After following the major media coverage of the Republican presidential candidates, and especially after watching the televised debates, I am very disappointed with and dismayed by the GOP candidates lining up for the chance to challenge President Obama in the 2012 presidential election. I don’t like any of the major candidates, and with only one exception (Jon Huntsman) I don’t like any of the minor candidates either. When I was watching a televised debate (which was held on Thursday, August 11, 2011), I tweeted that the candidates were “losers and nutcases”, by which I meant that some are losers and some are nutcases, not that all are both. I will give two rundowns on the candidates and my opinions of them, one brief, and the other more detailed.

Brief Rundown:

Mitt Romney (Businessman/former governor)– panderer, flip-flopper, inauthentic, some good policy ideas, mixed record as governor, VERDICT: competent and not crazy but an overall weak candidate

Rick Perry (Governor)–Tea Party supporter, some highly extreme comments, mixed record as governor, VERDICT: dangerously extreme and unintelligent

Michele Bachmann (Congresswoman)–Tea Party leader, many extreme comments and positions, paltry legislative record, no executive experience, VERDICT: dangerous extremist

Ron Paul (Congressman)–supporter of Austrian economics, many extreme comments, possible racist, no executive experience, VERDICT: dangerous extremist

Herman Cain (Businessman)–some extreme comments, possible racist (against Arabs & Muslims), no executive experience, VERDICT: semi-dangerous extremist

Newt Gingrich (Former Speaker of the House)–smart but not that smart, showed poor leadership during later Clinton years, very poor campaign management, VERDICT: intelligent but dangerously incompetent

Rick Santorum (Former Senator)–social conservative, many extreme comments and positions, possible homophobe, mixed legislative record, VERDICT: semi-dangerous extremist

Jon Huntsman (Former ambassador & governor)–substantial resumé, many sound domestic policy proposals, questionable foreign policy, positive record as governor, VERDICT: competent, not crazy, but not extreme enough or pandering enough to win primaries

My detailed rundown is after the break.

More Detailed Rundown:

Mitt Romney–I do not trust Mitt Romney. He has been described as “robotic” and “wooden”, and is surprisingly gaffe-prone for such a successful businessman and governor. He sometimes appears to be a fabrication–someone’s (admittedly hazy) idea of the perfect Republican presidential candidate. Romney’s biggest problem is his own ideological “flexibility”. During the 2008 Republican primaries, he attempted to outflank Senator John McCain by moving sharply to the right on social and domestic policies. He failed, largely because evangelical Christians saw in former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee one of their own, while they recognized that Romney was a johnny-come-lately on most of their core issues. Romney governed the state of Massachusetts as a moderate New England Republican, and then repeatedly had to run away from his own achievements and positions. A more principled man would have stood firm, instead of trying to contort himself, pretzel-like, into the shape of the “ideal” candidate. All politicians pander, but Romney turned “flip-flopping” into an art form. An entire website, entitled Multiple-Choice Mitt, documents Romney’s unique ability to be “on every side of every issue”. In my opinion, such egregious self-contradiction indicates either someone who is either a) schizophrenic, b) stupid, or c) incredibly power-hungry. Based on his record and accomplishments, we can assume that Romney’s actions do not signify mental illness or a Sarah Palin-like lack of knowledge on the issues, so the most logical conclusion is that Romney simply craves the presidency so desperately that he is willing to tell outrageous lies, speak out of both sides of his mouth, and throw himself under the bus in order to get a shot a defeating Obama. Leaving aside what this equivocation says about Romney’s moral character, it is highly likely (although not certain) that the well-funded Obama campaign machine would eviscerate Multiple-Choice Mitt, should he be lucky enough to win the Republican nomination. And I haven’t even mentioned his Massachusetts health care plan (dubbed “Romneycare”). Romney’s opponents, both Republicans and Democrats, allege that the Massachusetts health care law he championed as governor, which included an “individual mandate” to buy health insurance, was the model for the Affordable Care Act (known as “Obamacare”). The highly-controversial Obamacare law has been the principal bête noir for the Tea Party faction of the GOP for over a year. Furthermore, Obamacare has sparked a massive legal battle. Wikipedia helpfully explains that “A total of 28 states have filed joint or individual lawsuits (including 26 states engaged in a joint action) to overturn the individual mandate portions of the law.” After some lower-court wranglings, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear a case concerning the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act. On account of the way the Supreme Court’s schedule is structured, oral arguments for that case will take place in late March, and the Court will announce its ruling in mid-2012, right in the middle of the presidential election season. The Supreme Court case will almost certainly make health care reform a national issue again, which will only weaken the Romney campaign. Inexplicably, health care reform is the only issue on which Romney has not substantially flip-flopped, in that Romney refuses to disavow Romneycare. Of course, Romney still ties himself in knots, arguing that it was the right system for Massachusetts but not, as Obama has insisted, for the entire nation. Romney vows that he will dismantle Obamacare if he is elected president, and in several televised debates Romney got into a major tiff with his opponents (especially Rick Perry) over a change that was made between the hardcover and paperback editions of Romney’s book (the omitted section argued that Massachusetts should be “a model” for the nation regarding health care reform). Romney’s connection, both purported and actual, to health care reform centered around an individual mandate is probably his greatest liability in the GOP primaries. Additionally, if Romney wins the nomination (as many still believe he will) but the Supreme Court upholds the constitutionality of the Affordable Care Act, many conservative GOP voters might choose to stay home instead of supporting their party’s nominee, who will remain in their eyes a lukewarm convert to political conservatism who originated the hateful (to them) mandate-driven health care plan. Ironically, Obama’s much-disliked health care overhaul, which cost his party many Congressional seats in the 2010 midterm elections, could secure him a second term in the White House because the large number of Republicans angry about Obamacare will be too disgusted with Romney to support the former Massachusetts governor in the 2012 presidential election. Finally, Romney’s most-repeated campaign line is some variation on the theme that his private-sector experience and his first-hand knowledge of job-creation are exactly what Americans need to get our economy back on track. As I learned from Casey Mulligan, a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and a noted authority on public economics (the economics of the government), “public finance is nothing like corporate finance”. In other words, running a business is not the same as running the government, and experience from the former doesn’t necessarily translate to the latter. Thus, Romney’s greatest strength, his positive record as a businessman and manager, isn’t much of a strength. Despite his many flaws, I could still (maybe) be persuaded to vote for Mitt Romney. Romney’s team of economic advisers includes Harvard economist N. Gregory Mankiw, Dean of the Columbia University Business School R. Glenn Hubbard, and former Missouri senator Jim Talent. I respect and admire Mankiw, Hubbard, and Talent, and their endorsements may yet cause me to reconsider Mitt Romney. Furthermore, former Minnesota governor Tim Pawlenty, who was a rival candidate for the Republican 2012 presidential nomination until he dropped out of the race in August, has endorsed Romney and joined Romney’s campaign as a co-chair. Pawlenty was the candidate that I liked the second-most (after Huntsman), and again his endorsement raises my opinion of Romney. If Romney can demonstrate some instances of Huntsman-like political courage and McCain-like truth-telling, and if Romney continues to pick up endorsements from moderates in the Republican Party, I could imagine myself supporting him. Even if he doesn’t demonstrate these virtues or get the endorsements, the GOP nomination might come down to a two-man race between Romney and an opponent preferred by the more conservative wing of the GOP, known as the “Not-Romney” (for example, Newt Gingrich or Rick Perry). In this possible future, I would be negligent in not supporting Romney over the equally-insincere but more extreme and less economically-literate Perry, or the arrogant and insouciant Gingrich who has repeatedly shown that he can’t manage a Congressional office or a presidential campaign. Romney is an extremely flawed candidate, although he may (unfortunately) be the last, best hope of moderate Republicans.

