Author Archives: Fbvisitsmy

Psst, Zinke — national monuments create jobs just the way they are!

The fossil fuel industry has largely applauded the administration’s assault on environmental policy, like green-lighting controversial pipelines. Oh, and don’t forget that Trump “canceled” the Paris Climate Agreement.

Now, Politico Pro reports that some industry insiders say the Trump administration’s hasty environmental rule–scrapping has gone too far — and they’re getting worried about what might happen if disaster strikes.

“Every industry wants regulations that make sense,” Brian Youngberg, an energy analyst, told Politico. Trashing too many rules could lead to an environmental catastrophe, and might prompt even stricter regulations down the road.

Imagine a major disaster occurred — say, one akin to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. People might not look kindly upon President Trump’s executive order in April that reversed Obama-era restrictions on offshore drilling. Trump’s move abolished key safety improvements and opened up environmentally sensitive areas in the Gulf, the Arctic, and the Atlantic Ocean to potential oil drilling.

If a disaster were to happen, an anonymous source at an oil and gas company told Politico, “[W]e’d be painted with it as an entire industry.”

Link to article:  

Psst, Zinke — national monuments create jobs just the way they are!

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Are Conservative Economists Too Influential? Nah. It’s Worse Than That. But Also Better.

Mother Jones

Brad DeLong is unhappy that his faction of economists had so little influence on public policy during the Great Recession. But I think he makes a fundamental error:

Alesina and Ardagna and Reinhart and Rogoff each had more influence on what policymakers and journalists thought about the effects of fiscal policy than did Paul Krugman and company, (including me). While the Federal Reserve went full-tilt into quantitative easing (but not stamped money or helicopter money), it did so in the face of considerable know-nothing opposition. And the ECB lagged far behind in terms of even understanding its mission. Why? Because economists Taylor, Boskin, Calomiris, Lucas, Fama, and company had almost as much or even more impact as did Paul Krugman and company.

….The most salient relatively-recent example was provided by Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff who argued that it was risky for a country to have a debt-to-GDP ratio greater than 90 percent….I think we have by far the better of the argument. There is no tipping point. Indeed, there is barely a correlation, and it is very hard to argue that that correlation reflects causation from high initial debt to slower subsequent growth.

Yet it is very clear that even today Reinhart and Rogoff—and allied points by economists like Alberto Alesina, Francesco Giavazzi, et al., where I also think we have the better of the argument by far—have had a much greater impact on the public debate than my side has.

Brad’s error is in thinking that any of these economists influenced public policy. They didn’t. Politicians and central bankers wanted to do certain things, so they highlighted research from economists who happened to agree with them. Roughly speaking, when Congress wanted to spend more money, it asked for testimony from the Brad DeLongs of the world. When it wanted to cut spending, it asked for testimony from the Reinharts and Rogoffs. Likewise, central banks have their own models and their own political pressures, and they responded to them. They didn’t really care what any academic economists happened to say about it.

This may sound depressing if you’re an economist. Who wants to be nothing more than a handy mouthpiece for whichever politician happens to like the policy implications of your particular beliefs? But in fact, the news isn’t so bad after all.

Brad’s post is titled, “Why Were Economists as a Group as Useless Over 2010-2014 as Over 1929-1935?” But they weren’t. If we had responded to the 2007-08 financial crisis the same way we did to the 1929-32 financial crisis, we’d still be waiting for a rerun of World War II to pull us back to normal. The reality was far less grim. We might not have responded ideally, but we responded a helluva lot better than we did in 1931. That’s why it was a Great Recession, not a Great Depression.

And the reason for that is economists. Over the past 70 years they’ve had a tremendous impact on public policy. Compared to 1931, even the austerians are basically ultra-liberals who are just a few degrees less ultra-liberal than DeLong and Krugman. For better or worse, economists have enormous influence, but it’s influence exercised over the course of decades. On that score, the Keynesians are overwhelming winners who have moved the center of gravity of the profession far to the left. It’s only within the current center of gravity that conservatives seemed influential on public policy in 2009-10. But that’s almost always the case. Wherever the Overton Window happens to be, the conservative end is usually ascendant. What really matters, though, is where the window is.

Continued: 

Are Conservative Economists Too Influential? Nah. It’s Worse Than That. But Also Better.

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Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

Mother Jones

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I’ve written a post or two about the main reasons Hillary Clinton lost the election, and I always nod to the fact that there are other, smaller reasons too. One of these smaller reasons is that Clinton herself made mistakes, something that Harold Pollack noted a few days ago. So I asked him what he thought the campaign’s three biggest miscues were. He wrote a long post about this, which you should read since it contains a lot of discussion and nuance. In normal bloggy fashion, however, I’m going to ignore all that. Instead, here are Pollack’s answers, along with my comments:

Creating the email and speech problems, and being brittle and defensive about cleaning them up. No argument here. We both agree that these problems were wildly overblown by the press, but nonetheless they were problems that Clinton brought on herself. It’s all part of her greatest character deficit: pushing rules to the boundaries and then being defensive and secretive about it when her actions come to light. The former is a bad habit, and the latter just makes the press even more ravenous than they’d ordinarily be. It’s a toxic combination.

Final Polls on November 7

ABC/Post
NBC/WSJ
NBC/Survey Monkey
UPI/CVOTER
CBS/Times
IBD/TIPP
Fox
Monmouth
Bloomberg/Selzer

Clinton +4
Clinton +5
Clinton +7
Clinton +3
Clinton +4
Clinton +1
Clinton +4
Clinton +6
Clinton +3

Overconfidence and complacency across the political spectrum. In retrospect, this is obviously true. But even now, this hardly strikes me as a campaign problem per se. Clinton and her fellow Dems were confident because every poll showed them well ahead. I assume that all her internal polling showed the same thing. In the end, though, that polling was apparently off by about 3 points, and more than that in the famous trio of Pennsylvania, Michigan, and Wisconsin. That’s a big miss.

So what happened to the polls? Did Clinton’s internal polling show her way ahead? If so, how did it fail so badly? That’s what I’d like to know. I think anybody would have been overconfident if their polling showed them winning in a walk.

Signaling to older rural white voters that we didn’t want them, and indeed would leave them behind. This is hard to assess. There’s no question that Democrats have steadily lost the support of the white working class over the past two decades. This is something that goes far beyond Hillary Clinton. But did the white working class leave because they thought Republicans were likely to bring their jobs back and make their lives better? That hardly seems likely, given that during this entire period Republicans have campaigned on a steady diet of corporate deregulation and tax cuts for the rich.

But if that’s the case, we’re back to optics and race—and Trump appealed explicitly to both. He loudly and persistently pretended to care about the white working class while offering nothing much that would actually affect them. And he was pretty plainly pro-white, which obviously appealed to at least some of them. Clinton’s problem is that she isn’t cynical enough to do the former and not loathsome enough to do the latter.

Could she still have done more? Of course. Politicians routinely use symbols to demonstrate respect for groups even if their platforms don’t offer an awful lot of help at a concrete level. Clinton didn’t do that, and it turned out to be a mistake. I can’t bring myself to blame her too much for this, since it’s all hindsight, but it was still a mistake—and an especially big one since she clearly failed to understand what was happening in three states that were so critical to her that they were called the “blue firewall.”

Taken from: 

Hillary Clinton’s Three Big Mistakes

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