Isn't the thing about Vox that the bubble they exist in is one in which these expert consensuses (consensi?) are part of the definition of perceived reality - part of the skin of the bubble, if you like? The people who comprise Vox are where they are because they have come to accept this state of affairs, and if they didn't, Vox would not be Vox.
Good link. I got into a back-and-forth with a Vox journalist a while back about her snarkily dismissive reference to readers' "conspiracy theories" about who sponsors Vox videos.
It was pretty remarkable that a) it had clearly not occurred to the journalist that sponsorship by a corporation with a vested interest in the topic could be problematic to readers; b) that the journalist believed that the fact that Vox employees had made the judgment calls about what was included/not included in the video should be sufficient reassurance to readers of their integrity; and finally c) that the journalist thought that if readers didn't trust sponsored content then they couldn't fully trust any news outlet with advertising.
The last point was particularly boggling to me. RIGHT. YOU GOT IT. WE DON'T. Why on earth should we? Do you?
I was going to post in defense of vox, but I'm glad I read Witt's comment first, because it means I will write an even more qualified defense than I would have otherwise. That's genuinely bad.
But first, I remember reading a good series about the journalistic issues with sponsored content, and I want to try to find that.
I just switched from a 1% cash back to a 2% cash back card, does this make me evil?
The FAIR article does not assert that the consensus doesn't exist when VOX says it does. I would find it more persuasive if it had some evidence of lack of consensus.
For example, I bet most economists think chained price indices and cap and trade are good ideas.
I think this was the piece that I was thinking about, from the CJR.
Advertisers and journalists have always been partners, and that partnership has always contained an inherent tension. Content marketing has the potential to turn that tension into an existential threat. Journalists like to think of themselves as protectors of the public interest, intermediaries who police both fact and rhetoric. The very premise of the profession is that it's dangerous to have words pass straight from the mouths of CEOs or politicians to the public's ear. This intermediary function is at the core of journalism's identity and, though it wasn't always thought of this way, the core of its business model. But each successful piece of content marketing is, in effect, a statement that a journalist wasn't wanted or needed. Each time a consumer clicks on a piece of content marketing, or shares it with a friend, it's confirmation that they're very comfortable being out there in the information landscape on their own.
...
Everyone I talked to for this piece seemed to agree that some essential distinction between journalism and content marketing needs to be preserved, but no one agrees on what that distinction should be. . . .
And also.
"The promise that they're going to do this in-house, Mad Men-style, could generate some cool storytelling experiments," said Patrick Howe, a journalist-turned-academic at Cal Poly who is researching whether native ads undermine the credibility of news sites. "But for most publishers, native advertising is just another commodity, in exactly the same category as the double click ads and Google AdWords." In a follow up email, he added, "Most publishers are finding it a hell of a trick to get the tone 'right.' To me, [Conde Nast's] move crosses a line...I predict that editors and writers will find their loyalties divided and the ad-think will inevitably creep into the editorial content."
Those are from over a year ago, I feel like working journalists should be conscious of that as an ongoing debate.
I just learned Vox's main investor is Comcast, which may be the reason I can't recall Vox explaining anything useful about the telecommunications industry, or anything about the conflict inherent to having sources of content owned by the same company that controls the means of distribution.
I dunno, that article was incredibly weak. Why shouldn't they be able to say "consensus" as a shorthand instead if the far stupider some say/others say that was a staple of crappy J School articles forever. And, sure, whenever you're reading a journalist you're operating to some degree on faith and selectiveness, and ideology critique has its place -- and Vox's ideology is basically "center-left wonks." But the same is true of literally any journalism -- if you think you can escape ideology, you're doing the critique wrong, so all your information is being delivered selectively. But that doesn't mean that you can just ignore information because you're aware that ideological filtering by journalists is a thing. And at some point healthy skepticism becomes willful ignorance -- when the dominant response is go-to suspicion without other, better sources of information (which no one has for most topics, which is why we have journalists in the first place) your purportedly critical reading is making you affirmatively stupider, not smarter.
I actually think we'd be on net better off and better informed with a nation of uncritical readers of a "quality" mainstream publication like the NYT than we are with people cherry-picking information from the internet based on their pre-existing ideology and their social media feed while ignoring the lamestream media.
Slightly OT, but this conversation makes me want to give a shout-out to this excellent environmental justice story (about industrial towns around Detroit) in Newsweek. I don't read newsweek, I just saw that linked, but it's exactly the sort of thing that people complain that vox doesn't do -- actual reporting which engages strongly with inequality and details of local policy. In addition to that, one of the things that caught me slightly be surprise was that the link in this sentence
In America, race is the single biggest factor in determining whether you live near a toxic waste site.
Goes to The Nation. I know Newsweek had to re-invent itself after discontinuing print publication, but it still seems significant to see a long-form Newsweek story linking to The Nation for corroborating details.
All that said, here's my defense.
I've been reading Vox more regularly during the primaries* and honestly it's made me think more highly of vox. But, the thing that's clear, is that vox both does many things right and many things wrong. It's does not have a single editorial voice, and it is not wonkblog writ large (even though that's a big part of it). It's doing a lot of different styles of articles, and I think it's worth criticizing Vox's failures and weak points, but I would hesitate to ascribe them to a overarching institutional culture. As a reader I feel like some of their writers are good, and some are sloppy.
Having said that, I also agree with RT's 8.1, that in several of the cases mentioned in the FAIR article the complaint is a purely rhetorical one.
Sanders' coalition looks very different from what Obama created, or what most experts had expected.What did experts expect? It's never explained.
I have no argument with the assetion that most people did not expect the Sanders coalition to form the way that it has. That doesn't seem deceptive of ideologically slanted, it's just an example of the rhetorical tic FAIR is talking about.
* you can write your own punch-line.
Most say the world will end in fire,
Some say in ice.
Based on sources I've acquired
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if I had to publish twice,
I think I know enough of Slate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
This may be a coincidence, but the moment I stopped reading The Awl was the moment that Sponsored Content articles made up a substantial proportion of their posts.
11 is excellent. 8 is also right in that the criticism is obvious and the vague consensus-sourcing is same-old-same-old, though Trivers is right that Vox is lazy and selective.
Not unrelated: not to sound like a Bernie bro, but Krugman is being a major dick as a Clinton shill.
