I got nothing to add to the Ryanpalooza that’s been sweeping this and many other blogs. I don’t trust my horse racing system — haven’t since Tricky Dick crushed The Pride of the Upper Midwest in the 7th at Hialeah way back in 1972. I knew dirty deeds had to be involved, but even so, my then fourteen year old self couldn’t believe thatthe obviously better horse couldn’t carry the day…
But more than my desperate attempt to wean myself from trying to re-handicap this race as I absorb each quantum of news, rumor or the dispersing vapors of Hunter S. Thompson’s last hit of ibogaine, I’m not going to burden you with yet more Ryaniana because I don’t want to lose sight of the larger pathology within which the zombie-eyed-grannie-killer’s many sins are but symptoms.
That greater wrong within which the many smaller ones find safe haven is the Romney campaign’s comprehensive dishonesty about what a Romney administration would seek to do, and what it would mean if (FSM forbid!) it actually got the chance to do it. The latest case in point comes in a story that the Ryan announcement has largely cast into the tall grass. That would be the white paper — so called –put out by four academic economists that purports to describe just how a Romney-led United States would become a land of milk and honey, wealth trickling down from the heights to all “you people” so badly served (it is said) by President Obama’s leadership.
The only problem with this “analysis?” It’s bullshit.
Let me turn the podium over to KThug:
The big story of the week among the dismal science set is the Romney campaign’s white paper on economic policy, which represents a concerted effort by three economists — Glenn Hubbard, Greg Mankiw, and John Taylor — to destroy their own reputations. (Yes, there was a fourth author, Kevin Hassett. But the co-author of “Dow 36,000″ doesn’t exactly have a reputation to destroy).
And when I talk about destroying reputations, I don’t just mean saying things I disagree with. I mean flat-out, undeniable professional malpractice. It’s one thing to make shaky or even demonstrably wrong arguments. It’s something else to cite the work of other economists, claiming that it supports your position, when it does no such thing — and don’t take my word for it, listen to the protests of the cited economists. [links in the original]
And now put your hands together for Brad DeLong:
HHMT: As a consequence of short-termism, uncertainty over policy – particularly over tax and regulatory policy – limited both the recovery and job creation. One recent study by Scott Baker and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago found that this uncertainty reduced GDP by 1.4 percent in 2011 alone, and that restoring pre-crisis levels of uncertainty would add 2.3 million jobs in 18 months.
LIE: I am sorry, but I have to escalate from “FALSE” to “LIE”. The phrase “particularly over tax and regulatory policy” makes this a lie.
As Simon van Norden writes:
To understand the integrity of [the HHMT] argument, consider his claim that ‘uncertainty over policy–particularly over tax and regulatory policy–slowed the recovery and limited job creation. One recent study by Scott Baker and Nicholas Bloom of Stanford University and Steven Davis of the University of Chicago found that this uncertainty reduced GDP by 1.4% in 2011 alone.’ Note the phrase ‘this uncertainty’: he’s talking about uncertainty ‘particularly over tax and regulatory policy’. Now read the analysis by Baker, Bloom and Davis http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2000734. From their abstract: ‘The index spikes around presidential elections and major events such as the Gulf wars and the 9/11 attack. Index values are high in recent years and show clear jumps associated with the Lehman bankruptcy, the 2010 midterm elections, the Euro crisis and the U.S. debt-ceiling dispute.’ Uncertainty over regulatory policy? No mention. Uncertainty over tax policy? No mention. What Hubbard seems to be doing is interpreting the uncertainty created by elections (and the debt-ceiling showdown) as uncertainty about regulatory and tax policy (as opposed to, say, government spending.)
[HHMT = the four authors of the paper in question, Hubbard, Hassett, Mankiw and Taylor; all emphases in the original]
DeLong does this over and over again in his post — which is just a relentless debunking of claim after claim in the original paper.
So what’s going on here? Why are highly credentialed and well placed economists simply falsifying basic facts and arguments presented by other members of their profession, many of whom show the discourtesy of remaining sufficiently not-dead-yet to call them on it?
[Link to Ezra Klein courtesy of Kthug]Krugman again:
But surely part of it is simply that they have been caught up in the vortex of the broader Romney campaign — a campaign that has made fraudulence part of its standard operating procedure. Remember, Romney spent months castigating President Obama because he “apologizes for America” — something Obama has never, in fact, actually done. Then he spent weeks declaring that Obama has denigrated small business by claiming that businessmen didn’t actually build their own firms — all based on a remark that was clearly about infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Romney’s tax plan is now a demonstrated fraud — big tax cuts for the rich that he claims would be offset by closing loopholes, but the Tax Policy Center has demonstrated that the arithmetic can’t possibly work. He turns out to have been dishonest about when he really left Bain. And on and on.
