On Smith on Rowe on Krugman on Friedman

Nick Rowe wrote a post "There are no Friedmans today, except maybe Friedman himself" which I admit I haven't read.

Rowe declared Milton Friedman the victor of, at least, the macroeconomics debate. Without reading his post, I thought (and commented at Brad Delong's blog) that the battle isn't over and that the other than Friedman forces are currently winning back lost ground. In other words, I agree with Rowe (and an earlier post by DeLong) that Friedman's thought is the main stream of macroeconomics, although it is, oddly, called new Keynesian.

Noah Smith has 5 excellent questions for Nick Rowe. Do read Smith's post (for one thing he has read Rowe's post). My comment

As usual, I think this post is excellent (I guess I should save pixels by leaving that part out).

I definitely agree that mentioning Marxists is a bit odd. Marxist economists were marginal in the 70s. I don't think it makes sense to use the same word for Keynesians and Marxists together at all.

I do not recall widespread support for price controls among mainstream left of center economists. I definitely do recall hearing Robert Solow say that, while he doesn't have any strong ideological fixation on free markets, wage and price controls are just bad policy. Here (and always) I think that claims about what was generally said and written should be ruled out of order unless backed by names and citations. I personally recall hearing what Solow said on the topic in a Kennedy School public debate on what to do about high inflation. Update: Nick Rowe in comments links to Tobin (see next paragraph). My vague recollection of what I heard from economists when I was a biologist does not seem to be reliably intellectual history. I score this one Rowe 1 Waldmann ... hey I was just blogging at my personal blog and I just asked I didn't assert.

Or to put it another way, I am interested in Friedman vs Samuelson, Solow and Tobin.

Actually I have a challenge. Name a Friedman Solow debate which, with the benefit of hindsight, we agree was won by Friedman. I do not think this is easy to do.

I was alive in the 70s although kinda young and not an economist. I remember almost no discussion of wage and price controls after 1973 (when Nixon who was not Galbraith imposed them).

I recall extensive discussion of whether central banks should target interest rates or the money stock. This is a debate which Friedman won, leading to a shift in the late 70s to targetting the money stock, then lost in around 1982. How often do you read about the quantity of money ? How much did it grow in the past year ? Monetarism wasn't just the claim that monetary policy matters, but also the claim that the quantity of money was the key variable, because velocity is stable and predictable. This, the absolutely central aspect of monetarism according to Friedman, seems to have been conveniently forgotten by March 2008 at the latest. Or to put it another way, Friedman and new Keynesians have a lot in common, but also disagree on something Friedman considered extraordinarily important.

Your point 4 is related to your point 1. Rowe defines the left so that universal health insurance and environmental regulation are not leftist. It isn't as if people far to the left of Friedman ranging from Samuelson to Che Guevara are so similar that it is useful to discuss them together. Friedman, however, definitely advocated deregulationa and a sharp reduction of the state which haven't happened. He and Rose Friedman wrote a book called "The Tyranny of the Status Quo" during the Reagan administration. This is not a title for a book written by someone who won the policy debate (you may correctly guess that I haven't read the book).

Finally, you Rowe and I agree that Friedman dominated academic macroeconomics in 2007 with new Keyenesians better labeled Friedmanites. However, there have been some rather shocking new data since then leading to heated debate and making it a very odd time to try to decide who won the debate.

George Osborne buying votes in the UK

Via Simon Wren-Lewis, Richard Murphy informed me of a genuinely horrible policy in the UK. The Queen's exchequer is selling bonds at a discount to people over 65. As Chris Dillow explains, this gift is being given only to the at least moderately well off, since one must have financial wealth already to buy the special bonds. Wren-Lewis and Murphy have no doubt that this is a very blatant effort to buy votes in the upcoming election.

Murphy explains and denounces

here he [Chancellor George Osborne] is selling debt at 4% when he could quite easily sell it for less than half that price elsewhere. No one has done more to burden future generations than he is as a result. But the tune will not change, I am sure.

So why is he doing this? Candidly, it’s little better than gerrymandering. He’s literally selling the government’s silver to buy votes form the over 65s. Bribery is the nicest and politest possible term for his policy. I can't help focusing on one very odd thing Osborne said "Our long-term economic plan involves supporting savers. "

First he conflates a lump sum gift with an incentive scheme. At some times, there might be be good reason to encourage saving, but giving a surprise gift to those who have saved suggesting that it might happen again is a very inefficient incentive scheme. second, this is not one of those times. The UK has higher than NAIRU unemployment (now 6%) and 1.2 % inflation with interest rates at the zero lower bound. It could use more consumption not less. Osborne has found a way to add to the debt in the future (when debt will crowd out investment) and (he claims) encourage lower consumption in the present (when consumption won't crowd out investment). Finally, as a conservative, he identifies wealth with thrift. Savers differ from people who had equal income but spent more, but also from people who had much lower income and spent less. The conflation of wealth and thrift is deeply conservative. There is a lot of nonsense packed in that one short sentence.

