is overwhelmingly right-wing, it’s modern economics.)
Napoleon
@Aaron S. Veenstra:
To the extent you can find “evidence” for #1 I think it is a result of having a short time frame, which at Matt Y’s age is what I think he has fallen into. All of my adult life since I turned 18 in 1979 has been watching the country de-industrialize as a result of a lack of a coherent industrial policy, the federal government fall into the hands of fiscal flim flam men, and the casinoization of the economy, so I have been pesimistic about the country. But it was based on a clear slide over that period that anyone ought to be able to have seen. If Carter’s energy policies had been persued, a coherent industial policy and no bing and purge deficet fest under two seperate Republican presidents I bet I wouldn’t have had nearly the pessimistic view that I had over that period.
MTiffany
The need to psychotwaddlize people who get it right arises because most americans are too stupid to understand that cynicism and pessimism are not synonyms for skepticism and realism.
El Cid
@J.W. Hamner: There was a tendency in much of the classic Marxist left (“was” not because there aren’t still those with such thought, but because the numbers in the debate are so few) to always propose that some current crisis would really be the crisis of capitalism in which finally it would collapse and have to be replaced.
For me it just became a punch line when I’d read such a piece — “Oh, okay, then, forget that last one, this, this is the true and final crisis of capitalism.”
It’s not that I don’t think that capitalism could very well bring about its own replacement — and I do hope that someday it will be replaced — but I don’t mistake this as a prediction or imminent event because of some mechanistic view of history.
J. Michael Neal
@drew42:
This is a nice idea, but, in practice, it’s not entirely true. I think most of us, if we are honest with ourselves, will admit that our positions do sometimes arise in the opposite order.
This isn’t even a criticism, if done in moderation. None of us is an expert on everything. We have to fit our positions on a lot of things into the framework of a general world view. This means that some of our views are taken because they are the liberal position on the subject, and we generally trust the liberal outlook.
Hiram Taine
@J.W. Hamner:
That’s because the Republican policy is always on the table and in fact is the one that is implemented the majority of the time.
And Republicans *always* say something bad is going to happen if their policy wishes aren’t followed, the problem is that their policy wishes are usually followed and then something bad always happens.
Honestly, I can’t think of single exception to this rule, Republicans have the Sadim touch, that’s Midas spelled backward, everything they touch, particularly gold, turns to shit.
Hiram Taine
@Napoleon:
Exactly..
rickstersherpa
The Liberal/Left economic blogs, from Paul Krugman’s through Brad DeLong’s, Angry Bear’s, Interfluidity, Dean Baker’s, and Naked Capitalism have remained “pessimistic sincer Obama’s inadequate stimulus and Geithner’s weak financial reform proposals. If anything, the Conservative blogs, (Tyler Cowen’s for instance) and Arnold Kling have been more optimistic believing that the economy will rebound sharply because the recession was so deep and sharp and because structural problems in the labor market, Chinese Mercantilism, and Minsky/Fisher debt deflation deleveraging does not enter into their models. So at least in the economic sphere, I don’t think they are grading Obama on a curve.
mattH
Martin:
Not that I live there, but I think Humboldt County, Ca was the most obvious that we had a problem. Median income from 2001 to 2007 went from 21k to 26k, while houses went from 125k to about 500k. I think it lagged at the beginning, but that should have made it all the more obvious.
Mike G
Republicans are all about BELIEVING, which is to say that results mean nothing. What’s important is not solving problems effectively or whether you analyzed a situation with any accuracy or prescience, but whether you ‘Believe’ the ‘right’ things, and how loudly you proselytize for them so that everyone else can see that you believe in the ‘right’ things.
You see this mindset a lot in fundie churches. They actively disdain Christ-like actions such as helping the poor, one because their congregation of greedy narrow-minded assholes would tune out if they were asked to actually do something selfless for people outside their tribe, but also because the most important thing to them is not actions but Believing. Once you Believe, you’re in the club and inherently superior to all the dirty heathens.
This warped mindset is the only explanation for why anyone would have supported Bush and Cheney after eight long years of fuckups. Chimp Believed in Good Xtian Virtues, so he must be good, results and reality ignored. Magical thinking fucktards.
brantl
I would like to say that saying someone else is pessimistic, when they wind up being right all the time, is a good reason for you to go see a shrink. Sort of has to follow, doesn’t it?
catclub
rickstersherpa @ 32
You just made Yglesias’ point in his post, which JCole ignored.
There are no hack left wing/democratic economists who will
say things are better than they are to benefit Obama.
By ‘no’, I mean none with a megaphone that can affect public opinion.
Unfortunately Yglesias did not stop his post after making this point, but tried to explain it. A common failing.
CalD
Oh, I think there’s plenty of pessimism in the world to go around, left, right or center. Funny thing though, the difference between a pessimist and a realist is that a while a realist fully expects bad things will happen, a pessimist believes in their heart of hearts that good things can’t happen. And ironically, a lot of pessimism seems to have it’s roots in unrealistically optimistic expectations, meaning realists are more likely to be optimistic than idealists, even though they expect worse.
How’s that for pretzel logic?
Nutella
It’s obnoxious and a waste of time to psychoanalyze people’s opinions. Anyone can be right or wrong about lots of things.
The people who do need to be psychoanalyzed, and then locked up in the looney bin and not let out, are the ones whose opinions have been proved wrong and still insist they were right all along.