So this is a campaign that’s all about faking it — fake claims about Obama, fake claims about policy, fake claims about Romney’s personal history.
Is it really surprising, then, that the economists who have decided to lend their names to the campaign have been caught up in this culture of fraud? Maybe some of them were initially reluctant, or thought they could support the campaign with selective renderings of the truth. But the pressure was on to be team players, to give the campaign material it could use — and so, one day, they all ended up putting their names to a report that is just plain dishonest, in ways that can be and have been easily documented.
Perhaps so. I certainly cannot tell what’s in the hearts of Hubbard, et al. I’m not so sure, though — I think that the commitment to a political party that has since Reagan committed itself to the primacy of belief over evidence (just ask David Stockman) turns folks like these four into useful idiots, already primed to commit the kind of intellectual dishonesty that Krugman and others find so difficult to fathom.
But this I know: among the many, many reasons why the Republican party can’t be allowed access to power there is this constant theme: from Romney to Ryan to helpful peons like this quartet, no one dares state the bald realities of their plans and policies. If they did, they’d score in single digits come the election. And so they don’t.
Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.
Images: Unknown Flemish artist, Rich and Poor, 17th century.
Abraham van der Eyk, Allegory of the theological dispute between the Arminianists and their opponents, 1721
ABL
Oh crap, sorry Tom. I stepped all over your post! I will backpost mine since it’s fluff.
Valdivia
Tom, Brad DeLong had a point by point refutation of it I think. Brutal.
Here it is.
driftglass
Team Murdoch has finally taken the field: http://bit.ly/MNRUYd
PurpleGirl
Professor Krugman has been on vacation and couldn’t let that report go unremarked on. All hail the Shrill One.
Violet
@driftglass: That’s excellent.
Villago Delenda Est
They’re being paid to.
Which is in line with the economic incentives that economists so often protest they are immune from.
Yutsano
@driftglass: :: applause ::
And with that teh Interwebs is won.
El Cid
Perhaps instead of so many people wondering why such economists would do and say such things, perhaps it’s more appropriate to begin by asking, ‘why would they not‘?
What would prevent them from presenting falsehoods and dissembling and flat-out contradicting themselves and reiterating long disproven nonsense, whether consciously so or not?
What social pressures would stop them?
What would they suffer professionally or otherwise by doing so?
If this were a random mutated behavior, such that it were impossible to know in advance who would argue what nonsense or fraudulent propaganda, what would be the selective pressure against it?
What activity would occur to remove such actions from the field, or such actors?
And are any such constraints acting with a strength greater than that of an idle daydream?
PurpleGirl
@El Cid:
What social pressures would stop them?
What would they suffer professionally or otherwise by doing so?
There are no social pressures at this time that will stop these professionals from saying/writing what they do. They will not pay any professional price for their perfidy — they will keep their jobs in academia and at think tanks, etc. They may even get bonuses for writing what they do, beyond the pay they contracted for. Which is shameful…
Dennis SGMM
@driftglass:
Nicely played.
dead existentialist
@ABL: What was this?
Chris
Hubbard came off particularly badly in a wall street documentary, I think it was Charles Ferguson’s Inside Job, which had a sequence about the corruption of academic economists by wall street money. He was brazen and visibly empty
Elizabelle
@driftglass:
Funny.
Didn’t recognize Grandpa, but knew it was somebody I didn’t like, just on sight.
Weaselone
Well, maybe some enterprising students can pin DeLong’s rebuttal to the office door of these hacks and their superiors along with comments that a student stupid or dishonest enough to pen such tripe would receive a failing grade and that a professor that does so has no place teaching the subject matter.
Ben Johannson
Mankiw and Hubbard have been doing this sort of thing for decades. They (actually all four authors) are ideologically committed to some version of the Efficient Markets Hypothesis and that government action of any kind, even to reduce fraud, interferes with proper signalling. Mankiw has gone so far as to state that fraud is entirely rational and is properly dealt with by market forces, because if it weren’t then markets wouldn’t be efficient. But he knows that markets are efficient, therefore fraud cannot be a problem.
This is standard cant from the mainstream of economics. They promulgate myths (efficient markets, loanable funds framework, money multiplier, etc.) as fact. Their arguments are based in tautology. They predict crises where none occur and are surprised at crises they failed to predict. When confronted with evidence they are incorrect, they ignore it. They never internalize data antithetical to their core ideas, never re-examine their models and explain away problems on an ad hoc basis. What Mankiw et al. have done here isn’t shocking in the least: to the contrary it’s common practice. The question is why it’s taken Krugman so long to realize it.
JGabriel
Tom Levenson @ Top:
jake the snake
@JGabriel:
Hell, we are all living in Nixonland and will be for the foreseeable future.