Sanders' coalition looks very different from what Obama created, or what most experts had expected.
The thing is, that sentence would have been far stronger if it just ended with a period after "created." Instead, it feels the need to call on un-named "experts" for added credulity. Whats the value added there? Its argument by authority without actually naming an authority.
The West Indies just beat England in the cricket final, BTW. There was a dramatic ending where they needed 19 in 6 balls, but then they hit four sixes in a row to win. I don't really know what that means, but I watched it and it looked cool.
I wrote out this long irate comment on the problem of "experts agree" type journalism/writing, but then I thought. You know, everything you need to know about ideology behind Vox can be summed up by this. Honestly, this article should be projected behind Matt Yg|esias's head for the rest of his life.
15.last Not something a little more In the Penal Colony?
||
Hey Barry, I realized today that I gave you some bad information a while back with regard to the need to pay self employment tax for work oversees. Turns out that's only in the circumstance where you are actually doing the work in the United States for an international employer. Which had applied to me at one time, but now doesn't, so it means I don't have to cough up a huge check this year, which is nice.
|>
A fair criticism of Vox is that it's affirmatively worse at what it does than better or similarly funded outfits doing the same thing. The NYT (including the Upshot) is better at what Vox does than it is itself, even granting the purported premise of the site. And 538 is also better. Mostly, I think, because those sites have hired people who are either better-trained professional journalists or better at actually being experts than the Vox crew. And of course Yglesias is a lazy smart-undergrad jackass (Ezra actually works as a journalist, but he doesn't write everything).
And frankly reading any major American newspaper leaves you better informed than reading Vox, which suggests that its "explainer" premise was just wrong.
18 Thanks, I was looking at the IRS site earlier today and was all confused so I was going to ask you something about that in a thread here.
Do you know if I need to file for the automatic extension or is it, you know, automatic?
And I'd also actually like to pay into SS so I don't mind the self-employment tax (much) on account of the fact that I don't have enough quarters because of my messed up past life.
8-2 One problem with that is that the more people trust a source the more rewarding it is for that source if it lies to them. Another is that people who are well informed know that the NYT, for example cooperated with the effort to lie us into war with Iraq and then defended both the effort and the employee responsible. It is likely true that they still average better than people trying to act as their own filter, but that doesn't exactly inspire my trust.
16
You know, I am normally against cruel punishments, but then I learned what's ok for some people is different from what's ok for other people, so we needn't worry about all that universal human rights stuff.
19
In the long comment I deleted, I made a point like that. Most of them aren't journalists and they're not policy experts, so what's being value added is really unclear.
Actually, looking further into it, my self-employment tax exclusion may be specific to what the IRS has arranged with my employer, which is a whole separate and unique kind of clusterfuck.
Do you know if I need to file for the automatic extension or is it, you know, automatic?
According to this, you have to attach a statement to your return saying that you are using the exemption, and that you are entitled to it by merit of living/working overseas.
You know, Witt gave me accurate tax information. If we're keeping track of who is and isn't full of shit.
I can't help it that I'm more full of shit than Witt. She is one of the least full of shit people on here. You are setting the bar way too high.
I'm just grumpy because I have to file my taxes on paper this year.
This would be longer were I not on the phone. But tigre nails important points. No paper I have ever written for got everything wrong but they all got important things wrong for reasons of ideological blindness and self interest as well as normal incompetence. But in most cases this was sincere. The intelligent reader makes allowances. No better system is on offer.
Claud Cockburn said that all journalism is a mixture of entertainment and propaganda, so all you have to decide is who you want to entertain and what cause you want to serve. It's not art.
N
Most of them aren't journalists and they're not policy experts, so what's being value added is really unclear.
Yeah, this is my main issue with them. When they first announced the project it sounded like they were going to try to hire actual experts on the topics they would cover, but that doesn't seem to be what they've actually done. (Maybe they tried but couldn't get anyone to bite.)
In my experience, all experts bite.
That said, though, I suspect one of the reasons sites like Vox and 538 aren't obviously any better than traditional media outlets at what they do is that their existence has spurred those media outlets to step up their game at this, and since they have vastly more resources it's not surprising that they'd end up doing better.
Obviously just echoing what others have said, but the people at vox don't know anything about anything, and are just going to get snowed by whatever paid neo-liberal hacks they talk to at Brookings institute lunches or whatever. Remember when Snausgely wrote that economics blog on Slate for years with no expert knowledge whatsoever, and no desire to learn any.
If Slate offered me money to do that, I'd do it in a second.
And if you went to Harvard you could of.
I hate Yglesias as much as the next guy, and of course it is full of young people who know nothing. But I think the problem with Vox isn't so much Harvard pipeline, but that they hired people with resumes and interests similar to Ezra Klein's. And Ezra really did do an excellent job for a while as a health care journalist in the first Obama administration, but (a) most young people with comparable resumes aren't as hard working as Ezra (b) many issues don't lend themselves as well to that kind of journalism as did Obamacare (c) as a stand-alone site they need a bunch of entertainment-value clickbait to drive traffic and they're particularly bad at that.
I still like the Vox original premise, and I think I recently did read what seemed to be a good quick overview in Vox of the North Carolina anti-LGBT legislation, which I didn't even know was under discussion before it was passed. Other reports just talked about the passage of the law with a too-brief summary of what it did and almost no background of where it came from.
But aside from that, it seems like the only other Vox links I've clicked on recently have been summaries of pop culture stuff with a little analysis thrown in, so.
Vox hell. I don't get it it isn't as if alternatives aren't readily available. If Jacobin Marxian perspective isn't to your taste, The New Inquiry's radical global pluralism might be.
Read both and be informed
On Stone Mountain ...via New Inquiry
Awesome Fucking Picture Bill Clinton, 1992. Those are inmates in the background
A vote for Clinton in 2016 is a vote for white supremacy, just as the votes for Obama were. Don't kid yourselves.
Reading Vox is about wanting to be part of the default consensus, "people say," yet getting to complain about it. If it is "Krugman says" instead of "economists say" it really isn't any different. It is only when your cites and quotes and sources lack authority that you can claim to be anti-authoritarian.
didn't even know was under discussion before it was passed
Nobody did. It was drafted in secret, then passed and signed in a day during an "emergency" session of the General Assembly. The whole thing was just about putting the AG Roy Cooper (running against McCrory in November) and the Democratic Party on record as favoring the transgender agenda to rape kids in public bathrooms (plus the general ongoing attack on municipal government). And that will be the rhetorical centerpiece of the GOP campaign here until Election Day.
