Category: Michael Kinsley Disease

F%$# Me, I Agree with Michael F%$#ing Kinsley

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Michael Kinsley is the epitome of a mindless contrarian.

I refer to this mindset as “Michael Kinsley Disease”.

And after nearly 4 decades of being shallow, and facile, and wrong, he finally gets one right when he calls out the foreign policy establishment in Washington, DC as immoral and incompetent:

Can our nation survive without taking advantage of the wisdom of self-described “foreign policy elites”? That is the question posed on Page 1 of The Post’s print edition on Saturday, under the headline “Foreign policy elites indecisive on Trump.” The Post’s Karen DeYoung reports that 121 Republican national security experts have signed a petition saying they would not serve in a Donald Trump administration, should democracy serve them up such an opportunity. Actually, in their eyes, it is less an opportunity than a possible obligation. We all have to decide whether to vote for Trump, which is a pretty easy decision for most people I know. But “foreign policy elites” have the further obligation of deciding whether to work in a Trump administration. This, apparently, is not an easy decision at all.

………

If you ask me (which no one is doing), I think our country might survive quite well without the advice of “foreign policy elites” — or without the guidance of retired generals such as David Petraeus. A Post columnist last week recommended retired generals in general, and Petraeus in particular, as a good source of presidents. This is a brilliant idea. Petraeus had to resign as director of the CIA after he got caught in a scandal involving both sex and classified information, so he covers all the bases in competing with the Clinton machine. And he certainly qualifies as a member of the foreign policy elite.

What, after all, have foreign policy elites of either party done for us lately? Paying attention to “foreign policy elites” has given us nothing but heartbreak in the past three and a half decades. That’s right, three and a half decades, or a third of a century if you prefer. That’s how long we’ve been mired in the Middle East. At first it was considered gauche and naïve to use the Vietnam-era term “quagmire” to describe the United States’ situation in the Middle East. No one objects to calling it a quagmire anymore.

………

Perhaps what’s so remarkable about this terrible recent history is how many countries we have managed to screw up without affecting our own very much. That’s what allows us to give ourselves credit for good intentions, without the need for any beneficial result. Or perhaps what’s so remarkable is that we’re still paying the slightest attention to foreign policy elites.

 I will put this down to a stopped clock being right twice a day.

Michael Kinsley Comes Out in Favor of Stalinism

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In a New York Times review of Glenn Greenwald’s latest book, Kinsley declares that it must be the government, and not the journalist, who determines when a sensitive information can be published:

The trouble is this: Greenwald says that Snowden told him to “use your journalistic judgment to only publish those documents that the public should see and that can be revealed without harm to any innocent people.” Once again, this testimony proves the opposite of what Greenwald and Snowden seem to think. Snowden may be willing to trust Greenwald to make this judgment correctly — but are you? And even if you do trust Greenwald’s judgment, which on the evidence might be unwise, how can we be sure the next leaker will be so scrupulous?

The question is who decides. It seems clear, at least to me, that the private companies that own newspapers, and their employees, should not have the final say over the release of government secrets, and a free pass to make them public with no legal consequences. In a democracy (which, pace Greenwald, we still are), that decision must ultimately be made by the government. No doubt the government will usually be overprotective of its secrets, and so the process of decision-making — whatever it turns out to be — should openly tilt in favor of publication with minimal delay. But ultimately you can’t square this circle. Someone gets to decide, and that someone cannot be Glenn Greenwald.

This is not a problem, this is a free press, and one of the consequences of this is that stuff that the government does not want to be pubic knowledge will be public knowledge.

Shorter Michael Kinsley, “Journalism, Schmournalism, we need better stenographers.”

H/t Gawker.

So Not Surprised

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Getting away from the mindless contrarianism* that Nate Silver’s rebooted Fivethirtyeight dot com seems to specialize in, Ben Casselman actually does some meaningful statistics, and discovers that the end of extended unemployment benefits has not led to more people finding jobs:

The cutoff of federal unemployment benefits doesn’t seem to be helping the long-term unemployed get back to work.

More than a million Americans saw their unemployment benefits expire at the start of the year, after Congress failed to renew the Emergency Unemployment Compensation program. The program, which Congress created in 2008, had provided federally funded payments to unemployed workers when their state-funded benefits ran out, usually after 26 weeks.
The Senate recently voted to restore the benefits, but the House shows little sign of following suit.

Some economists had argued that the program was doing more harm than good by discouraging recipients from looking for work or taking jobs. They said that because the job market was improving, the time had come to cut off benefits. That would prod the unemployed to get back to work, perhaps leading them to accept offers that seem less than ideal.
So far, however, the evidence doesn’t seem to support that theory. Rather than finding jobs, the long-term unemployed continue to be out of luck.

We now have three months’ worth of job market data since the benefits program expired. The chart below shows job-finding rates for the long-term and short-term unemployed. Notice three things: First, the short-term unemployed have a much better chance of finding a job than the long-term unemployed and always have. Second, the short-term unemployed are seeing a steady improvement in their prospects, but the long-term jobless are not. And third, there’s been no major shift since the benefits program expired at the end of last year. (The chart shows the data as a 12-month rolling average, which could obscure a sudden shift. The un-smoothed data, however, doesn’t show a jump either.)