Rick Perry–He called Social Security “a monstrous lie” and “a Ponzi scheme”, sentiments with which I strongly agree. Perry’s position on climate change, that it is too early and the science is too uncertain to risk a huge portion of the US (and the world) economy taking rash actions to promote “sustainability”, is very close to (but not exactly equal to) my own. I also agree with Perry on the issue of the “border fence” (building a security barrier along the entire USA-Mexico border), in that Perry opposes the border fence and I find the entire idea of such a fence abhorrent. (Bizarrely, other, seemingly more moderate candidates like Romney and Huntsman want to militarize the border while Perry does not.) That said, Perry is practically the Tea Party’s Romney, in that he panders to almost every ultra-conservative policy position, and appears to be a fabricated far-right candidate. Perry (as well as his campaign website) is maddeningly vague on economic policies, the area of policy that matters most to me. Perry has repeatedly highlighted his record creating jobs in his home state of Texas. However, as Romney has persuasively argued, Perry benefited from the low tax rates and favorable regulatory environment of Texas, which were in place long before Perry was elected governor (and were probably created by the Texas legislature and by Perry’s gubernatorial predecessor George W. Bush, and his predecessor, Ann Richards). Romney has also argued that Perry’s attacks on Social Security will unnerve senior citizens and cost the Republicans many votes in the general election against Obama. This is simply another way of saying that Perry has a tendency towards extreme and harsh rhetoric. Exhibit A is when Perry accused Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke of “treason” for contemplating further expansionary monetary policy. Perry is widely considered to be “unelectable”, or at least far less electable in a nationwide general election than Romney. Conservative columnist Ross Douthat argues that Perry is the Republican equivalent of Howard Dean, while describing Perry as “overconfident and ill-prepared”. I agree with Douthat, and I think that Perry is a weak candidate. Perry’s pandering to the Tea Party unnerves me, and he seems intent on representing the insular and backward-looking factions of the Republican Party. Despite agreeing with him on a few key issues, I can scarcely envision any circumstances in which I could support the extremist Perry.

Newt Gingrich–I am somewhat shocked that as I am writing this, Newt Gingrich is considered by some to be the “frontrunner” in the GOP presidential contest. Many GOP insiders are surprised as well. As I have alluded to earlier, Gingrich does not impress me with his managerial abilities. Although he racked up several impressive achievements in the 1990s, (most notably: leading the Republicans to their first House of Representatives majority in 40 years, and working with then-president Bill Clinton to balance the federal budget and reform welfare) his personal and political blunders led to him being forced to resign by his own GOP members of Congress. In this respect, Gingrich is the polar opposite of President Obama: Obama had a relatively short career as a legislator, but he demonstrated notable leadership skill by running what was widely considered to be the most efficient and well-managed presidential campaign in US history; Gingrich had a very long career as a legislator with all the attendant baggage, and he has so far run one of the most chaotic and poorly-managed presidential campaigns in US history. To quote Wikipedia, “On June 9, 2011, Gingrich’s campaign manager, his press secretary, and senior aides in early primary states had resigned from his campaign en masse, leading to questions about the viability of the campaign.” While the doubts about Gingrich’s viability as a candidate have been put to rest by his subsequent surge in the polls, that incident underscores the widespread belief that Gingrich is a poor leader. Many of his former congressional colleagues, of whom it can rightly be said he was the leader during his tenure as Speaker of the House of Representatives, have flatly refused to back his presidential campaign. (Included in this group is then-Congressman but now-Senator Tom Coburn, an influential non-mainstream Republican.) Gingrich made a few very bad key decisions late in his Speaker-ship. Most notably, Gingrich got into a row with Bill Clinton over where he (Newt) was seated on Air Force One, and then let that dispute poison important budget negotiations. Even more inexplicably, Gingrich led the Republicans on a (in hindsight) misguided attempt to remove Clinton from office over Clinton’s lies regarding the president’s extramarital sex with White House intern Monica Lewinsky, while Gingrich was simultaneously engaging in an extramarital affair of his own with a Congressional staffer. That Gingrich is currently married to that staffer does not diminish the sheer hypocrisy and idiocy of his actions during Clinton’s presidency. Gingrich also managed to become the first Speaker of the House to be sanctioned by Congress for ethics violations. Amazingly, there is much more I can say that speaks to Newt’s lack of qualification for the presidency. Gingrich has changed his positions on major issues almost as much as Romney has, and Gingrich seems to have less to show for it, in that Romney used his formerly liberal views to win a governor’s race in the Democrat-controlled state of Massachusetts. Since leaving the House of Representatives in 1999, Gingrich has done little with his flexible viewpoints, except to personally enrich himself. By far the best example of this is Gingrich’s eight years of having troubled mortgage entity Freddie Mac as a client of his consulting firm. For those of you who have been living “on Mars for the past decade, in a cave with [your] eyes shut, and [your] fingers in [your] ears” (to quote The Simpsons), Freddie Mac is a government-sponsored entity whose actions had either a moderate amount or a large amount (depending on who you ask) to do with the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, principally through its participation in programs to encourage the vast proliferation of subprime mortgage lending to under-qualified borrowers. Along with its “sibling” Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac was placed in conservatorship by the US government in late 2008. Gingrich’s consulting firm earned approximately $1.6 million from its work with Freddie Mac, a point that his Republican opponents have repeatedly raised. Gingrich has also demonstrated a tendency to make joint appearances with prominent leftists, such as when he teamed up with Al Sharpton in 2009 to promote education reform, and even more notably in his now-infamous joint TV spot with Democratic Congressional leader Nancy Pelosi about global warming. Gingrich now calls that ad “one of the dumbest things I’ve done in recent years” and seems to have done a complete 180-degree turn regarding global warming. Finally, there are Newt’s personal indiscretions. He is on his third marriage, and in both of his previous divorces, he was cheating on his previous wife with his soon-to-be next wife. While I don’t care too much about this sort of thing, many voters (and Newt’s GOP rivals) espouse (no pun intended) the belief that someone who cheats on his spouse is more likely to abuse his office or break the public trust. When Gingrich was sanctioned by the House of Representatives for ethics violations, the vote was 395 to 28 in favor of sanctioning him. Although all but one of the ethics charges against him were eventually dropped, to quote Wikipedia again, “Special Counsel James M. Cole concluded that Gingrich violated federal tax law and had lied to the ethics panel…” Newt’s ethics violations may be somewhat overstated by his opponents, but it is clear that he did not emerge from Congress untainted by scandal. While these varied incidents should not, prima facie, render Gingrich ineligible for the presidency, they do all demonstrate poor judgment, of the political, professional and personal varieties. It is rare to find such an established, veteran politician who is so clearly not qualified to be president. I cannot, in good conscience, support a man who has embodied bad decision-making on so many occasions; I cannot overlook the flaws of someone who seeks the highest office in the land but by all accounts does not possess the capacity to even manage himself. If Gingrich wins the Republican nomination, I will be even more dismayed than I am now, and I may be forced by my own personal standards to oppose his presidential bid. Many Republicans seem to be backing Gingrich because they want someone who is a stark contrast to Obama (or who at least offers a clearer alternative to the current president than does Romney). As I argued above, Republicans who support Newt Gingrich may get the “polar opposite of Obama”, but not in the way they expected.

Herman Cain–The “Cain Train” has officially derailed itself. Until the allegations of sexual harassment and extramarital affairs began to appear, Herman Cain seemed like a nice enough fellow. However, to me, he always seemed dangerously under-prepared for running his own presidential campaign, let alone actually holding the nation’s highest office. Like many pundits, I believed that Cain was more interested in touring to promote his book (helpfully titled This Is Herman Cain!) than in actually campaigning for president. Now that question is largely academic. Nevertheless, I want to be on the record condemning Herman Cain’s intolerance towards Muslims and Muslim-Americans, and expressing my belief that Herman Cain’s famous “9-9-9″ tax plan is utter nonsense.

Michele Bachmann–Her claim that she, as president, could keep gasoline below $2.00 per gallon is ignorant and (if she actually believes it) insane. This is emblematic of her candidacy more broadly, in that it leaves her in a strange limbo of pointless extremism. Does anyone actually believe that she could deliver cheap gas? Does her shrill, impractical intransigence even matter anymore with (the equally-extreme but more influential) Perry in the race?