Wren-Lewis is optimistic that Osborne has gone so far that the media will have to notice that he is a hypocrite. In fact, the giveaway was denounced by the conservative TaxPayers' Alliance

Campaigns director Andy Silvester said: "They're not only taxpayer-guaranteed investments for the already relatively well-off, but leave the government borrowing at above-market rates. "Too often during this Parliament it has seemed as if austerity stops at 65 - it's almost as if pensioners are more likely to vote."

I defer to Wren-Lewis's expertise and also guess he is totally right. Osborne had a reputation for severe integrity (he had the severe part down in any case). Now he has revealed himself to be a vote buying hypocrite. I imagine or at least fantasize that now that the mask has dropped, people won't be fooled again when Osborne puts it back on.

There is a pattern of assuming that austerians are honest. US reader(s) will recall the case of high praise of the integrity of the extremely dishonest Paul Ryan. Italian reader(s) will note that the austerian wonk Giulio Tremonti (who managed the Italian budget and economy while Burlusconi focused on staying out of jail and bunga bunga) is being investigated for allegedly taking a huge bribe (Italian politician's (alleged) dishonesty is, I admit, in a different league). I wonder if people might some day realize that enthusiasm for cutting government spending (especially anti poverty spending) is not proof of honesty.

20 posts on 20 points ?

I have tried and failed to resist risking wasting reader's* time with another post on the same 20 data points. I am still looking at US fiscal policy and GDP growth during the current recovery. I first looked at government purchases (G) and GDP. Commenters note that Keynesians talk about deficit spending.

One not totally pointless point is that New Keynesians talk about G minus steady state G in theory (which means G minus some sort of trend in data). The work horse NK models have Ricardian equivalence so the timing of taxes doesn't matter.

But I am a paleo Keynesian, so I should look at something else. I should look at G-cT where T is taxes minus transfers (such as pensions) and c is the marginal propensity to consume which I have estimated to be about 1/3. Note that this is not at all equal to the deficit G-T. It is true that Keynesians have used the full employment (or "structural") deficit as a fiscal policy variable, but this never made sense for any Keynesian model (including the original IS-LM dated 1937).

Being totally lazy, I look at real G + 0.5 times the Federal budget deficit divided by the GDP deflator. This means that Federal G appears 1.5 times, state and local G appear 1 time and federal taxes minus transfers appear -0.5 times. I call this variable silly.

The recovery started in 2009q2 and I look at growth rates starting then (with growth from 2009q2 to 2009q3). The correlation between the growth rate of real GDP and the growth rate of silly is 0.22 which is considerable smaller than the correlation of the growth rate of real GDP and the growth rate of real G.

Here is the scatter

The reduced correlation is mostly due to 2013q1. As the US went over the fiscal cliff (even reduced at the last minute) Federal revenues increased sharply. This was not correlated with low GDP growth (or even low growth of consumption by the way). This data point looks Ricardian -- it fits new Keynesian models better than old Keynesian models. It is one data point. Stuff happens. This is my second post about that one data point which bothers me even though it is just one data point.

*this is not a typo. I assume the reader, if any, will be singular.

The Fiscal Cliff Multiplier

I am wondering why the fiscal cliff January 2013 didn't have a noticeable effect on the growth if consumption and GDP.

Compared to 2012 policy, the fiscal cliff deal principally consisted of increased taxation of extremely high income and large inheritances. I would not expect this to affect consumption much. However, it also included expiration of the partial payroll tax holiday with an increase in payroll taxes of 2%. This corresponds to a regressive tax increase of $115 billion. A new Keynesian could argue that the timing of taxes doesn't matter, since consumers knew that something like that would happen. But I can't.

A now standard estimate of the government spending multiplier is 1.5. To the most paleo of paleo Keynesians, this should be 1/(1-c) (where c is the marginal propensity to consume) giving c = 1/3. The tax increase multiplier should be c/(1-c) = 0.5 so the impact on GDP should have been about 0.5*115/16768 roughly = 0.4 %

This corresponds to a reduction in the annualized growth rate of 1.6%.

I have a problem. It isn't terrible. The predicted effect is small enough that it could be obscurred by the ordinary fluctuations in quarterly growth rates. But it seems to me that it should have been noticeable.

Moving on from 1937 to the 1960s the second most paleo possible Keynesian notes that increased aggregate demand causes increased investment through the accelerator. A payroll tax increase does not have this effect. The government expenditure multiplier is 1/(1-c-b) where b is the effect on investment, but the tax increase multiplier is still c/(1-c).

I estimate b = 0.29 (this is just from a regression of investment/GDP on the lagged annual GDP growth rate and a trend). I have gone too far, with a c=0.04 and a tiny multiplier.

OK where did I get the 1.5? Well always from looking at papers which look across US states or across mostly European countries. The multiplier for a large almost closed economy like the whole USA should be larger. I will guess 1/(1-c-0.29) = 2 so c is about .2 so c/(1-c) is about 1/4 and the effect on annualized growth about 0.8% which is not tiny but now well within the normal variation of growth rates.

I guess the bottom line of this silly exercize is that we can't learn anything from one data point regressions. I am talking about one quarterly growth rate and there is almost no information in it.

