Category: Academe

John Taylor Calls out Ben Bernanke

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Click for full size

Ben Bernanke in his younger days

He politely says that Bernanke is full of it, and that low rates caused the bubble:

John Taylor, creator of the so-called Taylor Rule for guiding monetary policy, disputed Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. Bernanke’s argument that low interest rates didn’t cause the U.S. housing bubble.

“The evidence is overwhelming that those low interest rates were not only unusually low but they logically were a factor in the housing boom and therefore ultimately the bust,” Taylor, a Stanford University economist, said in an interview today in Atlanta.

Taylor, a former Treasury undersecretary, was responding to a speech by Bernanke two days ago, when he [Bernanke] said the Fed’s monetary policy after the 2001 recession “appears to have been reasonably appropriate” and that better regulation would have been more effective than higher rates in curbing the boom.

The Taylor rule, from the Wiki:

In economics, a Taylor rule is a monetary-policy rule that stipulates how much the central bank would or should change the nominal interest rate in response to divergences of actual inflation rates from target inflation rates and of actual Gross Domestic Product (GDP) from potential GDP. It was first proposed by the U.S. economist John B. Taylor in 1993.

I’m not sure of the value of the Taylor rule, there seem to be some “miracle occurs here” bits in the coefficients used, but it is significant that someone with his sort of academic credentials (he has a fracking rule named after him) is coming out hard against the Fed Chairman’s excuses.

I Have No Clue What this Means

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Because I’ve yet to find a good synopsis of what exactly Elinor Ostrom and Oliver Williamson, actually do, but what ever it is, it won the Nobel Prize in Economics.

Their field of study appears to be how organizations structure themselves, which would seem to me more like anthropology or sociology, but there is always an overlap, particularly given the fact that the idea of the purely rational actor in a market has been challenged by recent events and the relatively new field of behavioral economics.

It appears that one of their discoveries is that competitive markets don’t always deliver the optimal results, and that cooperation frequently beats competition, which sounds to me like it’s straight out of anthropology.

Understand, however, that I have no clue what this actually means.

Yoo May Have Tenure Revoked

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Basically, the question is whether the legal opinions that John Yoo supplied to Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are so outrageous as to justify the termination of his tenure at UC Berkeley law school.

I am of the opinion that Yoo actually broke the law, using the Nuremberg precedents for trying judges and lawyers.

One caveat about this article, ignore Alan Dershowitz, who has actually been a big supporter of torture, going so far as to suggest that judges should authorize it, and not an opponent of Yoo’s position as the writer states.

Bullsh@$!!!!, John Yoo, Torturer Edition

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The National Lawyers Guild is calling for Yoo’s firing by UC Berkeley and his disbarment.

Additionally, they call for him to be tried as a war criminal.

Christopher Edley, Jr., the Dean of the UC Law School, is saying that while he disagrees with Yoo’s positions, it would be an infringement on academic freedom to take action against him.

Christopher Edley, Jr. is an embarrassment to the profession of law, and to the entire academic world for taking this position, though I don’t think that Edley should be fired for this.

The difference between espousing torture and engaging in a criminal conspiracy to promulgate actual torture.

There is a difference between a lawyer who defends a mobster, and a Consigliere, who actively aids and abets law breaking. Mr. Yoo was clearly the latter.

I would also note that in some of the lesser known Nuremberg trials, judges and lawyers were tried and convicted for their roles which consisted of supplying legal advice and justifications, just like Yoo:

Indictment

  1. Participating in a common plan or conspiracy to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity;
  2. War crimes through the abuse of the judicial and penal process, resulting in mass murder, torture, plunder of private property.
  3. Crimes against humanity on the same grounds, including slave labor charges.

I would suggest that anyone on the UC fund raising or alumni list seriously consider their responses in the future.

Check out my earlier post on this matter merely referred to one of the General’s magnificent snarks, so you might want to look elsewhere for greater analysis.

Did Greenspan Get a Fake PhD?

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I came across a review of Robert Auerbach’s book, Deception and Abuse at the Fed: Henry B. Gonzalez Battles Alan Greenspan’s Bank.

It goes into my must read pile.

Auerbach is an outspoken critic of both the Fed and of Greenspan, and was an aide to one of Greenspan’s fiercest critics, Henry Gonzalez, former head of the House Banking Committee.

Basically, it appears that Greenspan got his PhD after stepping down from the Council of Economic Advisers. It happened in a very few months, and it was never published:

Exactly how Greenspan wrapped up his NYU studies in such a short period is unclear, but it appears that his thesis wasn’t especially time-consuming. Auerbach cites an earlier biography that says that Greenspan submitted — instead of a normal Ph.D. dissertation — some papers totaling 176 pages that he entitled Papers on Economic Theory and Policy. Among them was at least one he’d written earlier.