Great explanation, apo. Have you considered working for Vox?
Latest News
The OC is now available to stream -- here are 7 bananas episodes that explain its greatness
ABOUT 7 HOURS AGO
A new study looks at why bike share is so much safer than regular biking
ABOUT 8 HOURS AGO
5 ways Netflix's Ashton Kutcher comedy The Ranch reinvents the live studio audience sitcom
ABOUT 8 HOURS AGO
Here's what happens when companies actually track their CO2 emissions
ABOUT 8 HOURS AGO
I'm not sure why something with such offerings continues to provoke so much angst. It's just trying to get the eyeballs and Facebook shares of upmarket millennials during their lunch breaks.
The way to read Vox is the same as the way to read The Economist (another offender mentioned in the linked article). When they write "most experts" or "most economists" or whatever, just substitute "we."
Vox is a terrific site and I'm continually amazed by the Mineshaft-as-a-whole's inexplicable Vox Derangement Syndrome. Are all of their writers great? No. Do they over-indulge in clickbaity headlines and gimmicky wannabe-viral posts? Sure. But they're doing web-first, fair-and-balanced policy journalism better than most. I have trouble imagining what a good general-interest politics-and-culture site looks like to someone for whom Vox is unacceptable (surely Slate is right out?).
A vote for Clinton in 2016 is a vote for white supremacy
Speaking of, I was outside for maybe 2 hours yesterday and now my face is sunburned and my head is sunburned where I'm supposed to have hair. And it's still early enough that there was snow on the ground this morning.
I need a hat, is what I'm saying. But I'm too young to have lost all my vanity and I can't find one that doesn't look stupid.
I think I want a straw fedora, but they all look either pimp or hipster or old man. I could live with pimp if I had to, but I think the brim is too small on those.
45- you should look into eclectic web magazines.
When Vox started I decided I didn't want to read it as it would piss me off. So I didn't, but with the election people I do read kept linking them so I have read them some, and they pissed me off in exactly the way I predicted. I await the end of the election and not reading them anymore.
a straw fedora
This is not a hat that exists. You want a panama. The good ones are made in Ecuador.
"economists agree..."
They do? I can't remember seeing that happen.
I was going to write something about how academics are liable to stave off agreement for as long as possible and often agree with each other only grudgingly, but I cut that paragraph out because it ended up being incoherent and not terribly relevant.
45- I feel like there is no shortage of hot takes such as would be necessary for me to take Vox seriously. I get pretty much all my news from bloggers who were on the right side during the run up to the Iraq war. I'm not really that interested in new sources of information.
Apparently, they made "fedora style" Panama hats. Also, and this one looks nicer to me, Havana style.
Lll45 - among better sources for, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Guardian, the Nation, the New Yorker, the BBC, the CBC, the Economist (even still, yes their politics suck), 538, the New York Review of Books, other major foreign newspapers, even Vice News, etc etc etc ....
The Panama Papers story that broke today is kind of a big deal, and Vox hasn't mentioned it. But who cares what mechanisms the world's oligarchs use to hide their money, right?
Well that was confusing. I meant better vaguely consensus information about what's going on in the world. The only remote comparative advantage of Vox is that it writes its headlines in millenial.
I just can't wear these hats. I'd feel less awkward in a seed corn hat. Except that wouldn't shade my neck or ears.
Suck it up and wear the hat. They're practical for sun protection, and once you get over being self-conscious about it, they look good on almost everyone.
(Buck looks a bit like an insane beachcomber in his, but in an appealing sort of way.)
Lll45 - among better sources for, the New York Times, the Washington Post, the LA Times, the Guardian, the Nation, the New Yorker, the BBC, the CBC, the Economist (even still, yes their politics suck), 538, the New York Review of Books, other major foreign newspapers, even Vice News, etc etc etc ....
I only read about half of those but, I disagree. Starting with the easiest ones first: Vox is way better than fivethirtyeight. I will outsource my criticism of the Economist and the Washington Post to Brad DeLong, but neither seem any better. I've been a subscriber to the NYRB for years and I have to say, I think they're in a down period right now. There's still good articles every issue, but they do not have the consistent quality that they used to.
I probably should read the NYer, NYTimes, and The Nation more than I do. I think of all of those as quality publications, but I just don't follow them regularly for various reasons.*
But, to say that Vox isn't as good as the NYT, NYer generally, and various other papers when they're at their best, isn't an argument for avoiding vox**, saying that they shouldn't exist.
In fact, you'd have to say, that's doing fairly well (with significant room for improvement) for a new publication.
* I have been meaning to re-subscribe to the NYer when I have more time for reading. The NYTimes is good, but deeply classist and, more importantly from my perspective, their writing style does not fit what I want to read when I'm procrastinating. I subscribed to the Nation once, during the 2000 election, when I was curious about their coverage. They were strongly in the, "Al Gore is almost as bad as George Bush" camp, and it left a lasting bad impression.
** However, "When Vox started I decided I didn't want to read it as it would piss me off." is a good reason for not reading vox.
My favorite hat site the one that starts at $500 for the cheap hats and tops out at $5,000.
I wonder how much it would be to get "Pioneer" embroidered on the front of it?
Sewing magazines are full of ads promising that if you buy a small commercial embroidery machine with the hat and the T-shirt attachment, you will make a comfortable living at home while your blonde children admire you. If they've fooled anyone, there's someone near you desperate to embroider something onto your hat. I don't know how to find her.
Maybe a Tilley canvas brimmed hat, for middling formal? They make a feed cap with a neck drape, but I think an actual brim would look better.
The drape over the neck could work if I join the French Foreign Legion.
I think you should get a pork-pie hat and initiate a habit of continually chomping on a cigar butt while absent-minded fiddling with a pair of dice.
It was such an ordeal to stop smoking for me. I couldn't bear the temptation.
Other than that, it was a good idea.
I myself have worn the same gimme cap for ten+ years, used to be purple with "Intel" on it but now it is washed and sun-bleached pale gray-green and there is No Logo.