Ron Paul–I have already written one post criticizing Texas US Congressman Ron Paul, so I will expand on those sentiments only briefly. Ron Paul is not a conservative. There is nothing “conservative” about dismantling more than two-thirds of all federal government agencies or abandoning our military alliances and defense cooperation with such laudable partners as the UK, Germany, Japan, and South Korea. Fortunately (for him), Ron Paul doesn’t claim to be a conservative. Rather, he claims to be a libertarian. However, as Will Wilkinson explained quite eloquently, Ron Paul picks and chooses only some parts of libertarian belief, and ignores other parts (especially the parts I like about how increasing liberty can help the poor and the downtrodden, by freeing them from, say, welfare dependency or rescuing their children from crumbling inner-city public schools). Paul is keener to trumpet his opposition to the landmark 1964 Civil Right Act than to discuss America’s failing public education system, which is probably the “civil rights” issue of our time. (For good measure, Paul could mention how poor minority children are being victimized by the teachers’ unions, but even so, he rarely discusses this issue. To the extent that he does offer education policy suggestions, Paul heavily emphasizes homeschooling, and not a more relevant policy such as school vouchers or teacher merit pay.) As Wilkinson puts it, “…libertarians have done a terrible job countering the widespread suspicion that theirs is a uselessly abstract ideology of privilege for socially obtuse adolescent white guys. Ron Paul sure isn’t helping.” Do read Wilkinson’s entire article if you haven’t already. Wilkinson barely touches on Ron Paul’s association with some newsletters that, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, published highly racist statements, or Paul’s repeated assertions (disturbingly common among Austrian economists, elderly southern men, and paleo-libertarians) that Abraham Lincoln was a big-government, freedom-crushing despot who unjustly (!) waged war on the Confederacy during the American Civil War. Even if Ron Paul were the exemplar of libertarian beliefs that his followers claim he is (and that Wilkinson demonstrates that he is not), Paul’s inadequately explained connections to racist newsletters and pro-Confederate sentiments make him an incredibly imperfect messenger for political liberty. But anyways, I agree with Wilkinson, and I contend that Ron Paul is a pernicious force within the Republican party, the libertarian movement, and American politics as a whole.

Rick Santorum–I don’t have much to say about Santorum, except that he couldn’t even win his own Senate re-election battle in 2006. In that year’s elections, Santorum lost his Pennsylvania US Senate seat to Bob Casey, Jr., 41% to 59%, “the largest margin of defeat ever for an incumbent Republican Senator in Pennsylvania” according to Wikipedia. Santorum also seems to have a problem with gay people, or at least what they do in the bedroom. Despite picking up the endorsement of an influential and controversial Iowa conservative leader, Santorum is essentially a failed candidate. Even if this were not true (and the signs of a “Santorum surge” in Iowa may yet make me eat my words) I could not support such an inept and hate-filled politician, and I do not wish to write about him any further.

Jon Huntsman–He has a few quirky policy positions, and is often (unfairly) dismissed as a less-polished but more substantive version of Romney. Huntsman and Romney are probably the least extreme candidates in the current race, although Romney pandered shamelessly to evangelical Christians in the 2008 primaries, and Huntsman was somewhat less of a centrist when he was governor of Utah. Huntsman shares with Romney the Mormon faith, which is viewed with suspicion by many Americans, despite the fact that it is essentially just another form of Christianity (no longer embracing controversial tenets such as polygamy or the exclusion of blacks). Jon Huntsman has made several arguments with which I strongly agree. For example, Huntsman is right that more legal immigration is a “rising tide that lifts all boats”. At the Reagan Library debate this past September, Huntsman stood up to defend the importance of not rejecting science (on evolution and climate change). Alone among the top Republicans candidates, he has expressed a desire to move the GOP in the direction of greater LGBT rights, specifically by supporting civil unions and by calling the treatment of gays and lesbians an issue of “equality and fairness”. Huntsman astutely points to American’s “twin deficits”, the obvious economic one, and the rarely-mentioned deficit of the people’s trust in our government. Huntsman’s plan to close the trust deficit contains many sensible reforms, including eliminating subsidies and tax loopholes, and ending “too big to fail”. Regarding the latter, Huntsman’s well-thought-out plan to break up the “too big to fail” banks is probably the second-most economically sound solution to the developed world’s banking problems, losing out only to the somewhat more drastic reform known as “limited-purpose banking“. There is probably only one issue on which I substantively disagree with Huntsman, but it is a big one: the military deployments in the Middle East and Central Asia (specifically Afghanistan), which Huntsman claims he wants to end (or severely curtail) immediately to focus on “nation-building here at home”. Even here, I give him points for courage, as only Ron Paul (who wants to end all foreign military deployments, forever and permanently) has argued for anything like this on the Republican side. I suspect that Huntsman may know (or think he knows) something that I don’t about China and the potential threat that nation poses to the United States, and consequently Huntsman believes that we shouldn’t be focusing on fighting brush-fires in the Middle East and Central Asia, but instead preparing ourselves to better compete with China. On this issue, I am willing to give Huntsman the benefit of the doubt. The Concord Monitor, an influential New Hampshire newspaper, recently published an endorsement of Huntsman with which I agree completely. If Huntsman were to become a top-tier candidate with a reasonable chance of besting more well-known candidates like Romney, Gingrich, and Perry in the primaries, I would support Huntsman without reservations.

Closing Thoughts–Several influential conservative or right-leaning commentators have deliberately avoided endorsing one of the leading GOP candidates. George Will, an intellectual leader of the American conservative movement who, because he denounced the worst excesses of the George W. Bush administration, lost very little credibility at a time when right-wing politics as a whole lost a great deal of credibility, denounced Romney and critiqued the seemingly-inevitable result of either Romney or Gingrich becoming the nominee. Even more notably, prominent bloggers Andrew Sullivan and E.D. Kain have both endorsed Ron Paul, for reasons of protest and of substance. Equally-prominent pundit David Frum tersely argues that dissatisfied conservatives should not endorse Ron Paul. Although I find Frum’s argument here somewhat lacking, I have already established plenty of reasons not to support Ron Paul. If Romney wins the nomination, I could potentially be persuaded to support him. If, in contrast, Gingrich, Perry, Paul, Bachmann, or Santorum wins the nomination, I would not be able to support them, and I would be practically compelled to vote for a third-party candidate or not vote at all. For those who share my political inclinations as well as my trepidations about most of the GOP candidates, I can offer a recommendation. If you want to cast what is essentially a protest vote, don’t cast it for Ron Paul. Instead, either support Jon Huntsman in the GOP primaries, or vote for Gary Johnson, who may end up as the presidential nominee of the Libertarian Party. Huntsman, while he has little chance of winning any primaries (and if he does win New Hampshire it will most likely only serve to hand the GOP nomination to a “Not-Romney” like Gingrich) and has a low standing in the national polls, is the candidate that I would be the most likely to support if I were forced to choose. Johnson, who even during the time I was writing this post has decided to exit the GOP primaries to seek the Libertarian Party nomination instead, is a libertarian-leaning former governor of New Mexico and essentially is, as my former college classmate Noah Kristula-Green writes, “…Ron Paul but without the racist newsletters.” Both Huntsman and Johnson appear to be honorable men (coming from me, that is pretty much the highest compliment a politician can receive) whose ideas could transform the United States of America for the better, if only they were given a fair hearing.

Economists are quick to speak of ‘market failure’, and rightly so, but a greater threat comes from ‘government failure’. Because it is a monopoly, government brings inefficiency and stagnation to most things it runs; government agencies pursue the inflation of their budgets rather than the service of their customers; pressure groups form an unholy alliance with agencies to extract more money form taxpayers for their members. Yet despite all this, most clever people still call for government to run more things and assume that if it did so, it would somehow be more perfect, more selfless, next time.

That is from The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley (page 182 of the US paperback edition), which I recently finished reading, and which economist David Henderson likes for other reasons. World-renowned economist Gary Becker expounds upon these same ideas on his blog.

Ridley’s astute observation could and should be a rallying cry for today’s free-market economists, moderate libertarians, economic conservatives, and centrist pro-market incrementalists. It’s certainly a much better starting point for lovers of liberty than the scorched-earth, radical sham-libertarianism of Ron Paul and his followers. Unfortunately, Ron Paul’s version of libertarianism is currently receiving much national attention, and as Will Wilkinson discusses in this article for The New Republic, the Paulite creed is both embarrassing and counterproductive to the cause of liberty (incrementalist or otherwise). Do read the whole thing, but Wilkinson is right on the money when he says,

If you were an evil genius determined to promote the idea that libertarianism is a morally dubious ideology of privilege poorly disguised as a doctrine of liberation, you’d be hard pressed to improve on Ron Paul.

I’m sure to get some flack for condemning Ron Paul (or I would, if anyone actually read this), but between Wilkinson’s TKO of the Paulite ideology and Ridley’s positive alternative, I am content to do so.

If, on the other hand, you enjoyed this criticism of Ron Paul, stay tuned for my upcoming post on what I think of the Republican Party’s 2012 presidential candidates, which will be posted in time for the start of the primary election season.