To say that this is irregular is an understatement. Dissertations are supposed to be public and available to people in the field, on the theory that it advances the area of study, even if that study is the “dismal science”.

The implication is not that he has lied on his resume, but rather that because of his connections, he was able to repackage a bunch of slop, and get his PhD anyway.

Sounds like Greenspan’s whole career.

Why Economists Suck, Crooked Timber Edition

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Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber notes that Greg Mankiw is doing some serious hating on “Joe Sixpack” in his latest NYT OP/ED:

Ahh go on then, try and tell me that Mankiw’s just engaging in a little bit of humour (possibly even a self-deprecating sigh at the pomposity of the average economist). No sale. This is how the average professional economist thinks of you lot, for all that you pay his wages; you’re a bunch of mugs who are incapable of understanding anything and just react like children to whatever’s dangled in front of your nose. It’s another of the many scandals of the profession, it is taught in the universities, and you can see it in more or less every popular book entitled something like “Fu$#younomics: How Nobody In The World Knows Jack Sh&@ Except Economists”.

(Bowlderization mine)

I would note, however that this is not limited to Economics.

You find this in many primarily academic fields, high energy physics, theoretical math, literary analysis, etc.

Take String Theorists…..Please.

With economists, however, the field is literally in front of our noses, and effects us in our daily lives, so the arrogance of economists is galling for that reason

Wanker of The Day: Northwestern U’s Coordinator of Violence Prevention and Sexual Health Education

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Here is the cartoon:

It’s pretty straightforward. It’s a call for promiscuity, something I whole heartedly approve of, unless it’s MY daughter.

Unfortunately, you have Northwestern’s Coordinator of Violence Prevention and Sexual Health Education not getting the fact that sex and rape are different things, and so she conflates them.

Letters to the Editor – Forum

Cartoon sexist, offensive

In The Daily on Friday, Jan. 25, a Drawing Board illustration was published depicting an angry stick figure and the message “I like my women like I like my cell phone minutes: Unlimited on nights and weekends.” Directly opposite this image were two Daily articles about the highly publicized sexual assault of an NU student that occurred near campus in May of 2007.

These two items juxtaposed in our student newspaper speak volumes about the culture here at NU. Whether or not the cartoon was created in an attempt to parody the attitude expressed in the quote, the illustration calls into question a set of beliefs about women and sex that research has shown to contribute to the alarmingly regular occurrence of sexual assault on college campuses.

Sexual assaults happen because the sexual aggressor believes that he is entitled to a woman’s body and pursues sexual activity without care or concern about the wishes of the victim. Attitudes like the one expressed in the cartoon reflect and contribute to a cultural climate where women’s value is based on their ability to sexually gratify men. When women are devalued in this manner and sexual relationships between men and women are viewed as adversarial, sexual violence against women is the natural extreme on a continuum of sexually aggressive and exploitative behaviors. In such a climate, the belief that women should be “unlimited” (and the assumption that they are) takes away an individual’s ability to give consent to sexual activity.

Most men who commit rape do not define their behavior as assault and are therefore able to justify their actions to themselves and others. Perpetrators of sexual assault are products of a culture that encourages them to view women as sexual objects and to believe that they are entitled to unlimited sexual access to women.

The belief that the majority of sexual assaults are committed by strangers in dark alleys is a misconception. Perpetrators of sexual assault are not mentally ill or psychotic, as the myths suggest, but rather they are “normal” men on your campus who hold beliefs about women and sex identical to those expressed in the Daily cartoon.

While the cartoon was most likely created in good humor, it is critical to make the connection between this humor and the set of beliefs that perpetuates and justifies sexual assault. We can all play a role in changing the culture at NU by thinking critically about the messages we receive and striving to challenge those that support and condone sexual violence.

– Kathryn Guilfoyle
Coordinator of Violence Prevention and Sexual Health Education
NU Health Education Department

The problem here is a simple one, and it not that the cartoon is crass, and perhaps a bit tasteless.

There is no call for violence. There is no implication of violence. There is a call for promiscuity.

There is a problem however, and that is when a “Coordinator of Violence Prevention” because of a need to justify the existence of such a position.

She is paid to be humorless and easily offended….Come to think of it, perhaps she needs a raise.

In conflating the desire with promiscuity with violence, Ms. Guilfoyle diminishes real, and ongoing threats of sexual violence.

She makes rape becomes about how humorless people find any reference to sex a call for rape, rather than being about the real, and more common than we would like to think, of sexual violence in our society.