Why would I need two, or a new one? Such fashion and vanity is for those dependent on and manipulative of others' opinions of them. I lack that contempt, for myself as needy, and for them as malleable.
Right, but if I always wear ten year old clothing, people will assume I started drinking too much again.
SPSS logo hat, dice. Hey kid, d'you frequentist this joint?
Most of the the sites listed in 55 have shitty RSS feeds and several are behind pay walls. I know bitching about RSS feeds is, like, so 2005 but if you don't play well with Feedly you're not going to be part of my daily information stream, full stop.
Which is to say that the "remote comparative advantage of Vox" is that's web-first and actually fits into my media consumption habits. I subscribe to the NYT and visit their site every day but it's not well designed, clearly second-class wrt to the daily paper, and I don't end up reading all that much of it.
I subscribe to the NYT at the ten articles or fewer a month level. Fortunately, important stuff usually happens toward the start of the month.
56: Yggles wrote up the Panama Papers thing about half an hour ago. I don't think "should have a story about it in minutes", on a weekend for that matter, is a standard I want to apply very broadly. We'd be better served if there was less effort spent on breaking news and to-the-minute updates.
46 Get a Jones Beach life guard bucket hat like the one I took with me to Arrakis and wear whenever I head out to the desert or the beaches here. But I think you have to know an actual Jones Beach life guard to get them. Like my brother.
I don't think "should have a story about it in minutes", on a weekend for that matter, is a standard I want to apply
I guess I was more impressed that this leak is said to have been secretly processed by about 400 journalists at over 100 media organizations, and apparently none of them are Vox.
Vox isn't really a traditional journalism operation that does original reporting, so I don't find it surprising that they weren't included in the group that processed the leaked documents.
I mean, I don't really give a shit about the timeliness of breaking news. But, the investigative story of the year that apparently everyone is in on, they aren't in on.
11 is great but for the typo
destruction s/b distraction
I think Vox is both a disappointment and much better than you all seem to think. At any rate, I find the article from the OP much more annoying than Vox. The article is very confused about whether it's saying that Vox is wrong about the expert consensus, that they're right but fail to back it up with evidence, or that the expert consensus is wrong. I think it's usually possible but somewhat time consuming to identify the expert consensus, and so it's valuable to include that information. And there's usually no way to quickly say how you worked that out other than "go read a bunch of experts."
(Of course there is some very valid criticism mixed up in there. The "tax calculator" was tendentious and ridiculous, and Vox should be embarrassed. The expert consensus in in economics can have major problems.)
Cash back rewards are taken out of the merchant fees, not out of poor people's accounts. What is the possible rationale behind giving charity to the upper middle class? The credit card companies would not create an entire class of cards on which they were taking a loss, then incentivize people to use them as much as possible. The hidden premise in "poor people are paying for your cash back rewards" is that the credit card companies are entitled to their current profit levels. In reality, they could be profitable without gouging the poor, but not as profitable.
The credit card companies would not create an entire class of cards on which they were taking a loss, then incentivize people to use them as much as possible.
No, but only because the residential mortgage branches of banks had the idea first.
82 is correct and complete.
Unlogged...
Ummm...
Ezra really should ban the phrase "most experts" from Vox.
But:
"'Most Experts': Should You Own Foreign Stocks?" Yes, Vox is right....
"Most experts agree that the world needs some kind of emergency-response team for dangerous diseases." Vox is right. Every public health professor I have ever talked to agrees....
"Sanders' coalition looks very different from... what most experts had expected." Vox is right, indeed it does--but these are the same experts who thought Trump would crash in a month....
"Most experts and police guidelines side with Belmar." Vox might be wrong here. I don't know many experts about how police can reasonably expected to work on the ground....
"ISIS's military defeats by the Iraqi government, Shia militias and Kurdish fighters have convinced most experts that the group can't hold on to its territory forever." Vox is right. Most experts agree....
"'Chained CPI'... [which] most economists regard as more technically accurate than the current measure, which would effectively cut benefits. What percent of economists think this?"... Vox is right. About 99% of economists agree that chained CPI is a more accurate measure of inflation, and that adopting it would cut benefits.
"Most economists feel that a 'chained" index like personal consumption expenditure deflator would be more accurate, and those indexes paint a more optimistic picture of income growth." Yep. Vox is right. 99%....
"'CBO and JCT assume that total employer compensation is fixed so this is fully borne by workers'... Official US government models becomes 'most economists'." Vox is right. It's the official US government model because 90% of economists agree....
"'Cap-and-trade program (or other price on carbon) is the most efficient way to reduce carbon emissions.' No evidence for this consensus is provided." Vox is right. 90%+....
"Most economists agree that the cost of 'employer-paid' payroll taxes are passed on entirely to workers in the form of lower wages in the long run." Yep. Vox again 90%+--but "long run" are weasel-words here....
"'Here are a few reasons why economists and markets are shaking off the biggest economic contraction in more than five years.' An economic consensus is just asserted by the author." And Danielle Kurtzleben of Vox is right! And this was an especially useful article....
"'Jobs Day Has Arrived! And yet despite that awful news, most economists are downright complacent....' Here the evidence... is a link back to the previous article.... The economy is just dandy and the reason we know this is because a phantom 'most economists' say so." Again, Vox is right....
"'Clean Energy Tax Credits Mostly Go to the Affluent. Is There a Better Way? To most economists, climate policies are either a carbon price or "second best"'. We needn't rehearse all that again." Once again, Vox is right....
As I see it, Adam Johnson has come up with 12 cases in which Vox is right as to what "most experts" or "most economists" say, and 1 case in which I do not know enough experts or economists to say.
Plus when Vox does refer to a poll of experts, Adam Johnson is no happier: "For example, the University of Chicago 'pol'" that sampled economists about the value of Uber, showing uniform consensus about how great it was, did not contain a single African-American or Hispanic economist." So now Adam Johnson is deciding all on his own that Caroline Minter Hoxby is not African-American? My my... Who died and made Adam Johnson racial-identity policeman? Caroline Minter Hoxby is right-wing as hell. But she is Black. Plus the "no Hispanics"... well, it elides the fact that Acemoglu, Banerjee, Chetty, and Kashyap are not my grandfather's WASP or WC or WJs either.
