Evidence, logic and reason cannot explain conservative beliefs--ie about economics. Tribal myth-making can. This is a case in point
My previous diary, "GOP denial of reality complete: House adopts rules of fiscal madness", dealt with Paul Krugman's op-ed, "The New Voodoo", which warned of the institutionalized fiscal madness that House Republicans have now committed themselves to, the ice-cream-pizza-and-beer diet "fiscal discipline by cutting taxes." Most ominously, Krugman wrote:
How did Republican leaders reconcile their purported deep concern about budget deficits with their advocacy of large tax cuts? Was it that old voodoo economics - the belief, refuted by study after study, that tax cuts pay for themselves - making a comeback? No, it was something new and worse.
To be sure, there were renewed claims that tax cuts lead to higher revenue. But 2010 marked the emergence of a new, even more profound level of magical thinking: the belief that deficits created by tax cuts just don't matter. For example, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona - who had denounced President Obama for running deficits - declared that "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans."
It's an easy position to ridicule. After all, if you never have to offset the cost of tax cuts, why not just eliminate taxes altogether?
The GOP madness is so transparent, and Krugman's platform so high that he just had to be attacked for saying this out loud. But there's nothing to attack him for. The GOP position is pure madness. So if there's nothing to attack him for, the solution is simple: just (1) make shit up and (2) ridicule him. It's Third Grade Bullying 101.
Take for example, Tom Maguire, whom Brad DeLong focused on over the week-end. DeLong used Maguire's feeble effort to go after bigger game: top Republicans silently signed on to this madness. But I'm happy enough to focus on Maguire himself, because he shows how entire mythologies get created with layer upon layer of BS to justify their biggest lies, lies such as "We have a spending problem, not a revenue problem." Or "tax cuts don't matter for the deficit." Here's DeLong:
Tom Maguire Says That All the Republicans Who Have Been Claiming to Worry About the Deficit Over the Past Two Years Are Liars
Tom:
JustOneMinute: One Day, When The Times Has An Economist As A Columnist...: The idea that deficits created by tax cuts don't matter is hardly new or magical, except perhaps to Krugman and any Times readers who lean on him for economic insight. IF YOU CAN'T TRUST FOX ON THIS: Per Fox, the Republican message has been that we have a spending problem, not a revenue problem. Very Ricardian, and how did Krugman miss it? SO WHO HAS ALZHEIMERS NOW, MR. SMARTY-MOUTH?
Seems like Tom is a bit harsh on his fellow Republicans to me. I think a bunch of them--people like Alan Greenspan, Paul O'Neill, etc., etc.--do worry about the deficit, but have been told to fall in line and be quiet for a while.
The most prominent feature here is trash-talking Krugman--in ALL CAPS, NO LESS! It drives conservatives crazy that the guy has a Nobel Prize and a prominent media platform, so trash-talking him helps build their group identity, and this group identity sustains them in the lack of any coherent set of facts, principles or ideology--the lack of which Krugman has just explosed. To actually discredit Krugman and his argument, Maguire would have to show that it's not delusional/magical thinking to diet on pizza, beer and ice cream cut deficits by cutting taxes.
But he can't do that, because it is magical thinking. So he does the best that he can: He tries to ridicule Krugman by pretending that the idea isn't new--that in fact it's well over 100 years olds, and associated with a venerable classical economist whom most conservative true believers probably never even heard of--David Ricardo--but it will make a really cool cover story, if they can all just get their stories straight.
But he can't do that, because Ricardo never said that tax cuts don't matter for deficits. So Maguire does the next best thing: he pretends that Ricardo said that tax cuts don't matter for deficits by implicitly equating it with what's known as "Ricardian equivalence" (hence "hardly new or magical" as Ricardo was early 19th Century) and he pretends that Krugman was just too obtuse to see it, even though Krugman had actually written about it before. (Hence the reference to ALZHEIMERS... MR. SMARTY-MOUTH!)