On taxes, Mr Obama has stapled together a clutch of previous proposals: returning tax rates on the wealthy to where they were before Mr Bush cut them in 2001, and curbing deductions such as those for municipal-bond interest, mortgages and charitable giving. He proposes a new “Buffett” tax, named after the billionaire investor who has protested against the injustice of paying a lower tax rate than his secretary. It would require anyone earning more than $1m to pay a tax rate equal to that of the middle class, though how that could be done is completely obscure.

Republicans accused Mr Obama of class warfare; he responded that “this is not class warfare. It’s math. The money is going to have to come from someplace.” But that is disingenuous. Maths demands that substantial money should be raised, not that it should all come from the wealthiest 2% of citizens, nor that Mr Obama should stick to his promise that 98% of households must never pay higher rates.

[emphasis added]

As I will (probably) say several times in future posts over the next few years, America is in deep fiscal trouble and to get out of it we will all have to bear some of the burden of higher taxes and reduced spending. Those on the left shout that we can’t “balance the budget on the backs of the poor”, but it is equally true that we can’t balance the budget on the backs of the rich. (As this article explains, it is not only true that we shouldn’t balance the budget on the backs of the rich, for reasons of economic efficiency and growth, but it is also true that we literally can’t balance the budget by hiking taxes on the rich, as the amount that would be raised by Obama’s potential tax increases is only a small fraction of what is needed to close the US budget deficit.) While wealthier Americans will pay proportionally more under any revenue-increasing tax reform (just as they pay proportionally more under our current system), Obama’s idea is to force high earners, small-business owners, and large corporations to bear virtually all of the burden of paying for our nation’s out-of-control spending. As The Economist continues,

Billionaires and secretaries will both surely have to pay more taxes; record deficits have long since replaced the surpluses of 2001, thanks in large part to Mr Bush’s across-the-board tax cuts. Yet Mr Obama is going about it in a clumsy way. Consider those millionaires he is insisting should pay more: there are 433,000 of them, or 0.3% of all taxpayers, according to the Tax Policy Centre, a non-partisan research outfit. On average they pay 20% of their income in federal income and payroll taxes, while the median taxpayer pays 11%. Just under a quarter of the millionaires pay as little, or less, than that median, a phenomenon almost entirely due to the lower rate levied on capital gains and dividends.

A far more efficient way to collect more taxes would be a genuine tax reform that maintained or lowered marginal rates while curbing the exemptions, credits and deductions that cost $1 trillion a year, including the lower rate for capital gains and dividends. This would boost productivity by making the tax code more efficient, while shifting more of the tax burden to the rich who now benefit disproportionately from such exemptions and account for Mr Buffett’s sub-secretarial tax rate. A lower corporate rate would offset the harm of higher capital gains and dividend taxes.

Or, as they will teach you in any public economics class, the solution is to “broaden the base and lower the rate”. While I don’t agree completely with The Economist‘s prescription (Milton Friedman persuasively argued that corporate income should not be taxed at all), it is far more reasonable than Obama’s proposals. The president can say a million times that his ideas represent “common sense” or the “balanced approach”, but that doesn’t make it true.

Paul Simon is, by a large margin, my favorite contemporary popular musician. In my personal ranking, he sits just beneath The Beatles and Bob Dylan as the third-greatest popular musician or group of any era. Even so, I recognize that his music, while it ranges widely across styles and topics, isn’t for everyone. Simon’s best songs are outstanding, but much of his music isn’t as accessible as that of Lennon and McCartney. A large part of what attracts me to Simon’s songs is his overt intellectualism. Simon, who once rhymed the word “thirteen” with “mezzanine” and “St. Augustine”, is one of the most intellectual popular songwriters in human history. His songs, dating back to the 1960s, have repeatedly explored psychological themes such as Freudian analysis, social influences on behavior, and disorders like depression and anxiety. Simon’s more recent songs have pondered the ideas of love, faith, God, man’s place in the universe, and finding integrity through one’s work. Simon’s songs are always about something, even if that something is an abstract concept like pain or loneliness. As Don Shewey wrote in Rolling Stone reviewing Simon’s 1983 album Hearts and Bones,

In an earlier era, Paul Simon would have written for Broadway, a craft that demands that a song tell a story or define a character. But like any youngster in the Fifties, he got hooked on the sheer sexual energy of rock & roll — not so much the guitar-based electricity of Chuck Berry, Elvis and the Beatles, but the dreamy soulfulness of groups that euphemized their teenage romantic longings in nonsense lyrics. The trouble was that Simon was too clever for either kind of rock & roll. The words always came first for him, the music was secondary, and the rock & roll he loved — the delicate Spanish guitar, the hushed doo-wop harmonies — lingered faintly in the distance like a disembodied ideal.

As is appropriate for a songwriter who prioritizes the words over the music and the rhythm, Simon has contemplated many issues of great importance to the American (and the Jewish-American) experience, while rarely being overtly political. A few of Simon’s songs represent the straightforward protest sentiments that birthed the folk-rock movement, particularly “The Sound of Silence” from his Simon & Garfunkel years and “American Tune” from his solo years. But the more important thread running through Simon’s music is the transformation of alienation and skepticism into searching and agnosticism, and eventually the transformation of searching and agnosticism into faith and self-acceptance. Simon & Garfunkel music is often considered to epitomize teenage and young adult feelings of loneliness and alienation, so much so that Simon’s songs with Garfunkel were mocked for this quality in an episode of That ’70s Show (from season 4, if I’m not mistaken), as well as in last week’s episode of the recently-debuted comedy New Girl. As his career progressed, Simon’s modernist skepticism, demonstrated in “The Dangling Conversation” from the 1966 album Parsley, Sage, Rosemary and Thyme, and his doubts in (and disdain for) religion seen in several songs, including “Ace in the Hole” from the 1980 album One-Trick Pony, eventually softened into a neutral agnosticism.

By 1983′s Hearts and Bones, Simon’s certainty in his own intellectual prowess was waning, as exemplified by him having not one, but two songs proclaiming that he “Think[s] Too Much”. It is clear that Simon was realizing that there were more things in heaven and earth than were dreamt of in his philosophy. The turning point arrived with Simon’s 1986 album Graceland (which won the Grammy Award for Album of the Year), as Simon began to accept spirituality as a mode of expression. In the title track, he famously sings, “Maybe I’ve a reason to believe / We all will be received / In Graceland”. As reviewers noted, Simon had turned the final home of the bloated and drug-addled Elvis Presley into a “holy place”, a symbol of potential redemption for himself, his son, and his fellow Memphis-bound pilgrims. As he highlighted the injustice of South African apartheid and bolstered the stature of the nascent genre of “worldbeat” with the success of Graceland, Simon continued to become more open to faith and spirituality. This is further demonstrated in his 1990 follow-up to Graceland, entitled The Rhythm of the Saints. In the opening track of that album, “The Obvious Child” (which received much airtime in the US and reached #15 on the UK charts) Simon asserts that faith is, if not a certainty, then at least a possibility. In the third song on The Rhythm of the Saints, “The Coast”, Simon makes what amounts to the most earnest and heartfelt case a New York Jew could possibly make for Christianity, specifically the Roman Catholic variety that predominates in Brazil. (After Paul Simon gave a recent live performance, Paul McCartney, who had been watching the show and was struck by the prevalence of Christian themes, came backstage and asked Simon, “Aren’t you Jewish?”) Although Simon attacks and partially dismantles this case for faith in the next song on the album, “Proof“, I (myself a Jew from a major northern US city–Chicago) have always been left with an appreciation for the immense beauty that Simon spins into “The Coast” and intertwines with his interpretation of Christianity.

Simon’s next studio album, You’re The One, reflects an understanding of both the positive and negative qualities of religious faith, especially in the song “Señorita with a Necklace of Tears”. On his 2006 album Surprise, Simon again makes statements of both faith and of skepticism. The skepticism appears in the somewhat-obviously-titled “I Don’t Believe”, and the song “How Can You Live in the Northeast?” demonstrates how religion can divide us, but Simon also portrays the more positive aspects of religion in a few songs, especially the hauntingly beautiful “Wartime Prayers”, and the final verse of “Once Upon a Time There Was an Ocean” (my favorite track on that album). Fully half of the songs from Simon’s most recent album, So Beautiful or So What (released earlier this year), contain references to God, religion, or other faith-related concepts. More importantly, these concepts are presented in a mostly-positive manner. While the song “The Afterlife” presents, well, the afterlife, as a bureaucracy where “You got to fill out the form first / And then you wait in the line”, and the song “Love Is Eternal Sacred Light” presents God as somewhat of a trickster, several songs, including “Love and Blessings” and “The Afterlife”, associate God and His Love with music, something that Simon strongly believes (as he illustrates in many songs, including “Ace in the Hole”) can provide redemption. Simon also makes the point throughout So Beautiful or So What that God, and not just the Devil, is in the details, and that we can find indications of a higher power in fleeting moments of everyday beauty. Simon’s transformation, over the course of his career, from an angst-filled modernist skeptic hostile to religion into a musical wise-man who shows us the positive sides of religion, faith, and spirituality as well as the negative, is remarkable, and I find the arc of his career to be personally inspirational.