You can beat Vox up with the stick that it shouldn't be citing expert near-consensus because experts are idiots, assholes, in the tank, or wrong. But you can't beat Vox up with the stick that it does not know who the "experts" are, because it does and does a good job of summarizing their views.
This should make you fear and distrust FAIR much more than it should make you fear and distrust Vox...
Does that mean I should watch "The OC"?
I didn't know Most Experts was a commenter here.
According to my spam folder, I'm an expert and should join the editorial staff of a journal that was just created last week.
For some reason, this seems like a pointless thing to do while working for free as a peer reviewer on an established journal seems like a part of good citizenship.
Clinton has decided to have a campaign event between my office and my house right at evening rush hour. Sanders was considerate enough to have his event were it didn't inconvenience me.
Sanders' event was (almost) next door to my daughter's school. That day happened to be the only time since she started there that I had something I wanted to drop off, but there was no way I was going to get near that mess. I dropped it off at the end of the day.
I'm all for democracy, but there's no reason for people to do so much of it face-to-face.
87
In fairness, any time someone cites a poll conducted by economists at UChicago, I am 100% more likely to question anything that comes out of their mouth after that.
I appreciate 87, thank you. I think Witt's story in 2 is more troubling than the FAIR article, but I'm glad you took the time to go through the examples.
In fairness, any time someone cites a poll conducted by economists at UChicago, I am 100% more likely to question anything that comes out of their mouth after that.
And yet, presumably Adam Johnson would try to find the strongest examples that he could for his article. If the most troubling one that he can find was a citation to a UofChicago poll about which he felt the need to say (incorrectly, apparently) that, it "did not contain a single African-American or Hispanic economist." That makes it seem like he didn't have a lot of strong material.
I don't believe there is that level of consensus among economists. For example, everyone knows what the textbook says, but that carbon pricing is the best solution, but actual subject matter experts generally seem all over the place. (Maybe carbon pricing is an exception.)
Anyway, that's not even what the textbook says. If carbon is the only externality in the economy, then a carbon tax is the best solution, but if there are two externalities then whether or not a carbon tax is the welfare-improving solution is theoretically indeterminate.
It probably is true that economists would almost all agree you should own foreign stocks, and that the economy has significantly improved ("just dandy" overstates the case).
It would also matter what the appropriate carbon price would be: depending on how close we are to some really terrifying tipping points the answer could well be "high enough that it's just banning it in a way that makes economists feel kind of self-satisfied about how the market is working".
How would "just banning it" handle the transition?
About as well as instituting incredibly high carbon pricing would, except probably a little better because there wouldn't be any confusion about it just being a big structural change that the government would have to be in control of and not some kind of market incentive that private interests would have to solve for themselves somehow.
I mean at this point we're well into the "what is the market value of the disappearance of all recognizable economies and the collapse of civilization as we know it?" territory, even if it's still hopefully one of the less likely outcomes (hopefully, maybe, who knows). Those tipping points are scary, and economic assessments are only so effective when it comes legitimately big deal stuff - of all the things that markets are bad at "enormous structural changes to the world which profoundly inconvenience powerful wealthy interests in the short term" has to be right there at the top.
99: and it's quite an odd complaint to have. If the poll had been about, say, mortgage redlining or the benefits of diversity in academia, then maybe the ethnicity of the economists might be relevant. But is Uber so obviously a racial issue, where you are just manifestly not doing your job if your sample is all composed of white and Indian and Bangladeshi and Turkish economists, but lacks the Hispanic and African-American perspectives?
But you still have to do some kind of phase in period. Nobody is going to pick a solution that means they're cold this winter. A tax that is gradually increased seems a far better and less politically divisive way to do that than a series of regulations that would, by their very nature, have to be incredibly intrusive.
of all the things that markets are bad at "enormous structural changes to the world which profoundly inconvenience powerful wealthy interests in the short term" has to be right there at the top.
This is also somewhere near the top of the list of things that governments are bad at.
But is Uber so obviously a racial issue, where you are just manifestly not doing your job if your sample is all composed of white and Indian and Bangladeshi and Turkish economists, but lacks the Hispanic and African-American perspectives?
Probably. Persistent and pervasive racially motivated redlining and service refusal have a very long and on-going history in the taxi service in most parts of the United States. The idea that Uber is a way to let transportation providers around such regulations as do exist is maybe not proven (I honestly don't know), but certainly a concern.
106 - It's where volcanoes have a comparative advantage. Volcanoes get things done.
107: What I've read is that Uber is more of a benefit than a detriment to minority cab-hailers. But I don't know how reliable that is.
Yes. I have no actual idea as to the effect. Just that the concern is real.
In Pittsburgh it would about have to be an improvement for some neighborhoods compared to other legal cab services, because they just don't go there. I don't know about the effect on the jitneys and their riders.
105: Sure, or at least not without an awful lot of people understanding the dangers of climate change on a deep down emotional level. But saying "phasing in a carbon tax" isn't any better than saying "phasing in a massive set of government programs that change the basic infrastructure of the world" as far as how you get it done. Quickly phasing in a massive pretty-much-eliminate-serious-carbon-output tax wouldn't be any better as far as that goes.
It looks simpler from a policy perspective but that's just because you can say it without having to specify what would happen. You're just saying "can't someone else do it?" when it comes to the actual details of what changes would be made. The only real advantage to making someone else do it is that you're letting people with a lot of money ensure that they're the least hurt by any changes, and that the poorest people are the most hurt by them, to the extent that you couldn't get away with if it was by government action. (And you can get away with a lot when it comes to government action too.) It certainly wouldn't be any less intrusive.
The government already taxes most types of carbon-based fuel usage. I don't think it's assuming to much to say that the details will be relatively simpler than with a more direct approach.
Plus, I want to get a tax credit for my self-created carbon sequestration project (stealing and burying propane tanks from my neighbors' grills).
The details of what the government would do aren't the same as the details of what would have to happen though. That's my point: it would be very simple for the government to just list the big sources of carbon, and impose an escalating tax (and pretty fast/high) on whatever they put out into the atmosphere. Tack on a serious enforcement mandate and there you go! But all that does is say to those people "hey you, you go solve that problem for us".