Unfortunately for Maguire, though, one of the things Krugman had written, which Maguire had missed, was the totally on-target prebuttal, "One more time" in which Krugman took aim at those who do "not understand the implications of their own model", in this case, Ricardian equivalence. In that prebuttal, Krugman had utterly demolished the basis of Maguire's "argument" if it can be called such, since Maguire's misunderstanding is even farther off the mark. But Krugman certainly demolished the authority of conservative economists on which Maguire relies.
This may all seem a bit overwhelming for non-economists, but split into bit-sized pieces, it turns out to be pretty easy to follow....
Some statements or arguments are irrefutable, because they are simply too stupid. In fact, it's not just them, it's the entire cognitive space in which they exist. Or should I say "entire cogntive subspace bubble", since that's pecise what it is: they exist in a black hole of stupid. Anything that gets close to enough to them to be used as an arguement, or even just evidence to refute them gets ripped from the fabric of ordinary cogntive space, and crushed by the forces of super-stupidity, suffering from an IQ depression shift, which has an effect analogous to turning your brains into applesauce. Like this, for example:
There has been some sniping from the left and right that The Promise is hagiography, as Alter's sunny accounting of Obama's achievements might suggest. But that's not the case. One may quibble with some of Alter's emphases, but his well-reported, judicious book is as mindful of Obama's failings as his successes and seems to be carrying water for no one in the White House or outside it.
and this is particularly evident with respect to Obama's economic team, which Rich discusses at some length, part of which bystander quoted:
...Even so, Alter's chronicle confirms that the biggest flaw in Obama's leadership has to do with his own team, not his opponents, and it's a flaw that's been visible from the start. He is simply too infatuated with the virtues of the American meritocracy that helped facilitate his own rise. "Obama's faith lay in cream rising to the top," Alter writes. "Because he himself was a product of the great American postwar meritocracy, he could never fully escape seeing the world from the status ladder he had ascended." This led Obama to hire "broad-gauged, integrative thinkers who could both absorb huge loads of complex material and apply it practically and lucidly without resorting to off-putting jargon"-and well, why not? Alter adds:
Almost all had advanced degrees from Ivy League schools, proof that they had aced standardized tests and knew the shortcuts to success exploited by American elites. A few were bombastic, but most had learned to cover their faith in their own powers of analysis with a thin veneer of humility; it made their arguments more effective. But their faith in the power of analysis remained unshaken.
This was a vast improvement over the ideologues and hacks favored by the Bush White House, but the potential for best-and-brightest arrogance was apparent as soon as Obama started assembling his team during the transition...
The very next sentence is even more telling, however, as it takes us right into the heart of the darkness of anosognosia:
The Promise leaves no doubt that his White House has not only fallen right into this trap but, for all its sophistication and smarts, was and apparently still is unaware that the trap exists. During the oil spill crisis, Obama and his surrogates kept reminding the public that the energy secretary, Steven Chu, was a Nobel laureate-as if that credential were so impressive in itself that it could override any debate about the administration's performance in the gulf.
Of course, such blindness more or less goes with the territory of infatuation, and the infatuation with meritocracy is no different from any other form of infatuation in this regard. Still, it bears underscoring that Obama has virtually ignored a couple of Noble Prize-winning economists--Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz--who've been quite outspoken in their criticism of his own Nobel-less team and its policies. Yes, this can be written off to yet more of the blindness of infatuation. But sooner or later one just has to start asking, exactly where is the "merit" in all this "meritocracy"?
If you've been paying attention this past decade, it won't surprise you to learn that the country's policy elites are in the midst of a destructive, well-nigh unhinged discussion about the future of the nation. But even by the degraded standards of the Washington establishment, the growing panic over government debt is shocking....