On Sachs on Krugman

cross posted at angrybearblog I have been pinged

@Noahpinion @sjwrenlewis also pinging @interfluidity @robertwaldmann @Frances_Coppola and anyone else who wants to get involved.

— Michael Harris (@MichaelH_PhD) January 7, 2015

and am so flattered to be pinged in such company that I decided I had to read the Jeff Sachs article on Krugman Austerity and the Obama recovery and comment on it. It isn't quite as bad as I feared.

My comment is really here. I note that the actual pattern corresponds to Krugman's descriptio of growth of real GDP speading up exactly when the long decline of government purchases (G) reversed in 2014q2. I fear I will be posted the graph of US real G for the rest of my life.

The graph shows steadily increasing austerity along with consistently disappointing recovery, then an end to the reduction in G and rapid growth. The data perfectly fit both the vulgar Keynesian story and the fancier Krugmanite story that vulgar Keynesianism is valid when the economy is in the liquidity trap.

Krugman's response is extremely convincing. Brad DeLong is impressively shrill. Simon Wren-Lewis found a new way to illustrate the fact that the recovery was disappointing.

So what was Sachs thinking ? First, in his defence, I am sure the "brisk" growth he had in mind was in 2014q2 and 2014q3. He should note that some is the economy unfreazing after 2014q1, but the word isn't crazy.

I think he made one polemical choice and one mistake. The mistake is to consider only Federal fiscal policy. This is a natural simplification if one relies on daily newspapers for news of fiscal policy, but Sachs should know how to FRED and should know to FRED. For aggregate demand, it doesn't matter if government consumption and investment is federal state or local. The graph above is for all together. This mistake is less excusable in a critique of Krugman, as Krugman often discusses the 50 little Hoovers.

Second the polemical choice is to focus on the deficit and not on G. This is totally unreasonable in a critique of Krugman. Krugman has repeatedly stressed the difference between the Government expenditure multiplier and that tax cut multiplier. He denounced Obama for (among many other things) including too largetax cuts as well as too small spending increases in the ARRA (Sachs made the same objection).

Krugman has made a proposal for optimal fiscal policy in a liquidity trap. In it he did not mention the timing of taxes at all, because he used a model with Ricardian equivalence in which this timing doesn't affect aggregate demand. The post is flagged as "ultra-wonkish" but it isn't too wonkish for Sachs.

Importantly, Keynesians all agree that balanced budget spending increases (as proposed by Sachs) stimulate. Therefore the structural deficit is not an adequate index of the fiscal stance. Some New Keynesians go so far as to use models in which deficits don't matter (By my rules I must name names, so I name Smets and Wouters). I consider myself an extremely old fashioned Keynesian who thinks the timing of taxes matters a lot. Krugman and Sachs are somewhere in between, and at almost exactly the same point. Being (even) less enamored of Ricardian equivalence than Krugman, I have more of an intellectual problem due to the absense of noticeable damage due to the end of the partial payroll tax holiday in 2013q1 (this not being the NYT I can just say that is just one data point and that shit happens). Oddly Sachs and Krugman agree on policy, yet Sachs continues to insist that Krugman disagrees.

we can't learn much from G and GNP during the current recovery

I'm continuing this discussion over here at this obscure blog, because writing 21 posts about 21 data points is a bit embarrassing. I noted that, since the recovery started June 2009, government the quarterly growth of consumption plus investment (G) is positively correlated with the growth rate of GDP. I followed up here. In both of those posts, I mention that this amounts to very weak evidence.

and

Importantly, Williamson and I agree that simple raw correlations tell us almost nothing especially when there are very few data points. As always, I stress that, to me, the interesting thing is the difference between statistical calculations however simple and crude (people agree on what they are if not what they mean) and impressions based on reading newspapers where people perceive very different supposed facts.

Of course even if one believed the conventionally calculated OLS standard errors (which is crazy) and assume that there are no omitted variables, which is crazy, one would get an +/-2 standard deviation interval from 0.248 to 3.184 so basically I totally misled the computer about the data generatingprocess but it still understands that 19 data points can’t prove or disprove anything.

Here 19 not 21 as FRED hadn't yet reported 2014q3 GDP and I used only changes t to t+1 where t as well as t+1 are during the recovery so didn't use 2009q2-2009q3.

I just want to explain more thoroughly why a simple correlation of 21 growth rates tells us little. First, and most importantly, many things other than G affect GDP. It is not possible to consider many variables with only 21 observations, so there is no solution to the problem. One way to see this is to look at the correlation starting at the peak 2007q4 not the trough 2008q2 (as I forget who on the web did -- sorry for no link tell me who you are in comments). For this sample, the correlation is strongly negative. Now this excludes the deflation of a housing bubble and a financial crisis, so it isn't convincing evidence that G causes lower GDP. But it does focus the mind on the risk that there are less obvious ommitted variables which explain GDP changes during the recovery.