The Rich/Poor Divide on Immigration

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Dean Baker correctly criticizes the New York Times for mischaracterizing the nature of immigration in this article.

The Times claims that poor immigrants find far more in the way of barriers than do the rich, and rightly notes that while poor immigrants may run across the borders, “The United States much more severely restricts the flows of highly educated immigrants than less-educated immigrants, it just uses different mechanisms. In the case of highly educated immigrants, the government at least partially enforces laws that prohibit employers from hiring immigrants at wages that are lower than what citizens would be willing to work for. There are no newspapers, hospitals, universities, or law firms that bring in large numbers of undocumented professionals and pay them half of the prevailing wage in their occupation. Such an institution would almost certainly be shut down, with the employers facing prosecution.“

This is not entirely accurate either. While the poor may be smuggled across borders in the back of 18 wheelers, and the more well to do will fly in, which makes the trek for the former easier, the divide is not between rich and poor, but between workers, and “professionals”.

Programmers, engineers, and nurses (which kind of eliminates your hospital example) are routinely replaced by lower paid H1b/L1 workers, and these visas are also used to lower wages in the fields.

The divide is that people who draw up this policy (Lawyers, Economists, and other Academicians), those who belong to professions that they might want their children to go into (Doctors), and those who are needed to cheer lead these policies (Journalists), are protected.

It’s about protecting, “People like us”, more than it is about rich and poor.

A Very Good Insight Into the Group Mind of Economists

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Dan Rodrik has a very good post on a fundamental difference in the economist community.

Essentially, it comes down to those who believe that theory as it now exists explains how the economy behaves, and any divergence from the theory as noise, and those who who see the noise as significant to a degree that textbook theory cannot be realistically applied.

Speaking as a non economist, I would see Milton Friedman (he got a Nobel for monetary free market theory) falling in the first category, and Joseph Stiglitz (he got his for his descriptions of how information asymmetry distorts free markets) in the second category.

There is a third category I think that he missed between the “first-best economists” and “second-best economists”, those who will revisit their theory on the basis of real world observations, where I would put Keynes, who I admire far more than Friedman.

Why Did We Think She Was Competent?

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Here is an interesting article on Condoleeza Rice. It appears that a view months ago, she wrote an article about Lebanon and how public/private partnerships might help in rebuilding the country.

Problem was, no on was willing to publish it. It came back from the “Wall Street Journal, the New York Times and perhaps other papers before the department finally tried a foreign publication, the Financial Times of London, which also turned it down.”

Think about that. A sitting Secretary of State could not get a paper to publish her OP/ED because it was so hactacular.

As a last-ditch strategy, the State Department briefly considered translating the article into Arabic and trying a Lebanese paper. But finally they just gave up. “I kept hearing the same thing: ‘There’s no news in this.’ ” Floyd said. The piece, he said, was littered with glowing references to President Bush’s wise leadership. “It read like a campaign document.”

The author goes on tho show how Bush politicized the State Department, as his administration has every other bureaucracy that they could get their hands on.

This misses the real point. The real point is that Condoleeza Rice is a complete incompetent who, much like Dick Cheney and Don Rumsfeld, has an unbroken record of failure.

This failure exceeds my wildest imagination. The fact that an academic, who was secretary of state was unable to write an article of sufficient quality for publication is a truly pathetic statement. In the publish or perish world of academe, this is inconceivable.

  • In the 1980s, she was lecturing troops in then West Berlin, and when someone wanted details, she did no know what a unit honorific in the Soviet army was.

  • In 1991, she was adamant that Boris Yeltzin not be given head of state protocol, because the USSR was going to reconstitute itself.

  • Throughout her career, she has been the only Sovietologist who did not recognize the sickness of their economy and society.

  • In 2001, she told Clinton’s natinal security team that she wasn’t worrying about al Queida, that the real threat was a resurgent Russia.

She is a fraud, elevated through right wing affirmative action, because it was convenient to have someone with a PhD in Sovietology to parrot right wing talking points.

No doubt her position as a double minority, black and a woman, has also served to elevate her stature in the party and with the pundits too.

Republicans believe that government is stupid, so they leave the stupid to govern.

The Depressing Thing is That Someone Will Get Tenure for This.

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Someone got paid to come up with this?

Women prefer well-built blokes: official
By Lester Haines
Published Tuesday 10th July 2007 14:44 GMT

Here’s some good news for the gym monsters among you: women are “predisposed to prefer muscularity in men”, according to researchers at UCLA.

The team’s report, published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, suggests “muscles in men are akin to elaborate tail feathers in male peacocks” which “attract females looking for a virile mate”, as Reuters puts it.

…