113: "Banning carbon" isn't a meaningful task to assign the government, especially when you start to talk about phasing (which you have to). What was the rule-making process for the EPA's treating CO2 as a pollutant? 18 months? Possibly more? Whereas the IRS is already set up to tax things. Tell it what you need taxed, and they can make it happen. But if you are talking about regulations that make it somehow illegal to put carbon into the atmosphere, you're talking about inventing whole new frameworks that will still have to cope with existing ones (is making agriculture carbon-free an EPA deal or a Dept of Ag one?). It would be madness.
Well, yes. Which I don't think is an avoidable problem when nobody actually knows what technologies might best serve as a replacement and which trade-offs people are most willing to make.
I do think the government would need to take some positive steps to create new alternatives (e.g. more intercity rail and public transportation), but a carbon tax is also a good way to get money for that.
116: I don't think I understand your objection at all. You've just articulated exactly why economists favor pricing carbon. How high the pricing is is a technical matter (also a political one, but we're in a fantasy land as soon as we talk about really addressing carbon anyway): set a target, estimate what taxation gets you there, and adjust as needed. But you absolutely want the mechanism to be "everyone in the economy figuring out how to get by" rather than "a few thousand gov't employees trying to work it all out in advance".
"Dear Carbon,
I never thought this would happen to me...."
In a related note, I want the trolley back.
Caroline Minter Hoxby is Black... *whimper*
& I do not know whether Daron Acemoglu self-identifies as Turkish or Armenian, but there may be some fraughtness there...
What I've read is that Uber is more of a benefit than a detriment to minority cab-hailers.
It definitely seems to be a benefit to minority cab-drivers, because I don't think I've had a white Uber driver yet. They all seem to be from either southern Africa or the Middle East and South Asia. Black cab drivers, meanwhile, are (stereotypically) white, and vitriolically racist. So it's probably a benefit to the hailers too because I imagine that you probably mind having a black guy in the back of your cab less if there is also a black guy (you) in the front of it.
And at least for center and left-wing economists "carbon pricing is efficient" ≠"carbon pricing is the best policy".
(For right-wing economists, generally "carbon pricing is efficient" = "carbon pricing is the best policy")...
Yellow cab drivers here are stereotypically white.
I thought yellow cab drivers were paid subsistence wages and all the profits from the medallion lobby were taken by the medallion owners who were all close personal friends of Donald Trump?
I was talking about Pittsburgh. I don't know about New York. Do they have many taxis?
128: Yellow cabs here are stereotypically black.
In North Carolina, most of the cabs were used NYC cabs. They still had the stickers and such.
Donald Trump doesn't have any close personal friends in Pittsburgh? That's YUUUGGGEEE!!!
Maybe W/ndy Bell has some free time.
128 - I believe that's only because no one immigrated into Pittsburgh between 1960 and 2005. Surly Russians dominate one of the cab companies here, but other than that almost none are white.
Uber is a hard one because they're objectively despicable yet provide a genuinely useful service. And the big urban cab companies and medallion owners are equally objectively despicable, benefitted from an unusually shitty regulatory regime, and provided way worse service. I was pretty pissed off at Uber's break the law, handwave "tech" to get people on their side, make billions from investors strategy. Yet cab service is objectively 100x better here now than it was 10 years ago, including for poorer folks and minorities.
Fixed: "Yet cab service is objectively 100x better here now than it was 10 years ago, including for poorer folks and minorities **for poorer folks and minorities with credit cards**"
Fair enough. But it's not like the cash only crowd was doing great under the yellow cab regime either.
135.1: Ridiculous. I moved here in the early '90s, and my wife came in the late '90s. The list goes on.
135: Right. I think that the success of Uber has misled a lot of people regarding the supposedly imminent conversion of everything into a "sharing economy". Uber was moving into an area where the service was genuinely terrible outside of a few large cities.
But you absolutely want the mechanism to be "everyone in the economy figuring out how to get by" rather than "a few thousand gov't employees trying to work it all out in advance"....
...Paul Ryan? Is that you?
Ok yes that was mean but the carbon tax argument really is a privatization one which is what I'm trying to point out. And there are cases where "tweak the incentives and let millions of people pursuing different goals end up furthering this one" is better than "just damn well go out there and do it". But the bigger the goal is and the more investment needed (social security; post office; roads; etc.) the less that seems to me to be true (in most cases, blah blah blah).
So in a lot of ways the question really is "just how big of a problem is climate change and how quickly do we need to address it?" And carbon pricing, even if it is the closest thing to politically possible that we have on hand*, really looks to me like what happens when the answer to that question is "moderately serious and, you know, over the next thirty to fifty years probably". But I really don't think that's the correct answer at all - it seems to me that the answer looks a lot more like "panic inducing catastrophe where we all die or at least everything that looks like civilization right now is gone forever" and "we have no idea because there are feedback loops that we can't see and if we trigger the wrong one(s) we're all dead no matter what we do". And if that's true then "WWII National Mobilization" is about the scale of an answer.
*Which is terrifying.
138: You, your wife, me, and the Russians. All white.
136 s/b "...with credit cards and smartphones". A third of American adults in 2015 did not have a smartphone, and 29% don't have a credit card - there's probably a lot of overlap.
Oh sure. You can pile any number of credit cards on a smart phone.
142.1 breaches the analogy ban... "Feeding people" is also a huge problem that requires immense investment and needs to be quickly addressed: there are 300 million people in the US and if they don't eat then they will all be dead in less than a month. But the US has been pretty successfully leaving this to the private sector, with some regulation, tweaking of incentives and support round the edges, rather than having nationalised farms providing everyone with a daily ration.
And if that's true then "WWII National Mobilization" is about the scale of an answer.
Then we're screwed regardless. The U.S. is high in per capita carbon emissions, but only 15% of world carbon emissions. The rest of the parts of the world that might conceivably be persuaded to do something starting are also about that much again. A plan that happens over the next 30 to 50 years is as good as it is going to get.
I get that means Miami is probably gone, but I feel that Miami brought enough of that on itself by not being able to vote.
I'm pretty sure if we had to suddenly come up with a way to feed everyone in the country over, say, the next five to ten years starting from, I dunno, 30% of the food required for that and very little transportation, storage, or farming infrastructre, people wouldn't be talking too much about how to adjust the tax incentives on farming interests. Big structural changes in short amounts of time aren't really very parallel to small adjustments to a system that's already mostly working fine and maybe needs some tweaking around the edges, and the way to address those two things are probably different. That's... kind of my point. Again.