Second and less importantly, there can be reverse causation. It is possible that high GDP growth causes high G growth. G is generally modified as exogenous and shifting due to the mysterious whims of policy makers, but state and local governments have limited authority to run deficits so low GDP growth causes pressure for low state and local spending growth. I don't think this is a big deal in quarterly data, but it is an issue.

Finally the standard errors and t-statistics are definitely nonsense. They are calculated under the assumption that disturbances are identically normally distributed and uncorrelated. They aren't, so the conventional standard errors are nonsense. This isn't always such a huge issue if large samples of data are used, but a set of 21 observations is small.

The Horn of Winter

This is another guess about George R R Martin's "Song of Ice and Fire" The books contain several references to the horn of Joramun also known as the horn of winter. In the book characters say that it is said that Joramun blew it and woke giants from the earth. spoiler alert -- those who have not read the 5 published books might learn some of their contents after the jump

TARP Bottom Line

TARP Books Closed (give or not give less than $ 1 billion).

According to Lew, the total profit for American taxpayers on TARP investments stands at $15.35 billion. The NYT report added, “Less than $1 billion in taxpayer funds remain scattered in about 35 community banks around the country, but with the sale on Thursday of the government’s last 54.9 million shares of Ally Financial … the Treasury declared the bailouts done.”

For some years now, I have been writing that estimates of the cost of TARP were probably over-estimates (I didn't speculate wether it would actually be profitable). I told you so. It is true that TARP was small beens compared to the much huger Fed bailout efforts. Also TARP profits are tiny compared to the huge immense gigantic profits from the Fed's efforts and the separate huge immense gigantic profits from the bailout of Fannie Mae and Freddi Mac. In those cases, we are discussing extremely high profits which are, at the least, among to the highest profits ever reported in human history.

Feeling Good is Easy When Barry's solid Blue

I was thinking about the newly liberated Obama here the villagers seem to have decided that Obama was passive, bored and uninterested in his job back when he was laying low to avoid making trouble for Democratic senators seeking re-election in red states. The fact that he had explicitly been asked to to not make too much news seems to have escaped the notice of people whose main problem is that they have litte DC political news to talk about (and heaven forfend that they report on what is happening to ordinary people who, for example, finally have health insurance). I decided to explain to no particular very serious person, that Obama had chosen to focus on not displeasing the median voter in mid term elections in states like Arkansas, Louisiana, North Carolina, West Virginia, and Kentucky. So I thought that he was thinking of at a Kentucky coal mine not a California shore. Busted Flat in Baton Rouge awaiting a renoff ... Feeling good is easy when Barry's solid blue ... from the Kentucky Coal mines to the California Shore I need help. Probably professional help. ..

the same percentage of US adults have a favorable view of the ACA as say it does not establish death panels.

From the Kaiser Family Foundtion Obamacare Tracking Poll for December 2014 Nearly 5 years after passage and a year after the coverage expansions under the ACA took effect, overall opinion on the law remains stable with 46 percent of the public reporting an unfavorable view of the law and 41 percent a favorable view. FIGURE 10: Misperceptions About ACA Continue To the best of your knowledge, would you say the health reform law does or does not do each of the following? CORRECT INCORRECT No Yes Don’t Know/Refused Allow undocumented immigrants to receive financial help from the government to buy health insurance No Yes Don’t Know/Refused 38% 43% 19% Establish a government panel to make decisions about end-of-life care for people on Medicare No Yes Don’t Know/Refused 41% 41% 19% I note that fraction who have a favorable view of the law is identical to the fraction who answer no if asked if it establishes death panels.

Kaili Celebrates Chanukah

QOTOD*

In any case, as is traditional on this blessed holiday, Rick Perry, the Simple Child, will now ask the Four questions, and if he can actually remember at least three of them, it will have been sufficient. Dyaneu.

*Quote of that other day

Random Opinions

All Kossacks work for the Kzar, but some Kossacks are more random than others

Yellow pigs forever. Also the bill of rewrites is excellent

sharp as a pin tight as a Drum

Kevin Drum asks an even more than usually interesting question here

He lists Democratic victories in the cromnibus (aside from that keeping the government open thing) then asks

shouldn't someone have been in charge of quietly making the progressive case for this bill? It wouldn't have convinced everyone, but it might have reduced the grumbling within the base a little bit. Why was that not worth doing?

In comments I speculate wildly about 11 dimensional chess (remember the good old days of 11 dimensional chess?).

One hypothesis is a grumbling, indeed rebellious, base is useful to the Democrats who deal with the Republicans. It sure seems that Republicans have gotten rather a lot (especially during the debt ceiling crisis negotiations) based on the argument that they need these concessions to fight off the crazy tea partier base.

I have long thought that leftist attacks on Obama, Reid and Hoyer are useful to them. It helps Democratic negotiators to be able to say they have given up all they can and almost too much. A non grumbling base makes this impossible. It helps most Democrats to be attacked from the left on some issues (although most definitely not for being too nice to bankers).

The huge publicity given to Republican victories which the vast majority of ordinary voters (including tea partiers) hate is also useful to Democrats.

Frankly I think a victory which is perceived as a defeat is the best outcome for Obama. It isn't as if he has to worry about being primaried.

