FUDing Inequality
Jon Chait has a great piece on Alan Reynolds' "research" into inequality, noting that the main point here isn't to convince anyone that Reynolds is right (the work would need to be less amateurish than that), but simply to convince ordinary people that there's a big, complicated, confusing controversy among the experts on this subject so who's to say:
For example, [Reynolds] argues that Piketty and Saez's data does not account for the massive rise of tax-sheltered pensions, such as 401(k) plans, which are "invisible in tax return data." Because 401(k) plans are now common among middle-class earners, tax returns miss a huge source of their wealth and thus make them look misleadingly poor. This sounds sensible enough, but it is wrong on several levels. 401(k)s didn't just appear out of nowhere; they mostly replaced defined benefit pensions. And, like the old pensions, 401(k)s do appear on tax returns when the accounts are withdrawn. On top of that, economists think most taxfavored assets are concentrated in the hands of the rich anyway, so, even if Reynolds were right about tax returns, it would very likely make inequality look even worse.But whether the missing data would make inequality look worse or better is really beside the point. Reynolds's role is merely to point out that the data is imperfect. The skeptic challenging the expert consensus must be fluent enough in the language of the experts to nibble away at their data. (The evolution skeptic can find holes in the fossil record; the global-warming skeptic can find periods of global cooling.) But he need not--indeed, he must not--be fluent enough to assimilate all the data himself into a coherent alternative explanation. His point is that the truth is unknowable.
Reynolds also turns out to be what you might call a fake economist. Obviously, there's a somewhat difficult asymmetry here. If you're an egalitarian liberal, you'll want to see the government implement anti-inequality policy insofar as you think a troubling level of inequality actually exists. So I would not, for example, urge Iceland to adopt new anti-inequality policies because Iceland's income distribution already is highly egalitarian. In the American context, however, new pro-equality policies are needed. Deciding what you want to do, in short, requires you to actually know something about the structure of wealth and income distribution. This, in turn, requires a certain level of analytic caution and modesty that makes it hard to write bombastic screeds on the subject.
Reynolds and his ideological fellow-travelers, by contrast, don't think we should try to reduce inequality and their commitment to that position is completely independent of their assessment of the empirical facts regarding the extent of inequality. So if Reynolds is getting all his data wrong, nobody on his side is really going to care about that, since, from the right-wing point of view, the question Reynolds is asking doesn't actually matter except as a tool in public debate.
Comments
The Republican War on Science.
doesn't actually matter except as a tool in public debate.
a.k.a The History of the GOP 1932-2007
Well, Reynolds is an original disciple of supply-side economics.
What otto said. This is so similar to the debates on global warming and ID that you might think it a general strategy.
despite their manifest distain for science in many regards, republicans have managed to turn the art of generating the appearance of doubt or debate into something of a science itself. and once again, society and intelligence suffer.
Oh, altogether sensible economics. True, American incomes and assets are going down the tubes, but it's all ok if we remember that, in place of pensions, we'll retire with $50,000 in the bank from a 401(k). I feel much better already, and I can't imagine how economists overlooked that gain.
That assymetry of debate is worth emphasizing. Global warming, economic inequality, a big world full of complicated people and problems. Nuance doesn't travel well, and analytic caution and modesty don't shout very well from the mountaintops.
This is also, of course, the strategy of religious conservatives on evolution -- create the illusion of controversy.
Reads like a scene from "Thank You For Smoking"
This goes back to an argument that appeared in TNR awhile back that I was skeptical of at first, and now believe is accurate.
Today's conservatives are ideologues who support policy positions mainly over their ideological purity. Today's liberals are mainly empiricists who either undertake serious research, or rely upon objective expertiese and evidence, in deciding what policies they like and dislike.
I include two links in my comment and suddenly it's not okay anymore? (I had the same problem with the burgers post.) I disapprove of your comment moderation system, sir.
Creationism, Tobacco companies, Global Warming denial. Conservatism is always about spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. That's why Conservatives are evil. That's why conservatives have always been evil, and why they always will be. They can't win an argument, so they cloud the issue. They can't win if people are good, moral and caring towards one one another, so they proclaim their own bigotry to be morality, and chastise at the top of their lungs anyone who doesn't hate the same people they hate. If they ever get caught, they deny that they ever knew they were doing anything wrong. Make no mistake, they are evil and they get off on it. Evil isn't some vague and mysterious force that twists people into monsters. Evil is something that exists only within humans. This is the face of it, Conservatism is at it's heart a justification for evil and it always will be.