Also yes we're fucked. The only question is how fucked, and whether we're going to do anything significant enough in time to prevent genuine fall-of-civilization stuff. Miami is probably already gone whatever we do, though. It just doesn't know it yet.
I get that means Miami is probably gone, but I feel that Miami brought enough of that on itself by not being able to vote.
Vanilla Ice was actually from Texas. And college football in the 80s was just asking for it.
149.1: But, if we had to feed say twice the number of people starting with our current infrastructure over that same time period and without a bacon revolution, a phased in tax on meat might work pretty well.
My favorite (probably wrong) fact about Florida is that everything from Okeechobee to the Everglades is essentially one river and the only reason it doesn't flow through Miami is Coriolis force bending it westward.
I think Miami is starting to know it, but they don't want to believe what they're seeing.
and whether we're going to do anything significant enough in time to prevent genuine fall-of-civilization stuff
Bing watching Interstellar again?
Eventually Miami can just re-brand itself as the Venice of the Western Hemisphere.
Just imagine the thrilling motorboat chase sequences through the canals of downtown Miami that will feature in the James Bond movies of the future.
I think that's Orlando's hope, not Miami's.
156 makes a good point. Also, swamp boat gondolas. Actually, the swamp boat industry might be a good place to park some long term capital, those awesome Gator boats are going to play a big role in our future.
Venice doesn't get hurricanes.
Well, the writing hasn't been plausible for some of them. It will improve.
God, it's a whole world of awesomeness in our new flooded future, now that I'm thinking about it. Hovercraft, ekranoplans, swamp boats, reptiles everywhere, people living in floating villages like Vietnamese fishermen. Shall I take the kayak or the swamp boat to work at the floating coding factory?
I'm not a climate change denier or anything and some places are definitely going to take it in the shorts. (cough, Bangladesh, cough) But you could seriously disrupt a lot of U.S. food production and we'd still not come close to starving. We're already below replacement birth rate and we export around half our wheat and rice production and something like 70 percent of our tree nuts.
...floating coding factory on the deck of a gentrified oil tanker.
162: And that's before you cover the flooded ruins of Florida with shrimp farms.
I tried to look this up and didn't get any satisfactory answers, but I think Venice's water supply comes from some combination (especially originally) of collected rainwater and wells. The wells worked because the.. sand?.. underneath the marsh effectively filtered out the salt from the water when you pulled it up so it was drinkable.
The biggest problem for Miami is that it's built on porous rock, so there's no way to build a dyke or to preserve the aquifer. I think there's some stopgaps in play right now to protect the water supply as much as they can, but sooner or later Miami is going to be far enough away from any potable water source to make New Venice pretty tricky.
162 Keep your grubby paws off my tree nuts.
165.1 Where do they poop? It's got to filter out the poop too.
Sorry, feeling about slap happy.
I guess they're called "airboats" not "swamp boats." They don't play a big role in my life now but hopefully they will soon. How hard would it be to build an electric one? I'd like to be the Elon Musk of airboats.
Moving water to submerged Miami isn't that hard, you just need an aqueduct and a system of underwater delivery pipes. Same thing with sewage, which you can probably put into a self-cleaning jellyfish-filled ocean and dilute to not-a-problem level.
Then we're screwed regardless.
There is no scenario where we aren't screwed. Our boat is now caught in the strong current and we are definitely going to go over the waterfall and be smashed in the rocks at the bottom. That is true no matter what we do. (Unless we're very lucky in ways we can't currently predict or expect.) The question is, perceiving that to be the case, do we keep paddling towards the waterfall or do we turn the boat around and start to paddle as hard as we can against the current? It will almost certainly be futile, we know that. But there's still real psychological benefit in at least trying. When the boat is going over the falls, we want to be able to look at our children and assure them that we at least tried hard to turn it around, sorry we were too late.
171: This is why I like young Republicans so much. In the coming decades, I won't feel bad about telling them, "Well, we could have done something, but we didn't feel like it, because, let's face it, we're going to be dead before it gets really bad."
Miami is going to be far enough away from any potable water source to make New Venice pretty tricky.
Well, assuming a carbon price hike never actually happens so oil stays cheap, they'll get it through desalination.
It might be cheaper just to build a new North Miami than to supply an entire (large) city that way, especially if it was one that was half under water already.
A (much smaller) scenic tourist trap city would probably work, though. Come see the lost city of Miami! Sun yourself on its scenic rooftop beaches! Scuba dive down to the surface to see the tropical fish living among the whatever is in Miami! (Meth labs? I have no idea.)
Say hello to my little fin.
A huge part of the UK's WW2 mobilisation, probably the ideal type of such things, was *inventing PAYE and bringing everyone into the income tax net while sweetening the deal with the welfare state*. Oh yes, and a hell of a lot of complicated technical policy initiatives about farming that the median Unfogged user would immediately denounce as weak meliorist tinkering.
175: Someone's been reading Edgerton again...
...one of the initiatives included, IIRC, deciding on a Standard British Cheese (Cheddar) and getting rid of pretty much every other type in favour of a few giant industrial creameries producing vast quantities of Cheddar.
I read somewhere the claim that Britain mobilized its resources more effectively during World War 2 than Germany, and that was because it relied more on markets than on a command economy, and that this difference was because of the influence of Keynes. (I have no idea where I read it, or if it's true.)
176: This Edgerton? Worth reading?
178: yes, and yes. "Britain's War Machine" is particularly good; completely overturns the common image of WW2 as plucky disorganised ingenious amateurs vs. mighty centrally-controlled industrial armoured juggernaut, or rather doesn't overturn it but just disagrees about which one Britain was.
177: Keynes' How to Pay for the War was intended to achieve that, but the plan actually implemented was quite a bit different. Although it kept the idea of a national income accounting budget, managed to run at full employment under the constraint of available foreign exchange, a big extension of income tax, and deferred pay, it also introduced more outright rationing and an explicit commitment to create the second welfare state. Both of these were conditions set by the Labour Party and the trade unions in exchange for having to accept PAYE and helping to manage down wartime inflation.