For those with strong stomachs

Pseudo doctor James Mitchell (the man who designed the CIA torture methods and became the first person to commit torture with the approval of, at least, the US National Security Advisor) set up and knocked down a straw man in an interview (which I will not watch because I feel sick and filthy enough after reading the SSCi executive summary).

But Mitchell is largely responsive to Larsen's questions, and perhaps the most striking moment is when he reacts to the intelligence committee's findings that torture had not yielded actionable intelligence. It wasn't supposed to, he says. It was supposed to make detainees more responsive to other questioning. "It's almost like a good cop, bad cop kind of set-up," he says, "with a really bad cop." The point, he says, "was to facilitate getting actionable intelligence by making a bad cop that was bad enough that the person was engage with the good cop," Mitchell continues. "I would be stunned if they found any kind of evidence that EITs, as they were being applied, yielded actionable intelligence."

Mitchell did not respond honestly to the evidence that his torture was ineffective or counter productive. Throughout the executive summary of the SSCI torture report, information obtained before the torture was compared to information obtained during and after the torture. Consider a claim only slightly more absurd, dishonest and irrelevant than Mitchell's. He could just have well have argued that, yes, people didn't give useful answers while being waterboarded, because they could speak no more than they could breath. He absolutely does not address the evidence and made a totally irrelevant argument assuming that viewers would not have read the executive summary. I have read it. There is no evidence that torture caused people to be more cooperative when interrogated *after* the torture. In fact essentially all of the valuable information obtained from Al Qaeda prisoners was obtained before they were tortured, certainly the information most often cited by defenders of the torture program was (this is documented in repetitive meticulous detail in page after page after page of the executive summary). In particular, Rasul Ghul provided key information relevent to finding Osama Bin Laden in the first two days he was interrogated (notably without "enhanced" techniques) then nothing even noted by defenders of the torture program after he was tortured. Mitchell set up and knocked down a straw man. Unsurprisingly he is completely dishonest and pretends to respond to the evidence which he ignores counting on listeners' ignorance. Also his crimes must be prosecuted. Torture of prisoners is almost unique in that the Geneva conventions (which are ratified and therefore US law) do not allow prosecutorial discretion.

Sensible Redactions

The redactions in the Senate Torture Report seem reasonable. They are concentrated in sections where the report explains how valuable intel was gathered and important terrorists captured. The section on the capture of khalid Sheik Mohammad is wonderfully terse as redacted. So that is how history is made, with the text message "I M W KSM". OMG

Ali Soufan Vindicated

Ali Soufan is an FBI agent who claims that he and his partner obtained intelligence from Abu Zubaydah before the CIA tortured Abu Zubaydah. He claims they obtained this information by building raport and that claims about the effectiveness of high value detainee interrogation which are used to justify torture are based on the effectiveness of his opposite approach. Google reminds me, that I have posted on this quite often These claims are contested by vague assertions made often by anonymous sources which imply that those who have full access to classified information know Ali Soufan exaggerated. The Executive Summary of the Senate Intelligence Committee Torture Report strongly confirms Ali Soufan's claims based on access to CIA cables -- Cia intelligence and analysis staff communicating with each other and not CIA employees communicating with the press, congress or the White House.

Senate Torture Report (executive summary)

I am starting at page 192 III "Intelligence Acquired and CIA Representations on the Effectiveness of the CIA's Enhanced Interrogation Techniques to Multiple Constituencies"

Because I assume many others are starting on page 1 and because reading about the torture techniques is very painful.

update: Talk about burying the lead. Only on page 226 does the Senate Report describe the Jose Padilla dirty bomb plot in detail

This is the plot which allegedly made it necessary for the US to completely abaondon the 5th amendment and authorize the President to hold anyone held incommunicado forever on his say so.

An issue key to the assessment of the effectiveness of techniques (which are criminal and unacceptable in any case) is when information was obtained from people the CIA tortured. FBI agent Ali Soufan claims that he and his partner obtained valuable information from Abu Zubaydah *before* he was tortured and that Abu Zubaydah stopped providing information when the "enhanced" interrogation began. I will not how many times CIA representations say something about who talked and what they revealed but avoid any hint about when.

Not in the report, the Washington Post presents both sides of the debate

CIA Director John Brennan on Monday rebutted ...

“Our review indicates that interrogations of detainees on whom [enhanced interrogation techniques] were used did produce intelligence that helped thwart attack plans, capture terrorists, and save lives,” Brennan said in the statement. “The intelligence gained from the program was critical to our understanding of al-Qa’ida and continues to inform our counterterrorism efforts to this day.”

Note no hint as whether the interrogation which produced intelligence was "enhanced" or on whether it occured before the "enhanced" interrogation techniques were used on that detainee. His alleged rebutal is consistent with Soufan's claim.

The Senate report stresses this issue and claims it is the first official report to address it.

From the report page 206

I think the "time off for a break and to attend to personal matters" tells me much more than I want to know about how seriously Abu Zubaydah's interrogators worried about the morality of torture. Also notice the torture started *after* the discussion of the end game, that is after someone at least raised the question of whether there was any need for further questioning whether "enhanced" or legal.