It is hard to believe that Paul Simon, who once sang, “I started to think too much / when I was twelve going on thirteen” (in the song “Think Too Much (a)” from Hearts and Bones, which I often consider to be a personal anthem) is now a septuagenarian. Fittingly, however, Simon predicted his own senescence in the song “Old Friends”, which Simon sang, along with Art Garfunkel, on the 1968 album Bookends:

Can you imagine us
Years from today
Sharing a park bench quietly?
How terribly strange
To be seventy

Happy 70th Birthday, Paul! I hope that you have a great day, and that you can spend it with your wife and children, and not sitting on a cold park bench with Art Garfunkel.

Thomas J. Sargent, currently a professor at New York University, is a macroeconomic theorist who has contributed substantially to the fields of pure macroeconomic theory, monetary theory, and economic history. He was one of the leaders of the “rational expectations revolution” in macroeconomics and his work helped to establish the New Classical School of economics. More recently, Sargent has also developed economic models that incorporate learning and bounded rationality. Here is Tyler Cowen explaining Sargent’s contributions to economics.

Christopher A. Sims, currently a professor at Princeton University, is a macroeconometrician who led the profession in applying the technique of Vector Auto-Regression (VAR) to empirical macroeconomics. He also pioneered the use of impulse response functions in macroeconomics. Here is Tyler Cowen explaining Sims’s contributions to economics.

Although it is sometimes a mistake to interpret the Sveriges Riksbank Prize through a political lens, in my opinion today’s award represents a partial vindication of the free-market “freshwater approach” to macroeconomics (associated with the University of Chicago, the University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, and the University of Rochester) whose reputation has been unfairly dragged through the mud during the recent financial crisis. It equally represents a rebuke to the dirigiste “saltwater approach” to macroeconomics (associated with Harvard, MIT, and Berkeley, among others) and especially to the pre-1980s “dinosaur Keynesianism” espoused by Paul Krugman, who was awarded the Sveriges Riksbank Prize in 2008 amid what many said was an ideological victory for Keynesian Economics over Classical Economics. With today’s prize award, the wheel has turned. The “rational expectations” economists, led by Sargent and his allies Robert E. Lucas, Nancy L. Stokey, and Edward C. Prescott, proved that Keynesian Economics had an unsound theoretical foundation, while Sims demonstrated empirically with his VARs that the prevailing (Keynesian) economic models of the 1970s had mediocre predictive power. Today’s prize honors the contributions of two preeminent economists, and reflects the shift in the economics profession ushered in by their contributions.

[cross-posted at erweinstein.tumblr.com]

There is very little that I can add to the tributes and obituaries that have already been published. Although Jobs himself denied that technology has the power to substantively change the world, this claim, coming from Jobs, is self-refuting. We are living today in a world fundamentally shaped by the innovations Steve Jobs pioneered in the fields of computing, animation, consumer electronics, and personal media consumption.

Here is a video of Jobs giving a moving and inspirational commencement speech at Stanford University.

World Trade Towers, 9:03 am EDT, 9/11/2001

The Pentagon, 9/11/2001

United Airlines Flight 93 Crash Site, Shanksville, PA

During the mid-1960s Bob Dylan, John Lennon, and Paul McCartney created a new kind of popular music that was personal and often obscure. This shift, which transformed popular music from an experimental into a conceptual art, produced a distinct change in the creative life cycles of songwriters.

For more information on what it means for popular music to be transformed from an experimental into a conceptual art, consult that article (search Google Scholar for “The Conceptual Revolution in Popular Music”, including the quotes) as well as Galenson’s “Understanding Creativity” (Journal of Applied Economics, Volume 13, Issue 2, November 2010, pgs. 351-362). From that latter paper comes an excellent quote from Bruce Springsteen, who at Bob Dylan’s induction into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1988, said:

Bob freed your mind the way Elvis freed your body. He showed us that just because the music was innately physical did not mean that it was anti-intellectual.

In honor of Dylan’s birthday, Tyler Cowen, another economist who studies arts and culture, discusses the highlights of Dylan’s career.

What strikes me the most about Bob Dylan is how incredibly young he was when he made his biggest contributions to popular music. Only 23 when he released “Blowin’ in the Wind” (ranked #14 on Rolling Stone magazine’s list of “500 Greatest Songs of All Time”) and was acknowledged as the king of the American folk music scene, Dylan was 24 when he precipitated the “Electric Controversy”, and later that same year he released “Like a Rolling Stone” (ranked #1 on the aforementioned list). It’s worth excerpting Galenson again to explain the importance of “Like a Rolling Stone.”

“Like a Rolling Stone” rejected the traditional clarity and universality of popular music, using a novel synthesis of folk music, blues, and Symbolist poetry to create a personal, complex song that became a radical new model for rock music. It led directly to the introspective and elusive imagery of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and inspired generations of singer-songwriters.

Reading Galenson’s papers (or quickly reading his Wikipedia page), it is clear that Dylan’s relative youth during such transformational events is no accident. Dylan is a conceptual innovator, like Pablo Picasso, T.S. Eliot, and Orson Welles, who starting innovating young, made art by synthesizing other art forms and works, and broke the rules of his art in such a fundamental way that everyone else had to take notice. Like other conceptual innovators, Dylan peaked early, which is not to say that his later work is worthless, but rather that his most influential songs and albums were from the mid-to-late 1960s. Here’s Galenson one more time:

In 1966, when Robert Shelton asked Dylan if his songs were influential because he broke the rules, Dylan responded, “I don’t break the rules, because I don’t see any rules to break. As far as I’m concerned, there aren’t any rules.”

It is difficult to understate the magnitude of the impact Bob Dylan had on the development of popular music. We’re still living in the musical world created by Dylan’s innovations.

So, Bob, how does it feel to be seventy? I don’t expect you to answer any time soon, but until then, many more happy birthdays!

Osama Bin Laden, reportedly in poor health and no longer the operational director of Al-Qaeda, was nevertheless the inspiration behind the 1998 US Embassy Bombings in East Africa, the attack on the USS Cole, and of course the 9/11 hijackings and suicide attacks.

The peoples of the West as well as residents of free, democratic, capitalist societies across the world will rest easier knowing that this unfathomably ruthless butcher is dead. While the universe may not have an inherent sense of justice, there does seem to be reversion-to-the-mean, and whether you call it karma, luck, or something else, no one can evade the tides of fortune forever. Osama Bin Laden and his army of deranged fanatics are on the losing side of history, and it was only a matter of time before justice of some form caught up to him.

I will leave you with an excerpt from an old gospel song (based on the Book of Revelation 6:15-17), as transcribed by author and screenwriter J. Michael Straczynski, from which I have derived a series of posts on this blog entitled “No Hiding Place”.

Well I went to the rock to hide my face

But the rock cried out, “No Hiding Place”

The rock cried out, “No Hiding Place”

“There’s no hiding place down here”

As Lincoln himself prophesied in a speech given in Springfield, Illinois on June 16, 1858,

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.” I believe this government cannot endure, permanently, half slave and half free.

Although Lincoln went on to pay the ultimate price for his resolve in preserving that government, he left as his legacy a house that was no longer divided by the question of human enslavement. Unfortunately, the United States was divided by the legacy of slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, as deep social and economic differences between the North and the South persisted for over a hundred years, well into the Twentieth Century. These divisions, and how they have recently begun to heal in earnest, are the subject of an excellent article in The Economist from two weeks ago.

It is also worth noting that the question of slavery in the United States was only resolved through the deaths of 620,000 soldiers (from the Union and the Confederacy combined), including 3,654 dead on a single day at the Battle of Antietam. While these counts are dwarfed by, say, the number of Russian deaths during World War II, they represent a staggeringly large fraction of the population of the United States at the time of the Civil War (total Civil War deaths amounted to around 2% of total US population, by my quick calculations).

Today, and for the next four years, we remember the American Civil War and those who died to settle the differences between the North and the South over slavery and states rights.