The ‘they will greet us as liberators’ or ‘we’ll be in and out of Iraq in a few months’ people, for example.
Grumpy Code Monkey
@CalD:
I’ve heard that the worst cynics are idealists at heart; they constantly expect the best of other people, and are always disappointed.
I’m a Murphologist, which is a pessimist with a sense of humor.
bayville
Ho hum. Another day, another overly-written, incorrect dose of psychobabble by
DouthatYglesias.Yep. Glad he’s on our side.
jl
Thanks for this post. Economics is not much of a hard science, but there are some semi-reliable macroeconomic relations that have stood the test of time. For example, Okun’s Law.
So, you take any macroeconomic theory and emprical macroeconomic laws that have have stood the test of prediction without completely falling apart (which pretty much limits you to an expectations augmented form of Keynesian theory, with modern monetary markets added on), you measure the variables that go into the RHS and calculate the variables on the LHS.
From my perspective, and I am not even a macroeconomic specialist, Krugman, Galbraith, Stiglitz, Roubini, Menzie Chinn, etc. have been using standard advanced undergraduate or first year graduate Keynesian models, plugging, and chugging.
For me their predictions had nothing to do with psychology or political tendencies, but simply competent use of standard models. Their reasoning and calclations were so basic that any econ major who has learned Keynesian theory at college should be able easily follow the arguments and caclulations in their heads, and should be easy to reproduce just by consulting standard textbooks.
The public may be confused about one issue. The anti-Keynesians cannot predict much of anything that anyone is interested in. What they can do is analyze the past and rationalize their theories, which by itself is not science at all. But if you never require anyone to predict anything, or do not keep track of their predictive record, this looks impressive because they have a theory that can explain anything at all no matter what happens. All you have to do is give them the empirical data about what happened first, is all.
A philosophy major like Iglesias should be somewhat aware of this kind of problem, so why Iglesias is wasting his and everyone else’s time with this stuff is a puzzle.
jl
note: my comment went into moderation. The b * N * r P * l L curse. I will try again:
Thanks for this post. Economics is not much of a hard science, but there are some semi-reliable macroeconomic relations that have stood the test of time. For example, Okun’s Law.
So, you take any macroeconomic theory and emprical macroeconomic laws that have have stood the test of prediction without completely falling apart (which pretty much limits you to an expectations augmented form of Keynesian theory, with modern monetary markets added on), you measure the variables that go into the RHS and calculate the variables on the LHS.
From my perspective, and I am not even a macroeconomics s p e c i a l i s t, Krugman, Galbraith, Stiglitz, Roubini, Menzie Chinn, etc. have been using standard advanced undergraduate or first year graduate Keynesian models, plugging, and chugging.
For me their predictions had nothing to do with psychology or political tendencies, but simply competent use of standard models. Their reasoning and calclations were so basic that any econ major who has learned Keynesian theory at college should be able easily follow the arguments and caclulations in their heads, and should be easy to reproduce just by consulting standard textbooks.
The public may be confused about one issue. The anti-Keynesians cannot predict much of anything that anyone is interested in. What they can do is analyze the past and rationalize their theories, which by itself is not science at all. But if you never require anyone to predict anything, or do not keep track of their predictive record, this looks impressive because they have a theory that can explain anything at all no matter what happens. All you have to do is give them the empirical data about what happened first, is all.
A philosophy major like Iglesias should be somewhat aware of this kind of problem, so why Iglesias is wasting his and everyone else’s time with this stuff is a puzzle.
DougJ
@jl:
From my perspective, and I am not even a macroeconomics s p e c i a l i s t, Krugman, Galbraith, Stiglitz, Roubini, Menzie Chinn, etc. have been using standard advanced undergraduate or first year graduate Keynesian models, plugging, and chugging.
I think that’s about right. I’m not even sure it required Keynesian models, but even simpler analysis than that.
jl
@DougJ: Not sure how correct you are on that. I do think that some of their predictions could have been done using the (at most) half a dozen or so purely empirical macroeconomic relationships that show some empirical regularity. I do not think all of it could have been done without the Keynesian version of macro supply and demand analysis.
JSpencer
I don’t consider myself to be liberal so much as I consider myself to be a realist. Liberals just happen to be more realistic than conservatives these days, so it’s a natural alignment. No mystery.
Zach
That’s a second-order objection. My consistent objection was that there was no compelling evidence that Iraq possessed any chemical or biological weapons or a nuclear weapons program of any kind what-so-ever. That we’d provided inspectors with our best intelligence and come up dry for the better part of a decade. That Hans Blix, as much a straight-shooter as I’ve ever seen in that sort of role, was practically begging us not to invade because he knew it was bullshit.
When the only rationale, literally, is “everyone knows that Saddam has WMD; even France’s intelligence service does,” it wasn’t hard to apply Occam’s razor if you stuck to the facts and not the emotional appeals of interested parties.
I figured it was possible that we’d invade and things would eventually wind up better for the average Iraqi (and considered a fiasco a more likely possibility, and dropping the ball in Afghanistan a near certainty), but I never really entered into that argument because it was so hypothetical. I understand why it was the favored argument of “serious” war critics since anyone who denied that Iraq had, you know, done anything particularly bad in a decade, was raked over the coals.
I was also never particularly convinced that Scott Ritter was a pedophile blackmailed by Saddam Hussein so obviously all work done in Iraqi arms destruction after the Gulf War was worthless.