The report continues

Abu Zubaydah's inability to provide information

So they tortured Abu Zubaydah because they thought he knew things which he did not reveal after being tortured, and which there is no reason to believe he knew. I don't think there is proof that there were Al Qaeda operatives inside the United States at the time.

The not at all shocking at this point fact is that, as the report notes on page 503, long after the water boarding CIA employees repeated the claim that Abu Zubaydah ceased to cooperate before being water boarded and that he then revealed valuable information. Those thoughts moved from hypothesis to history without ever being reported as current events. Or to put it another way, people guessed wrong, authorized torture based on their guesses, and then lied.

Ah this is still shocking. Before torturing Abu Zubaydah the interrogation team wrote in a cable "assumption is that the objective of this operation is to achieve a high degree of confidence that [Abu Zubaydah] is not holding back actionable information concerning threats to the United States beyond that which [Abu Zubahdah] has already provided"

The standard isn't torture if you know it is necessary but torture if you have only a moderate but not a high degree of confidence that it must be useless, because all actionable intelligence has already been obtained by legal means.

This is cute. According to the report the CIA's representations about the interrogation of both Abu Zubaydah and Khalid Sheik Muhammad bpth contain the unsupported claim that the terrorist "believed the general US population was 'weak' lacked resilience and was unwilling to 'do what was necessary." (I am quoting p210-11 on KSM, but the exact same quote (except missing the period) is on page 205 on AZ). So CIA torture advocates asserted that AZ and KSM believed the US was too weak to support torture and the CIA. Bit of rather obvious reverse psychology there no ?

udate: minor discussion removed for space.

Catch 22. Janat Gul was subjected to "enhanced interrogation" because Source Y said he had vital information related to an imminent atach in 2004. Gul denied everything. When confronted, source Y admitted he lied. So the enhanced interrogation provied the useful information that Source Y was a liar. The vital information Gul revealed was that Gul had no vital information to reveal. Heads they win, tails the Geneva Conventions lose.

Are they even trying ? On page 366

Finding Bin Laden: This is the final and very extensive section on the effectivness of torture. The report makes an absolutely convincing case that "enhanced interrogation" played no useful role in the finding of Bin Laden. They key to finding Bin Laden was determining that Habib al-Rahman was his courier and used the pseudonym Abu-Ahmad al-Kuwaiti. The courier's true name was guessed based interrogation of someone detained by a country other than the USA (such countries are never named in the report). The report also notes the huge amount of valuable information provided by top terroris Hassan Ghul during the two days he was detained at Cobolt (I think NY Times has figured out that is code for Bagram) *before* he was subjected to "enhanced interrogation" and the absense of significant useful information obtained after he was subjected to enhanced interrogation. In contrast KSM denied that Al-Kuwaiti was a courier and said he was retired from al Qaeda. This section is very long. I understand that the debate about whether "enhanced interrogation" was useful in the search for Bin Laden is still very open. I think it is worth reading in full (the report has a table of contents). I can just say that the report is extremely convincing on this point.

Ouch. that's going to leave a mark

It is not safe to debate Chait

I edit down a Jon Chait post

Quin Hillyer @QuinHillyer

Follow Obama: racism 'deeply rooted' in U.S. http://fw.to/KbBforM I disagree. Rather than "deeply rooted," it's "mostly buried." As in near-dead.

[skip]

Hillyer, who is quoted above, participated last year in an unpleasant exchange with yours truly, in which he concluded, “We’re not oblivious to racism; we just want to transcend it by leaving it out of discussions where it doesn’t belong.” Apparently the places it doesn’t belong include an interview about race with BET — which is to say, it doesn’t belong anywhere

On Chait on Klein on Chait on TNR

I don't want to waste anyone's time (even my own) on an inside journalism debate, but I can't help myself. I am just going to cut and past with one or two snarky comments.

Jon Chait feels obliged to write about something Klein wrote about what Chait wrote about The New Republic.

"The New Republic and the Imperfect Media Market

A reply to Ezra Klein, FWIW."

The subtitle is extraordinarily modest "FWIW" for what that's worth, and makes it clear that Chait felt obliged to comment on Klein and felt that "I agree with Ezra" was not an acceptable comment. I think there is something odd and very characteristic of Chait wrong with his reply -- basically Chait is so drawn to polemic that can't resist attacking people, with whom he agrees. I fear that the reason my only other complaint about Chait is that he doesn't blog enough is that I enjoy attacks on the people he usually attacks. Of course Chait's extremely intense feelings about TNR must affect his judgment.

update: the post below is a total waste of pixels. But there is someting so odd about Chait's post, that I want to add a bit which might be interesting. Chait begins "Many journalists, myself included, are currently mourning the meltdown of The New Republic, a century-old liberal magazine currently abandoning its historic mission. But Ezra Klein has a contrary take." I too find Klein's take to be "contrary," because he much more nearly agrees with Chait than anyone else I regularly read. So why did Chait comment on Klein and not the many people who totally disagree with Chait ? I'm sure a large part of it is that Chait wrote he reply before these other people wrote their attacks on TNR, but I suspect that he does not consider them worth his time and attention -- maybe he doesn't read them or maybe he reads but doesn't feel that they are important enough for a reply. Unlike Klein, many writers write that nothing much will be lost as TNR fundamentally changes. Brad DeLong in reply to Klein

The Washington Monthly and The American Prospect at their peak and in their prime may have been better at thinking than today's digital successors. But I am wracking my brains trying to think of examples in which the Martin Peretz-era New Republic was better at thinking.