If anyone cares to comment, what does the legacy of the Civil War mean to you? What does it suggest to you about the way substantial political, social, and economic divisions, like those between the North and the South circa 1861, can be resolved through discourse or violence?

1. The King James Version of the Bible turns 400.

2. Will Wilkinson gives “A Scornful Review” to the new David Brooks novel The Social Animal.

3. “Illinois has 11 working nuclear reactors at six sites, more than any other state [in the USA]…”

4. Soon there will be no hiding place for Jacques Chirac.

5. Megan McArdle argues that “We Don’t Need More Stigma for Overweight Kids“. Excerpt:

But it seems to me that we frequently mix “healthy” up with “thin”.  Most people who switch to eating an actual healthy diet–little processed food, a lot of fresh fruits and vegetables, less salt and sugar–won’t end up thin.  Most people who exercise won’t lose much, if any weight without calorie restriction.  And most people who try to restrict their calories below what their body wants fail over the long term–eventually, their appetite wins.

6. A study released by a think-tank affiliated with the German Social Democratic Party (Germany’s large center-left party) reveals that nearly half of Germans believe that Israel is attempting to exterminate the Palestinians, and a slightly larger proportion of Germans agree with the statement “Jews try to take advantage of having been victims during the Nazi era”. As Tyler Cowen would say, “Yikes!”

7. Scott Adams gives his assessment of Charlie Sheen. That’s all the Charlie Sheen blogging you will get from me.

8. Rabbi Richard Jacobs is elected as the next president of the Union for Reform Judaism.

9. Economist Steven Horwitz, whose writings on cell phones I have previous blogged, cites telephone service as an example of an industry where cost has fallen and quality has risen (both dramatically). In other words, there is no great stagnation.

10. Vanity Fair’s offbeat interview with Paul Simon.

11. Very short Newsweek interview with Larry Summers. As some other bloggers have noted, the best line from Summers is, “I’m one of the few people who went to Washington to get out of politics.”

The best remark made on the blogosphere this month comes from Russell Roberts, professor of economics at George Mason University. He writes:

We do not expect a biologist to forecast how many squirrels will be alive in ten years if we increase the number of trees in the United States by 20%. A biologist would laugh at you. But that is what people ask of economists all the time.

I find this idea to be a very useful corrective to the sentiments of many (including some economists) who have condemned the entire discipline of economics for, say, not predicting the recent financial crisis. However, Roberts makes a larger point that economics has gone astray though pretensions of “scientism”–the belief that economics resembles hard sciences like physics. As he says in his follow-up post,

The problem is that too many economists and others treat it [economics] as if it were like physics.

I think that Roberts overstates his case, but it certainly is interesting to read his half-defense, half-indictment of economics. Roberts repeatedly asserts that economics is closer to evolutionary and ecological biology than to physics. I find this argument particularly appealing because, as readers of my post on Leigh Van Valen will recall, evolutionary biology was my first intellectual love. At this point, I can’t directly rebut Roberts’s argument comparing economics to evolutionary biology, but I can say that there is another possibility, namely, that economics is  young science, closer to physics in the late 19th Century than to modern physics.

Here is Arnold Kling commenting on the same Roberts post.

In somewhat related news, here is an online mini-symposium, hosted by The Economist, regarding whether or not the economics profession should adopt a code of conduct.

Have a safe and excellent New Year’s Eve!

1. Robert Barro, a Harvard University economics professor, offers a brief explanation of QE2 followed by a critique of the Fed’s proposed “exit strategy”, hosted by The Economist.

2. Greg Mankiw, also a Harvard economics professor and one of the most popular economics bloggers, has a short post that places him mildly in favor of QE2.

3. Megan McArdle, business and economics editor for The Atlantic, explains why China doesn’t like QE2, and why they’re being hypocritical (and we are too).

4. Scott Sumner, an economics professor at Bentley University and a standard-bearer for mainstream (albeit slightly-right-of-center) monetary economics, provides seven reasons why conservatives should support QE2.

5. Gary Becker, economics professor at the University of Chicago, and Richard Posner, judge on the 7th Circuit US Court of Appeals, offer some contrary opinions here and here.

6. A handful of conservative economists signed an open letter to Ben Bernanke opposing QE2. This is primarily what Sumner is reacting to in the link above. Paul Krugman, a Princeton economics professor and New York Times contributor, attacks these signatories from the left, here and here. John B. Taylor, a Stanford economics professor and the most influential monetary economist among the signatories, defends the letter here.

7. Also from The Economist‘s Free Exchange blog, here are two short posts, the first on why QE2 skeptics are wrong to worry about runaway inflation (at least so far), and the second about some “inside baseball” at the Fed, particularly whether or not support for QE2 will remain when a new group of officials rotates onto the Federal Open Market Committee next year.

8. Paul Krugman also notes that inflation is low, and seems alarmed, here and here.

My own position on QE2 is closest to Sumner’s. While Becker and Posner make pretty convincing arguments that QE2 will have little positive effect, I prefer Sumner’s reasoning that nominal GDP growth is too low, and that QE2 is a relatively low-risk way of addressing that problem. However, part of me disagrees with Sumner in that  I suspect that the current recession has a large real component, as Arnold Kling and (to a lesser extent) Tyler Cowen have argued.  I think that one’s position on QE2 is largely influenced by whether one believes inflation is a bigger threat than deflation, or vice-versa. If you believe that (potentially massive) inflation is lurking in the US monetary system, then you are likely to oppose QE2 on the grounds that it might unleash inflation that the Fed will be unable or unwilling to rein in. Those who worry more about deflation tend to favor QE2, even if (like me) they are also concerned that real aspects of the downturn make government policy–both fiscal and monetary–nearly useless. As you may have gathered from the links I chose above, I am not concerned about short- or medium-term inflation, so I view QE2 as a low-risk method of potentially boosting the economy.

Social Security does not incur investment risk. That is because Social Security taxes are not invested at all. They are paid to beneficiaries. Until this point, taxes have exceeded benefits, and excess revenues have been spent on other government programs. This excess spending is tracked in an account called the Social Security Trust Fund, which can  be thought of as a collection of IOUs from the rest of the Federal government to Social Security recipients.

Within a few years, Social Security benefits will start to exceed tax revenues, and the government will have to make good on its IOUs. Later this century, depending on how demographic and productivity trends play out, the Trust Fund will be exhausted, and the government will have to raise additional taxes to pay for Social Security benefits.

I would go so far as to say that thinking about Social Security with the image of money (or bonds) in a trust fund somewhere is downright pernicious. There isn’t any money stored away to pay for Social Security–just a promise by the government to repay the money it “borrowed” from Social Security excess revenues and in fact spent on other things. As I wrote in my previous post on this subject, Thomas Sowell once said that no one can borrow and save the same money simultaneously. To the extent that the Social Security Trust fund exists, it is a promise by the government (specifically Congress) to take money out of general revenues and spend it on Social Security benefits when the time comes that–as Kling described–benefits start to exceed revenues. I will conclude by stating what many others have written, namely that if you’re in your twenties or younger, don’t expect the government to keep its Social Security promise to you. One or both of the following will be the experience of my generation: 1) substantially higher taxes during our peak earning years as we (via the government) pay for the retirement and health care of our Baby Boomer parents, and 2) drastically reduced benefits from government programs like Social Security and Medicare when we’re old enough to receive those benefits.

ADDENDUM: Gregg Easterbrook lays out the facts on Social Security here. Also, in the October 2010 issue of The Atlantic, Michael Kinsley argues that the Baby Boomers should redeem themselves by turning down the Social Security largess about the be lavished on them and by helping to pay the way out of our nation’s fiscal hole.

From the official University of Chicago press release:

In his most famous paper, “A New Evolutionary Law,” published in 1973, he introduced novel observations and a radical interpretation that together continue to shape the field. The first, which he labeled the law of constant extinction—often called Van Valen’s Law—states that the probability of extinction for species and larger evolutionary groups bears no relation to how long it may have already existed. The fossil record, he argued, shows that lineages become neither more extinction-resistant nor more vulnerable over time.

To explain this surprising pattern, he proposed the Red Queen hypothesis, a model of co-evolutionary interaction, and one of the most enduring metaphors in modern biology. It holds that the struggle for existence never eases up, so that no species or lineage ever pulls ahead for long. Instead there is a constant arms race among species or larger groups, such as a community of competing lineages or parasites and their hosts. In a world with a fixed amount of energy, each must continually develop new adaptations, weapons or defenses to keep up with the other, a prolonged sequence of mutational one-upmanship.