....we face a joblessness crisis that threatens to pitch us into a long, ugly period of low growth, the kind of lost decade that will cause tremendous misery, degrade the nation's human capital, undermine an entire cohort of young workers for years and blow a hole in the government's bank sheet. The best chance we have to stave off this scenario is more government spending to nurse the economy back to health. The economy may be alive, but that doesn't mean it's healthy. There's a reason you keep taking antibiotics even after you start to feel better.
And yet: the drumbeat of deficit hysterics thumping in self-righteous panic grows louder by the day....
This all seems eerily familiar. The conversation--if it can be called that--about deficits recalls the national conversation about war in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq. From one day to the next, what was once accepted by the establishment as tolerable--Saddam Hussein--became intolerable, a crisis of such pressing urgency that "serious people" were required to present their ideas about how to deal with it. Once the burden of proof shifted from those who favored war to those who opposed it, the argument was lost....
Perhaps the most egregious aspect of the selling of the Iraq War was its false pretext. It never really was about weapons of mass destruction, as Paul Wolfowitz admitted. WMDs were just "what everyone could agree on." So it is with deficits. Conservatives and their neoliberal allies don't really care about deficits; they care about austerity-about gutting the welfare state and redistributing wealth upward. That's the objective. Deficits are just what they can all agree on, the WMDs of this manufactured crisis. Senator John Kyl of Arizona, speaking on Fox, has come out and admitted as much. All new spending increases must be offset, he said, but "you should never have to offset the cost of a deliberate decision to reduce tax rates on Americans." So there you have it.
"At a time when so many families are tightening their belts, he's going to make sure that the government continues to tighten its own," Obama said. "
We'll never know how differently the politics would have played if Obama, instead of systematically echoing and giving credibility to all the arguments of the people who want to destroy him, had actually stood up for a different economic philosophy. But we do know how his actual strategy has worked, and it hasn't been a success.
Krugman boils it down to its simple essence. But in order to fight it, we need all the insight we can get, which can get rather messy. I'm not going to try and do it all here. I'm only going to highlight one aspect. But in doing so, I hope to illustrate the importance of brining as much insight to bear as possible. Yes, there's a lack of principle, courage and will, as well as plain old common sense. There's not even a sense of poltical self-preservation, as Krugman himself points out.
But there's also an almost total lack of cognitive functioning. The content may be different, but as far as the formal processes are concerned, this is pure Tea Bag territory--reasoning by associative similiarity: You dress up like a Revolutionary soldier, and voila! the Founding Fathers are automatically your spokesmen! Obama's "reasoning" basically operates on the same level. This goes back to the appearance-based "sequential reasoning" that I first blogged about years ago in "Terri Schiavo: We're Too Smart!"
Sequential thinkers reason "by tracking the world," recognize regularities in sequences of events, but have no abstract understanding of cause and effect. The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences.
Linear thinkers understand cause and effect, limited to a one-direction, one-cause/one-effect model. The world they perceive has logical order and structure, but the structure is invariably hierarchical, causality flows top-down, and the world is divided neatly into cause and effect.
Systematic thinkers understand multi-faceted, multi-linear cause and effect, with mutual cause-and-effect relationships between different elements. The world they perceive is primarily a world of systems and relationships, rather than objects.
Equating the federal budget with family budgets is a classic example of sequential thinking. There is no logical reasoning involved here. There is simply an association between two things that superficially appear to be the same:
"The world they perceive is a world of appearances that has very little organization to it beyond the recurrence of sequences."
That perfectly describes the crazy world of John Boehner and the Tea Baggers last year. And the world of Barack Obama today.
Last Tuesday, Rachel Maddow reported from Aghanistan:
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP) MADDOW: If the police efforts, the policing effort, security efforts don't combine to create enough space for Afghan government to step up in a way that is working, I don't get the sense there's a plan B. Is there a plan B?
(END VIDEO CLIP)
MADDOW: We'll have more with the American general in charge of southern Afghanistan, Brigadier General Ben Hodges, in just a moment.
When she talked to General Hodges, he tacitly admitted it: No plan B.