Max Fisher (at VOX edited by one Ezra Klein) Atrios Atrios again Booman Charles Pierce John Cole Billmon Chait begins

Many journalists, myself included, are currently mourning the meltdown of The New Republic, a century-old liberal magazine currently abandoning its historic mission. But Ezra Klein has a contrary take, summarized in his headline “Even the liberal New Republic Needs to Change.”

Now the fact that Chait makes his claim that Klein's take is contrary after quoting nothing but the title. This does not prove that Chait made the irreversible decision that he and Klein disagree after reading only the title of Klein's post. However, I think the quotations below prove that Chait must have done that -- that there was nothing Klein write after the title to shake Chait's conviction.

Chait himself explicitly notes only one substantive disagrement with Klein.

"Having read through Klein’s story, my substantive disagreements are actually small. He describes TNR as a “policy magazine,” a description he qualifies by noting its tremendous culture section, but doesn’t qualify enough. " -Chait

Not quite a confession that he began writing his reply and maybe typed the word "contrarian" before reading Klein's post, but damn close to one. Of course one can erase typed pixels (I just did when I found I was about to make incorrect claim about Chait's piece based on an incorrect memory of the bit I just quoted).

I quote from Klein "The New Republic, in particular, had an amazing culture section."

I wonder if "tremendous, spectacular, amazing, wonderful, amazing cultural section which consisted of no fewer pages than the policy focused part" would have been sufficient qualification.

Chait describes this as his main substantive disagreement. I think after typing that, he should have realized that there was no good reason for him to write a reply to Klein, and just refrain from posting (as I should just not post this crap).

It is possible that Chait considers the following bit a further substantive disagreement.

TNR has never been a policy magazine. It is and always has been a magazine of politics and culture pitched at a high intellectual level, which necessarily limits its appeal to a slice of the public too small to be financially viable.

Crucially, nothing has changed to make the magazine less financially viable. It has required subsidy for its entire existence.

Now if Klein's claim had been that the New Republic needs to change because it has ceased to be profitable and magazines need to be profitable, the fact that it has always required subsidy would be be substantive and even crucial.

Again I quote Klein

"the TNR of yore, even if it lost money indefinitely (as it has in the past)"

I guess "in the past" doesn't imply "every year since it was founded," but there is no hint anywhere in Klein's post that he thought TNR needed to change because it was losing money in the past. No sensible person would imagine for an instant that Klein doesn't understand the economics of high brow publications (he is editing one). Yet, in spite of the fact that the post contains evidence (not amounting to proof beyond reasonable doubt) that Klein knows all about this, Chait insists that Klein wrote, in effect, "publications always are and should be required to be profitable, so the TNR needs to change".

Am I really claiming that Chait ascribed such a crazy view to Klein ? I quote

The odd thing about Klein’s column is that, other than this small disagreement about TNR’s character, I cannot find anything in it with which I disagree. He straightforwardly described the problem of highbrow magazines that serve a public-interest function and have always lost money. He proceeds from that accurate description straight to the conclusion in his headline — TNR must change — without explaining why. One could just as easily conclude that TNR will always lose money, and its value should be assessed in non-market terms and subsidized accordingly by a willing donor. That unacknowledged leap of logic contains nearly all our disagreement. It seems to be rooted in a deep faith in the power of the free market when it comes to media.

First I note that the disagreement about TNR's character is whether "amazing culture section" is a strong enough assertion. Second I note that when one writes "seems" one should reconsider. Chait should ask if he really thinks media should be judged in market terms (so VOX would rate way behind Hustler). He should (and did) look for evidence. When the best evidence he can find is that Klein defends The Huffington Post's "What Time is the Superbowl" articles as follows

People always bring up that Huffington Post article. What I think is missed in that discussion is that that article is super useful. Every year I need to know when the Super Bowl is. I always forget. I often find that article. It tells me exactly what time the Super Bowl is.

Note nothing about markets or profits. He says he finds "that article" useful. Chait concludes that therefore Klein thinks that the market is a perfect judge of media. Evidently Chait considers it unacceptable for any media to transmit the time the Super Bowl starts and that this is an offense serious enough to outweigh everything else except profit, so any defence of a web journal which reports when the Super Bowl starts is proof that the defender considers profit the be all and end all of journalism. I think this is an entirely fair summary of Chait's argument. And this after (just after) Chait said he had no substantive disagreements with Klein except for the "amazing culture section" stuff.