Also:

Considered unconventional even by eccentrics, Van Valen had a wide range of interests, spanning the history of all life forms. “I don’t work linearly,” he explained in a note to his department chair. “I am a generalist and tend to open new approaches more than fill them in. What I work on changes irregularly and unpredictably with the progress of theory and knowledge.”

“Leigh Van Valen was an unbelievably broad thinker, uniquely so,” recalled his colleague David Jablonski, the William Kenan Jr. Professor in Geophysical Sciences. “The breadth of his work was staggering. He was interested in big questions—in everything, actually—but especially in topics like how diversity came about, how it changed over time.”

The picture that emerges of Van Valen is that of a divergent, even radical, thinker. Although capable of specific, technical, and highly theoretical research, he had the soul of a generalist, as evidenced by the wide range of interests he possessed (not to mention his own statements, seen above). As his colleagues and former students attest, he was a unique scientist, and he stood out even at a university that is known for having more than its share of offbeat and eccentric professors.

Van Valen’s work, as transmitted through his greatest popularizer–British science journalist Matt Ridley, was hugely influential on my own worldview and my scientific ethos. I read Ridley’s book The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature my junior year in high school. I was enthralled by Ridley’s account of the development of modern evolutionary biology, and fascinated by the exciting yet painstaking research of Ridley’s protagonists, including W.D. Hamilton, John Maynard Smith, Donald Symons, and Leigh Van Valen. Even more than was already the case, scientists became my heroes, and professors became the men (like Albert Einstein and Stephen Hawking) and women (like Rosalind Franklin and Jane Goodall) that I esteemed. Although I soon decided that I found history far more interesting than biology (and would later decide that I found economics even more interesting than history, as my favorite parts of history tended to be economic history), I remained committed to the idea that I would dedicate my own life to scholarly inquiry. Thus, I owe the direction of my academic career to my reading of Ridley’s The Red Queen, and that book truly would not have existed but for the contributions of Leigh Van Valen.

Bryan Caplan has written (on more than one occasion) that he misses Julian Simon, even though he never met Simon. Well, I can say the same thing about Leigh Van Valen. Even though I (probably) never met you, I will miss you, Professor Van Valen!

In fact, we could immediately put $100 trillion gazillion dollars in the trust funds from the general budget, and then they would have enough money to pay Social Security forever. Supposedly.

The trust fund is a measure of what we are promising to pay future Social Security recipients. To me, it is nothing more than that. But what is going to fund Social Security down the road is not the promises that we pour into it today. It is the taxes that people will pay in the future.

Kling simply and eloquently makes a point that I have often found myself struggling to articulate–that the trust fund is an accounting fiction. As for Kling accusing Paul Krugman of not understanding the overlapping generations model, remember that–to paraphrase Thomas Sowell–no entity, not even the government, can borrow and save the same money simultaneously.

Tyler Cowen once wrote (I can’t find a link)  that good blogs have recurring features, like a regular “cast of characters”. Although I haven’t been anywhere near as prolific a blogger as Tyler, I have tried to follow his advice in this respect. My recurring features include the not-quite-weekly “Remark of the Week” series, longish posts of assorted links called “Festival of Links”, and the occasional “No Hiding Place”, wherein I highlight the misfortunes of corrupt politicians and other public figures. If you see an example of the creative use of technology in a developing country, be sure to share it with me in an email or comment so I can blog about it in my (so far abortive) continuing series called “Lasers in the Jungle Watch“.

An entry from early in my blogging career of which I am particularly proud is my post about George W. Bush nominating Ben Bernanke to replace then-Fed chairman Alan Greenspan (see also here). Although at the time Mankind Minus One did not have a huge readership, I was one of the first on the blogosphere to post this story, and perhaps the first to include the commentary that the nomination of Bernanke carried none of the stench of Bush’s (eventually withdrawn) nomination of Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court. For this timeliness, my post was cited by the (now apparently defunct) BlogPulse Newswire, a metablog that highlighted important topics and breaking stories discussed on other blogs.

I am also still proud of my two entries (written about a year into my solo blogging career) contrasting the politics and rhetoric of two prominent economists, Paul Krugman and Herbert Gintis (see here and here). Although the conventional wisdom would hold that Gintis is farther to the left than Krugman, I sided with Gintis after he wrote a negative review of Krugman’s book, The Conscience of a Liberal. In that review, Gintis critiqued Krguman’s advocacy of extreme partisanship, writing, “This book epitomizes what is wrong with American liberalism.” While I admire Krugman’s contributions to the theories of international trade and economic geography, when opining on political matters, Krugman is just as shrill and vapid as the right-wing talking heads–like Sean Hannity and Glenn Beck–that he so much despises. Gintis, on the other hand, has a deep and abiding conviction that we must study social problems scientifically–from many angles, approaches, and viewpoints–in order to glean truths that will help us to ameliorate or solve those problems. My trend of attacking Paul Krugman has continued more recently, in my post defending Congressman Paul Ryan from Krugman’s (and Andrew Sullivan’s) charges of being a “fraud”. (And lest my Obamaphile friends forget, Krugman was a strong supporter of Hillary Clinton against Barack Obama in the 2008 Democratic presidential primaries, he maintains that Hillary lost due to sexism and media conspiracy, and he remains, in many ways, an opponent of President Obama, albeit from the left.)

Speaking of Glenn Beck, by far the most viewed post in the entirety of my solo blogging career is the one in which I discuss William Shatner’s political views, as revealed in an interview with Beck on Headline News (back when Beck worked for CNN). I was fortunate enough to watch a re-broadcast of that interview while staying in a hotel room in DC a little more than two years ago. Shatner, the Emmy-award-winning actor who portrayed the protagonists of Boston Legal and the original Star Trek, holds a set of nuanced but unusual political opinions, and while Beck sometimes tried to steer the interview towards his personal talking points, their exchanges were unique and revealing. I found an online transcript of the interview, and filed it away for a few months until I had time to blog about it. Fortunately for me, when I finally blogged about that interview, Shatner’s autobiography Up Till Now had recently been released, and Beck was moving his self-titled show to the Fox News Channel. Even more fortunately, the stars of Shatner and Beck have only risen since then, as Shatner’s autobiography was a best-seller and Beck’s TV program has gained in viewership. Just this past Saturday, a rally at the Lincoln Memorial in DC hosted by Beck (along with Sarah Palin) attracted tens (or perhaps hundreds) of thousands of participants. Perhaps these developments account for the fact that my post on William Shatner’s politics is the most viewed post on Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem, by an order of magnitude. Another possibility is that many people are interested in finding out what William Shatner’s political views are, and there are few other sites on the Internet that clearly and directly discuss Shatner’s political opinions. With this in mind, my secret plan to attract more traffic to this blog in the future is to……blog more about William Shatner! Shatner’s popularity might even increase further, as he will return to network TV this fall with the show $#*! My Dad Says, which is in fact a television show based on a Twitter feed–a clear sign of the times. So expect–and be prepared for–more posts about the one and only William Shatner.

I will close with a few announcements.

First, if you like what you see, please leave a comment and introduce yourself. If you are one of my friends who reads my blog posts as “Notes” automatically imported into Facebook, please take some time to visit my main blog site, chicagoathensjerusalem.com, and post comments there. If you find it easier just to comment on the Facebook Note, I will of course read those comments as well, but the main site could use a few more (non-spam) commenters.

Second, I would like to address the requests I have received from my friends on Tumblr to use that site more often. Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem has served me well, and I will if anything devote more time to it, not less. I will continue to post on my Chicago, Athens, and Jerusalem Tumblr occasionally, especially for short items that don’t require or deserve a full blog post. I may in fact post there with a slightly greater frequency, as blogging here and posting items to Tumblr may be complements not substitutes, to put it in economic parlance. Furthermore, an RSS feed of my Tumblr posts will remain visible on the sidebar of this site, an idea I got from fellow WordPress.com blogger Robert Talbert–a nice guy with many interesting things to say over at his blog Casting Out Nines.

Finally, while I do not wish to issue any corrections or retractions for my first five years of blogging, I do wish to sincerely apologize to economist and journalist Tim Harford for repeatedly misspelling his surname.

Thanks for reading! Here’s to five more years!

I have to say that Paul Krugman made a very strong case that the young GOPer is still drinking supply-side Kool-Aid.