What a surprise.

The right wing economists, and those who listen to them, people who have been wrong about everything since at least 1929 are wrong again.

* AKA Michael Kinsley disease.

Things that Pundits do Not Understand

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To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it’s not all about them.

He’s right, of course, but I think that he misses the dynamic:  Pundits are supposed to be narcissistic sociopaths.  It’s the nature of the medium:

Brad DeLong and Dan Drezner wearily continue the policing of Michael Kinsley. I’ll leave it in their hands. But may I say that there is a serious pundit lesson here — namely, that it’s not about you.

Basically, Kinsley has been on a jihad against Krugman because other people took apart Kinsley’s essay on austerity, which was both wrong on the basic history, and fetishized other people’s suffering.

I’m not sure why patron saint of dumb-f%$# mindless contrarianism is upset with Paul Krugman, but being wrong is what Michael Kinsley does best.

Devastating Takedown of Super Freakonomics

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Click for full size


Not really such a big patch of territory.

 You don’t have to go far for help

I think that the book is an exercise in muddy headed contrarianism: The idea here is if you come to conclusions that are counter intuitive, particularly if they are favor conservatives, you get air time and book sales, and thus academic integrity be damned.

In any case, Professor Raymond T. Pierrehumbert takes a look at the chapter on Superfreakonomics where the authors claim that solar panels will contribute to global warming, and shows that anyone who can add 2 and 2 should never have put out this tripe.

First, he Googles world electric consumption, 16.83 trillion KWH, and figures back to wattage, which gives about 2 trillion (1.921T actually) watts.

Well, with 200w/m for an average area (he used 250 W on the assumption that you place solar cells in sunnier climes), and the current commercial efficiency of 15% that means that one would need about an area equal to 2×1012/(.15 X 250)=5.333×1010 m2=53,000 square kilometers, or a square about 231 kilometers to a side. (top picture).

Wiki has Earth’s surface area as 510,072,000 km2, so this is 0.0105% of the earth’s surface.

Now, you actually have to double this, since you need to account for the fact that at any given moment, half the earth’s surface is in darkness, so it rises to a whopping 0.0210% of the Earth’s surface area.

This is a worst case scenario, particularly since the albedo (reflectivity) of a solar cell is frequently the same as the roof that they are placed on (yes, this is an argument for white roofs in warm climates), but let’s ignore that, and go to his numbers:

So, let’s say that sand has a 50% albedo. [note the albedo of the earth is 0.39, I learned that from the Greek composer Vangelis] That means that each square meter of black solar cell absorbs an extra 125 Watts that otherwise would have been reflected by the sand (i.e. 50% of the 250 Watts per square meter of sunlight). Multiplying by the area of solar cell, we get 6.66 trillion Watts

That 6.66 trillion Watts is the “waste heat” that is a byproduct of generating electricity by using solar cells. All means of generating electricity involve waste heat, and fossil fuels are not an exception. A typical coal-fired power plant only is around 33% efficient, so you would need to release 6 trillion Watts of heat to burn the coal to make our 2 trillion Watts of electricity. That makes the waste heat of solar cells vs. coal basically a wash, and we could stop right there, but let’s continue our exercise in thinking with numbers anyway.

Of course, the problem is not the heat produced by coal production, it’s a trivial part of the equation, it’s the heat trapped by the emissions that are the concern, and it is (go to article) at least two orders of magnitude greater than waste heat.

His conclusion:

A more substantive (though in the end almost equally trivial) issue is the carbon emitted in the course of manufacturing solar cells, but that is not the matter at hand here. The point here is that really simple arithmetic, which you could not be bothered to do, would have been enough to tell you that the claim that the blackness of solar cells makes solar energy pointless is complete and utter nonsense. I don’t think you would have accepted such laziness and sloppiness in a term paper from one of your students, so why do you accept it from yourself? What does the failure to do such basic thinking with numbers say about the extent to which anything you write can be trusted? How do you think it reflects on the profession of economics when a member of that profession — somebody who that profession seems to esteem highly — publicly and noisily shows that he cannot be bothered to do simple arithmetic and elementary background reading? Not even for a subject of such paramount importance as global warming.

(emphasis mine)

He then finishes with a Google map (bottom pic) showing that it is a ½ mile walk to the Hinds Geophysical Laboratory on his own campus in order to confirm these numbers.

It would be even shorter if he cut through campus and the Administration building, though considering that the ethics office is likely located there, he probably wants to take the long way.

(on edit)
I updated the pictures to go with the popup format that I now use.

Given Michael Kinsley’s most recent exercise in mindless contrarianism, where he came out against journalism, I feel compelled to note that this behavior (Michael Kinsley disease) becomes even more toxic and has less intellectual integrity when juxtaposed with Chicago School economic delusions.