Ah but Chait notes that Klein's conclusion is inconsistent with the wish that TNR might continue as it was losing money. I quote the last words in Klein's post "something is being lost in the transition from policy magazines to policy web sites, and it's still an open question how much of it can be regained."

Yep sure sounds as if Klein is celebrating the change. No hint that he thinks there could be anything wrong there.

I think most of what went wrong with Chait's post is that he drew a conclusion based only on reading Klein's headline and the wouldn't allow any evidence to make him question Chait's conclusion. Note "the conclusion in his headline". This doesn't necessarily imply that Chait's final guess as to what conclusion Klein reached was based entirely on the headline, but it is a bit more evidence.

Chait entirely ignores Klein's discussion of the influence of TNR

That's why it was believable that The New Republic was the "in-flight reading on Air Force One." President Bill Clinton was a policy wonk. What else was he going to read? But they're no longer the center of the policy conversation in Washington. That conversation has spilled online, beyond their pages, outside their borders. The in-flight reading on Air Force One is probably saved to President Obama's iPad.

Now if one is writing a policy oriented (front half of a) magazine, influence on policy makers is a central concern. This is a "non-market" issue (unless the policy makers are corrupt bribe takers).

In fact, one might even imagine that Klein cares about policy, so he cares about in flight reading on Air Force One because he cares about what that reader will do and not because he cares about the writers. The fact that Chait completely overlooks a discussion of what the President of the USA reads makes me wonder what motivates Chait.

Chait seems to interpret "a viable web publication, in a world where viability — and, arguably, influence — requires web traffic" as Klein saying policy journals *should* be required to have high web traffic. But the full sentence is "Hughes believes his charge is to make it a viable web publication, in a world where viability — and, arguably, influence — requires web traffic." The sentece does not state Kleins view but rather the view which he ascribes to Hughes.

I note that the title is ambiguous. Words all have multiple meanings. Extremely brief statements are often ambiguous with context necessary to disambiguate. In particular "needs" is abiguous. "Needs to Change" might mean "is being compelled to change" or "is morally obliged to change". The literal meaning of "TNR needs to change" and "TNR must change" are the same, but the second is more amenable to Chait's interpretation. The last sentence of Klein's piece is consistent only with "is being compelled to change" and definitely not with "Is morally obliged to change".

My conclusion is that one should read the post before beginning to write a reply to it (this is a do what I say don't do what I do conclusion as I usually comment before finishing posts)

Huh?

I will try to explain what I was trying to write here 1. Many polls show that a solid majority of US adults are economic populists -- they think the rich and corporations pay less than their fair share of taxes.

2. Democrats keep asking each other how they can appeal to the White working class.

3. I think that Democrats can propose raising taxes on high incomes and cutting taxes on the middle and working class. This proposal has been made by Democrats in political campaigns for example by Clinton in 1992 and Obama in 2008. It seems to have worked. But I don't hear any such proposal. I wonder why.

Almost all Democrats don't propose middle class tax cuts (financed by increased taxes on high incomes, capital gains, and corporate income. Why ?

4. I also wonder how Republicans got their majorities in congress and Governorships in purple and blue states (include the two saphire blue states in which I have ever been resident). I am fairly confident that a large part of the reason is point 3.

5. I also can't help believing that if other people knew as much as I know, they would vote the way I vote (that is to say I am human). So I am attracted to the idea that they are misinformed and inclined to blame the mass media. In particular, I don't think they are informed about the effect of the policy platforms of the two major parties on their personal pocket books. Here I guess the most dramatic example is the absurd delusional median guess that the foreign aid budget is about 10% of the US Federal budget. I blame the mass media for not reporting the basic bread and butter facts again and again and again until voters are informed.

6. Elite commentators hate #SocialSecurityAndMedicare. Why ? Many villagers consider the budget deficit the biggest problem the US has. This is a view shared by the extremely rich. Why ?

7. All the elite behavior which seems odd can be understood as the result of a combination of the financial self interes and peer pressure.

the financial interest is obvious -- major contributors to campaigns are rich. Top commentators are rich (which I will define as income over 250000/ year not as income over $150,000/yr -- the median threshold from a poll). Publishers and CEOs of corporations which own networks are rich. There are rich reactionaries eager to pay people to argue against economic populism but no super rich financers of economic populism (I think the rich who care about the non rich and support higher taxes on rich people (Warren Buffet, Bill and Melinda Gates) try to help directly not by influencing politicians and commentators).

But I think the peer pressure is very strong -- that people fear that they will be called demogogues if they are populists (hell "demogogue" is Greek for "populist" and "popolares" is Latin for "demogogue").

Uh oh it almost sounds as I am saying that politics and the discussion of politics and policy is based on elite class interest. Importantly class interest not just narrow personal interest. A commentator can get very famous arguing for egalitarianism (see Krugman, Paul). Politicians can get elected president by promising to increase taxes on the rich and cut taxes on the non rich (Clinton, Obama). But such things aren't done often.

Oh nooooo I agree with Marx.

I hate Marx. I hate the Republicans, conservatives, conservadems, villagers, very serious people, third wayer, DLC and Pete Peterson for making me agree on anything with Marx.