…I remain pretty much persuaded by Krugman’s broad critique, however. Cutting taxes at this point in American history, in the face of this much debt, strikes me as loony.

From my vantage point, it is Sullivan who is drinking Krugman’s hyper-partisan left-wing Kool-Aid. I understand that Sullivan is angry about Republicans who propose tax cuts without recognizing the need for substantial spending cuts and tax increases to put America’s fiscal house in order (and on that account I agree with him). But that’s not what Ryan is doing. Ryan developed his plan for across-the-board reductions in government spending as a way to ease the US debt burden without having to employ extremely high tax rates. Ryan further contends that we can climb out from under the debt through economic growth if we stimulate the economy with carefully-targeted tax cuts. There is a legitimate debate to be had about whether we could bolster economic growth and help claw our way out of the current recession with tax cuts, just as there is a continuing debate about the need for additional stimulus in the form of increased government expenditures (some in the form of aid to the states, which Congress is considering this week). While I am probably closer to Sullivan than to Ryan on the subject of whether or not we need tax cuts right now, it inefficient, ignorant, and just plain rude to label anyone who favors tax cuts as “loony”–we are, after all, still reeling from the effects of one of the largest recessions in history. It may be silly to think that we can tax-cut our way out of a recession, but from the standpoint of economic theory it’s no sillier than thinking we can government-spend our way out of a recession, which has been the policy of the Obama Administration and the Democrat-controlled Congress for the past two years.

Furthermore, Paul Krugman’s attacks on Ryan are at least somewhat spurious. Krugman alleges that Ryan was being disingenuous by having the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) only score the part of Ryan’s “Roadmap” involving spending cuts, while ignoring Ryan’s proposed tax cuts, which would understandably eat away at much of the savings that Ryan’s spending reductions would create. The only problem with this line of attack is that the CBO doesn’t, as part of its operations, score tax cuts. As Megan McArdle, the business and economics editor for the Atlantic, points out in an excellent blog post entitled “Krugman is Wrong on Ryan and the CBO”, scoring tax cuts is the responsibility of the Joint Committee on Taxation (JCT). And Ryan did ask the JCT to score his tax cut proposals, although the JCT turned him down–possibly due to its heavy workload scoring the tax provisions of healthcare reform.

As an aside, I should say that I agree with a few of Krugman’s criticisms of Ryan’s plan, notably that Ryan fails to specify precisely what programs he would cut to achieve some of his spending reductions, and that other spending reductions rely on cuts in politically-sensitive Medicare, which are unlikely to ever be enacted.

However, Krugman writes:

The Ryan plan is a fraud that makes no useful contribution to the debate over America’s fiscal future.

This, of course, is just partisan vitriol. Ryan’s plan makes several useful contributions to the debate, even if it is not the most realistic or workable plan that has ever been proposed. Paul Ryan may not be the fiscal prophet that some on the right wish him to be, but he certainly doesn’t fit Paul Krugman’s caricature of a scammer, charlatan, or “flimflam man”.

As policymakers use it to devise programs, it’s becoming clear that behavioral economics is being asked to solve problems it wasn’t meant to address. Indeed, it seems in some cases that behavioral economics is being used as a political expedient, allowing policymakers to avoid painful but more effective solutions rooted in traditional economics.

The op-ed is filled with interesting (if perhaps overstated) examples, so read the whole thing.

Here is Tyler Cowen on Loewenstein and Ubel. Tyler writes,

Often there is no nudge-based free lunch and we need a straightforward relative price shift

Here is Erik Voeten from The Monkey Cage on Loewenstein and Ubel. Erik elaborates,

Ultimately, changing relative prices is much more likely to meaningfully impact behavior deemed socially undesirable. So, making healthier foods cheaper is much more important than labeling unhealthy food.

…

Loewenstein and Ubel’s op-ed is mostly aimed at warning people that behavioral solutions are no panacea.…Yet, it strikes me that if they are right, their argument is really quite damning for the behavioral economics revolution. Essentially, they assert that traditional economic analysis has ultimately much more relevance for the analysis of major social problems and for finding solutions to them. Behavioral economics can complement this but cannot be a viable alternative. Within political science and other social sciences the insights of behavioral economics are sometimes interpreted as undermining the very foundations of classical economic analysis and warranting an entirely different approach to social problems. At the very least, the op-ed is a useful reminder that careful scrutiny of effect sizes matters greatly.

Although Loewenstein and Ubel may not have intended it as such, their op-ed provides even more evidence that mainstream economics offers useful and robust solutions to many pressing policy issues, and that challengers such as behavioral economics serve up “corrections” to the mainstream models that are limited in practical use. While there are some insights to be gathered from behavioral economics (especially when combined with experimental methods, such as John List‘s tests of prospect theory), as a movement it is unlikely to do much to revolutionize economics because it does not posit critiques of mainstream methods that are both novel and useful, especially concerning policy applications.

One’s pleasure in hearing one of the world’s great Wagnerian “pit” bands playing this glorious music from center stage, along with the full-throated singing of the soloists, was mingled with dismay at the smallish audience. Wagner remains a tough sell on the North Shore [of Chicago]. The “Ringheads” in attendance cheered lustily, as if to compensate for the acres of empty seats.

I can offer only speculation as to why “Wager remains a tough sell” for the people of the northern suburbs of Chicago. That speculation is twofold: 1) The North Shore of Chicago is known for its substantially above-average prevalence of Jews, as well as high levels of social and political support for tolerance and diversity among the general population (although there are some areas, such as ultra-wealthy Kenilworth, that reliably vote Republican). 2) The music of Richard Wagner is still tainted by its associated with Nazi Germany–where it was highly popular with Hitler and other Nazi leaders–as well as the perceived anti-Semitism of Wagner himself (note the controversy caused by Daniel Barenboim’s performance of Wagner in Israel). Putting together 1) and 2) leads me to conjecture that the North Shore has a higher-than-average number of people who consider Wagner distasteful for political reasons, leading to a below-average popularity of Wagner’s music among the population in that area.

Also, I didn’t know that fans of Wagner’s Ring Cycle had a special name (“Ringheads”), although a quick Google search demonstrates at least two different instances of using “Ringheads” to denote Wagner fanatics.

As always, thank you for reading my random musings on subjects like the relative popularity of Wagnerian opera. For my friends, family, and other American readers, Happy July 4th! Here’s to an excellent rest of 2010!

‘Psychic’ octopus predicts Germany victory over England

Here’s more:

When consulted, Paul the octopus chose a mussel from a jar with the German flag on it ahead of one in a similar jar bearing the cross of St George.

The two-year-old cephalopod has a record of predicting past German results in this manner, his owners say.

Paul has so far correctly predicted all of Germany’s results in South Africa.

By the way, the octopus was right again, as Germany beat England 4-1 yesterday.

2. An extremely in-depth article about Lady Gaga, for those interested in such things.

3. Facebook’s new privacy controls explained. See also here.

4. Ranking diseases by prestige (hat tip to Tyler Cowen).

5. Homer Simpson named greatest TV character by Entertainment Weekly.

6. Allegations–very disturbing if true–about the Turkish government persecuting political opponents, from Turkish economist Dani Rodrik. I can’t vouch for the accuracy of his claims, but Rodrik is a widely-respected scholar, a highly-regarded teacher, and an excellent writer, and I have no reason to doubt him.

7. Amidst news that Apple has exceeded Microsoft in market capitalization, Microsoft is reorganizing its Entertainment & Devices division. This shakeup also includes the departure of J Allard and Robbie Bach, two prominent and influential Microsoft executives. Here are two good opinion pieces commenting on these developments, one from InfoWorld, and one from ArsTechnica.

8. A new profile of Gary Becker, who was awarded the University of Chicago Alumni Medal yesterday. Becker previously received the Alfred Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences in 1992 and the United States Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2007. Becker’s blog (joint with Judge Richard Posner) is here.

9. In a move that heralds the future of the mobile telecoms industry, AT&T announced that new customers will no longer be able to purchase unlimited mobile data plans. Dan Indiviglio and Megan McArdle concur with AT&T estimates that most smartphone users would end up paying less under the new plans. Slashdot has a roundup of various other reactions to the change. The Unofficial Apple Weblog hosted a Q&A with an AT&T rep on how this will affect iPhone and iPad users.

10. The true history of the original Order of Assassins (hat tip to Alex Tabarrok, who has a good article in the Wall Street Journal about the portrayal of capitalism in American movies and TV, including in The Wire).