But Afghanistan isn't the exception. It's the rule. The lack of a plan B isn't the problem--it's just one aspect of the larger problem of systematically bad thinking that repeatedly leads to bad results.
The very next day, Paul Krugman blogged about the Obama Administration's failure to foresee how bad things would get with unemployment, and their consequent undersizing of the stimulus. Here's a chart he reproduced showing what they thought would happen:
Krugman said, in part:
based on public reporting, like the Ryan Lizza article on Larry Summers - which reads rather differently now that we know how things are really working out, or more accurately not working out - it looks as if top advisers convinced themselves that even in the absence of stimulus the slump would be nasty, brutish, but not too long. That's the assumption embedded in the now infamous Romer-Bernstein chart, above. So all policy needed to do was meliorate the worst, while we waited for the economy to recover spontaneously. From the Lizza article:
Summers did not include Romer's $1.2-trillion projection. The memo argued that the stimulus should not be used to fill the entire output gap; rather, it was "an insurance package against catastrophic failure."
I don't know why Summers etc. believed this. Even before the severity of the financial crisis was fully apparent, the recent history of recessions suggested that the jobs picture would continue to worsen long after the recession was technically over. And by the winter of 2008-2009, it was obvious that this was the Big One...
In short, there was every reason to think that things could be worse than anticipated. But the problem wasn't simply that they got their estimate wrong. It's how they got it wrong, and even more seriously how they failed to think about what might happen if they turned out to be wrong. "Failure is not an option" they were thinking, just like BushCo, and so they didn't think about it, and thus they blindly plunged into it. No worst-case planning. No Plan B.
A little more detail from Liazza's article (including the passage Krugman quotes) makes this even clearer:
It's not just a political question, it's a cognitive one. And of course, it's not just Rachel Maddow.
This diary has three parts: The Setup, in which Obama overpraise is once again front and center. The Reality Check, in which I once again remind folks of what LBJ did aside from the Vietnam War, and the Cognitive Science Reflection, in which I take advantage of an essay series by Errol Morris this week--helpfully pointed out by TSlavin which deals in part with the question "What if you're too incompetent to realize that you're incompetent?"
The Setup: Overpraising Obama Once Again
Rachel Maddow has been on a bit of a tear lately. Her coverage of the BP oil spill has been well beyond anyone else similarly situated in the media, and as I noted yesterday in "Why is Rachel Maddow the only one who understands what's going on?", she's the only one who got to the very heart of the contradiction in McChrystal's conduct, which went to the very essence of the "logic" of the Afghan War.
That only made it all the more perplexing when she picked up a bone-headed comment by Teagan Goddard that "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform the country," and ran with it:
It turns out that a lot of things that have happened in the less than two years of this administration are the biggest or first or most important in generations. On the occasion of the Wall Street reform announcement today, Taegan Goddard at "CQ Politics" wrote, "Not since FDR has a president done so much to transform this country."
Even before today`s historic Wall Street reform agreement, President Obama, of course, did what politicians have been trying to do for more than 60 years. He passed health reform, which, for the first time, establishes government responsibility for the health care of American citizens.
Consider also the stimulus bill. It didn`t just throw a lasso around our entire economy and yank and yank it back from the brink. It also pumped about $100 billion into the crumbling embarrassment of our national infrastructure and transportation system.
It was the largest investment in infrastructure since Ike....
But presidential legacies are complex. Not even the Reagan administration`s legacy is pure as the conservative-driven snow. But Taegan Goddard at "CQ Politics" was right today about nothing this big happening since FDR.
The list of legislative accomplishments of this president in half a term even before energy reform which he`s probably going to get to is, to quote the vice president, "a big freaking deal." Love this administration or hate it, this president is getting a lot done.
The last time any president did this much in office, booze was illegal. If you believe in policy, if you believe in government that addresses problems, cheers to that.
I have just three letters to say to Maddow, the same three letters I had to say to her back in January ("Efficiency vs. Effectiveness"): L-B-J.
