Left and Right: Time to Actually Talk
by Travis Pantin
Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 11:41 AM
updated Fri, 30 Nov 2007 at 11:43 AM
Libertarian economist Tyler Cowen has a radical suggestion: the left and the right should stop generalizing about each other and actually talk for a change. He says both sides should take some time to interview their opposition before claiming to pronounce the entire liberal or conservative worldview in a single sentence.
Mr. Cowen has a particular bone to pick with blogger Daniel Davies, who accuses the late economist Milton Friedman of being "a party line Republican hack."
Mr. Cowen would like to know how many actual conversations Mr. Davies had with Milton Friedman on the topic of the Republican Party. "I've been present for a few," Mr. Cowen writes, "and while I'm open to feedback from Davies, my guess reading his post is that he hasn't been there for any. Yet he writes with a tone of certitude."
A new research convention should be established, Mr. Cowen argues: "Anytime a writer or blogger talks about what The Right or The Left (or some subset thereof) really wants or means, I'd like them to list their personal anthropological experience with the subjects under consideration."
Mr. Cowen suspects that Jon Chait, who recently published a book on supply side economics called "The Big Con: The True Story of How Washington Got Hoodwinked and Hijacked by Crackpot Economics," would be guilty of violating that convention.
"How many supply-siders has Chait talked to?" Mr. Cowen asks. "It might be a lot, but again I'd like to know. Has he met with the people who write The Wall Street Journal Op-Ed page? How many of them? How many leading Republican donors and strategists does he know? Did they really chat with him, or were they in controlled 'interview mode'? How motivated are they by supply-side doctrine? What did those say who weren't so motivated?"
A CALL FOR A NEW BLOG
A Harvard economics professor and blogger, Greg Mankiw, congratulates his friend and fellow economist Keith Hennessey for getting the presidential nomination to serve as head of the National Economic Council.
According to Mr. Mankiw, "Keith has spent most of his career as a Washington policy wonk. … But, like most readers of this blog, in his heart he is an econonerd. I recall that in his spare time … Keith was reading David Romer's graduate-level textbook, Advanced Macroeconomics, just for fun."
Mr. Mankiw's advice to his friend? "Start a blog."
THE SUBPRIME BUBBLE AND BUSH
Was the subprime bubble responsible for President Bush's re-election in 2004? David Byrne, a Grammy Award-winning musician and amateur political economist, thinks it might have been.
"Could it reveal one of the reasons poor or working people voted for Bush last time around?" Mr. Byrne asks. "I wonder, because for working folks voting Republican is usually and traditionally a vote for Big Business, and therefore against the working man's self interest."
Before laying out his theory, Mr. Byrne provides a plainspoken version of how the subprime collapse worked. Irresponsible lenders gave loans to people that they shouldn't have, he says. "The recipients of such loans are often described as NINJAs — No Income, No Job, No Assets," Mr. Byrne reports.
Over the course of all this irresponsible lending, the working poor "suddenly have loan offers thrown at them by the truckload. They feel richer, more flush; things are going well it seems. … A sense of blissfully ignorant well-being pervades the land. The working class and the under- and unemployed assume that the Republicans are somewhat responsible for this new (virtual) wealth — and maybe they were."
He argues that it's not far-fetched to think that this sense of well being might have tempted Mr. Joe Average to "vote for the administration seemingly responsible for his new sense of well-being."
IMMIGRANTS AND HEALTH CARE
A new study released by a UCLA associate professor, Alexander Ortega, shows that illegal immigrants use the health care system much less than legal immigrants.
Blogger Ezra Klein comments: "Contrary to fears that they see seven hours in the emergency room as an awesome, cost-free night on the town, it turns out they're 50% less likely than U.S-born Latinos to use ERs, and that means they're almost certainly less likely than that to seek care elsewhere, as the ER is about the only place you can go if you lack insurance."
Although they may engage in some free riding, Mr. Klein makes the point that, economically speaking, we should actually want the illegal immigrants in our country to get health care. "It's no harder to catch the flu from a day laborer than an investment banker," he notes, and healthy workers are more productive.
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