"Today's conservatives are ideologues who support policy positions mainly over their ideological purity. Today's liberals are mainly empiricists who either undertake serious research, or rely upon objective expertiese and evidence, in deciding what policies they like and dislike."
That's not quite right. It's not that Liberals are empiricists, it's that empiricists are liberals. Greater education correlates very, very heavily with Democratic party support. But it's like being African-American - the Democrats *own* that group, which means they can selectively ignore them and the Republicans can openly "smart-people-bait" without suffering at the ballot box. Sure, their stem-cell policies are moronic - so what? Anyone who recognizes that was never going to vote for George Bush in the first place.
Obviously, it's not 100%. There are Republicans who are capable careful reasoning - but they're the equivalent of Alan Keyes, token members with inexplicable motives.
This is why public discourse is so relentlessly stupid. Because stupidity isn't a swing issue.
I'm not sure I agree in the general. Today, yes. It's hard for me to imagine an educated, truly inquisitive person calling himself a Republican (not the same as a conservative). But not too long ago, in my opinion (and this is guaranteed to get me flamed), a lot of liberals were loath to accept solid data about welfare dependency and the truly ridiculously high marginal tax rates of the pre-Reagan days.
I don't want to go any farther than that because I don't have the energy and I'm not trying to troll. But certainly one can be a liberal and refuse to believe that government benefits can, if configured poorly, create dependency, just for example.
Also, I disagree that conservatism is fundamentally a bad thing. Here's how I interpret American politics: An X-Y quad chart. Top to bottom is recklessness vs. caution (or a conservative temperment). That's the temperment axis. Left to right is liberalism (expanding opportunity, etc.) vs. entrenchment of privilege. This is the values axis.
I think the best place to be on this chart is the quadrant that reflects liberal values and a conservative, or at least cautious, temperment.
The absolute worst spot on the chart is the opposite quadrant: recklessness married to a desire to defend and expand privilege. This is where today's unbearably noxious GOP finds itself. They want to launch insane crusades in the middle east, destroy the national budget, sell sovereign debt to China, and eliminate taxes on capital gains (which means eliminating taxes on rich people).
But a while back, conservatives were...well...more conservative, tempermentally. And in my opinion, liberals were more reckless.
I'm yammering on way too long and getting off topic (sorry!), but this is a great opportunity for the Democratic Party, who can now lay claim to the best temperment and the best values and truly build a national party, while the GOP retreats to the south and advocates batshit crazy policies nobody likes.
Slippery Pete --
I guess my only beef with your cartesian coordinate scheme is that I don't see the recklessness of earlier liberals. It's true they pressed for change in some areas -- civil rights, poverty programs -- but was that reckless? At the time it seemed more like asking America to live up to its own declared values. Maybe it's that your two axes aren't really independent of each other.
But one thing I do agree with you about, Slippery Pete, is that American political divisions are largely a matter of temperament. People tried to make this kind of case about fascism (the "authoritarian personality" and so on). I don't know if they got it quite right -- there was a lot of Marxo-Freudo muscle-flexing involved -- but I doubt whether they got it totally wrong.
as a small point, pikkety and saez were exploring income inequality.
putting money into a 401K is something you do with your income; whether you make good or bad choices with your 401K relates to your net worth.
reynolds, of course, is a propagandist, not an analyst.
"There are Republicans who are capable careful reasoning - but they're the equivalent of Alan Keyes, token members with inexplicable motives."
Here is something interesting on that subject:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Keyes
"...Keyes has said his favorite professor at Cornell and Harvard was the political philosophy professor Allan Bloom. A passage of Bloom's best-selling book, "The Closing of the American Mind,"ISBN 0-671-65715-1 (Simon & Schuster, 1987) refers to an African American student "whose life had been threatened by a black faculty member when the student refused to participate in a demonstration" at Cornell. (Ibid., p 316) That student was Alan Keyes."
To explain Alan Keyes being a Republican, I'd look at the ideology and policy the Republican party espouses (not a caricature of it, but the *actual* stated platform). See www.gop.org. That would require giving him the benefit of the doubt that he is actually doing what he thinks is best for the country (note that the death threat above is irrelevant, the professors "wtf a minority conservative?" attitude and his thugish threat are two completely seperate issues).
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