One of the best bits of Robert Skidelsky's biography of Keynes is about the period 1939-1942 and the process of negotiation between the Treasury, the K-man himself and his shadow team of Cambridge students like James Meade and Richard Kahn, and the Labour movement, notably Ernest Bevin, Hugh Dalton, and Ellen Wilkinson.
I read somewhere the claim that Britain mobilized its resources more effectively during World War 2 than Germany, and that was because it relied more on markets than on a command economy, and that this difference was because of the influence of Keynes
Adam Tooze suggests that the first part of that is true, but that the reason had more to do with the way that the Nazi economy was being run on a very short-term basis, lurching from crisis to crisis under the loose control of a set of incompetents, maniacs, chancers and war profiteers. Not so much that we had Keynes but that they had Goering.
I say 'suggests' because I don't think he ever explicitly compares mobilisation efficiency between the UK and Germany; his focus is pretty tightly on Germany. But I could be wrong.
J K Galbraith made a very similar argument in December '45 in Fortune magazine - "Germany Was Badly Run" (pp 173-178, 196-200.)
Although he focuses more on the lack of democratic systems of accountability in Germany, and particularly on the role of the free press in sorting out incompetence in government.
(And note that this "fire incompetents" strategy was carried through to the very top of the British government quite early on in the war...)
186: Yeah, German mismanagement isn't news at all. It's really remarkable how entrenched the British mythology is in popular memory.
Starting a massive war on multiple fronts, two decades after the very same strategy failed, seems like a bit of a policy blunder.
"I'm not saying you aren't running the most efficient genocide ever. I'm just saying that maybe committing a genocide against largely unarmed people while very well armed people are trying to kill you isn't efficient overall."
188: The first loss might have been a fluke.
The first several thousand people who ate moldy bit of oranges didn't learn anything. But that didn't stop Flemming.
161: IIUC, Florida's future under Global Warming Halfordismo would be basically The Drowned World but with Ballard's 'negro' (sic) lieutenants replaced by ninja lieutenants, hydroplanes by ekranoplans, and London by Miami. (The alligators and iguanas stay.)
Starting a massive war on multiple fronts, two decades after the very same strategy failed, seems like a bit of a policy blunder.
Well, the first time around they deliberately started a war on multiple fronts but were sure they could finish off the one on the left before the one on the right really got going. The second time they learned from their mistake and only started the one on the left at first, not the one on the right, but then halfway through they just assumed that the one on the left was now more or less over and it was time to start the one on the right. Turned out that the one on the left was actually still going.
Again IIRC, Tooze argues against that: Hitler thought it necessary to conquer Soviet resources in order to fight the war on the left once America came in.
Hitler invaded the Soviet Union before America came in.
I read someone that argued Germany could have finished the war on the left before the one on the right really got going if they had stuck with their original plans and not moved troops to the right. That is, a desire to not let the eastern parts of Germany get overrun by Russians cost them their chance to knock out France quickly.
195: once America came in. Considered inevitable by everyone, not just Nazis.
FDR was sure worried about how to make it happen.
196 is presumably talking about the first time, not the second, because they knocked France out pretty quickly second try.
I guess I go for the traditional view, that Hitler invaded the Soviet Union because Liebenstraum/anit-communism/racists views on Slavs.
196: Assuming you mean WWI, AFAICR that isn't plausible: the attack in France failed because it couldn't advance fast enough, not because it was too small. Also, they really needed those troops in the east.
198: Yes, he was. Hence Lend-Lease, having the Navy hunt German submarines, etc. Naked breaches of neutrality.The Undeclared War had me convinced it really was inevitable.
197, 98 - In my Tooze memory, the argument was that even pre-December 41 Hitler correctly viewed the USA as already effectively the critical piece the of British war effort, by providing it with a reserve of massive material support. The Nazi logic for invading the USSR was (a) we have no viable plan for actually invading Britain (b) we're stuck with very limited food and industrial and other resources, even after conquering France (c) the combined British Empire + USA is, in the medium run, massively more powerful and rich than we are, as Hitler has been saying since the 20s; therefore (d) let's invade the East because then we really will be impregnable Fortress Europe and can use slaves and genocide-depopulated areas to grow our food and build up our resources, and also (e) we better do this quickly, because if we wait even in the medium term we're fucked.
Plus, the Germans actually won the first war on the eastern front.
Today Vox has a piece up defending the Libyian intervention, it's total garbage, and written by someone who works for the brookings institute, I declare my first comment vindicated.
That was predictable, and predicted. Hey did you hear, we are starting a new bombing campaign in Libya, to fix the disorder created by our previous bombing campaign in Libya.
205, 206: I have no problem viewing our intervention in Libya as somewhere between useless and disastrous, but let's not retcon history to suggest that, absent our bombing, it's a stable regime. It wasn't Iraq Redux: we intervened after a month of large scale civil war. As Syria has shown, civil wars can be protracted and ugly whether we get (significantly) involved or not.
207- Its a good point. I feel like it is impossible to know if there would have been a civil war if not for the US pouring arms in to the region and destabilizing nearby countries. Even if there had been I think there is a strong case to be made that we don't want to intervene and by doing so take ownership/responsibility.
208: oh please the U.S. was not pouring arms into Libya. Libya had immense stockpiles of weapons and they were all Russian or Chinese.
208: Comity. I think that Tunisia was genuinely spontaneous*, but beyond that I'm sure US (and Euro) agents were neck-deep behind the scenes.
*as much as that sort of thing ever can be; there's always agents around, but I don't have the sense that anything beyond general keeping-an-eye stuff was happening. Certainly the USG didn't seem to have a plan for Arab Spring.
Getting rid of Gaddafi was a risk that if Libyans were willing to start things on their own, was worth supporting.
Libya had immense stockpiles of weapons and they were all Russian or Chinese.
Yeah, and the part where all these arms got scattered through half the continent of Africa afterward was a huge part of the clusterfuck.
To the extent that Gaddafi had not already scattered them to the murderers of three continents over his forty years of stirring up shit from Angola to the North Sea.
Gaddafi was horrible, but he was no Islamist. It wasn't until he was below the ground that Boko Haram could get access.
That's June 2012 - a year after the civil war started.
214: he did sort of introduce sharia law and expel all the Jews. But yes, he was probably more of a Gaddafiist than an Islamist.
The United States, which had only small numbers of C.I.A. officers in Libya during the tumult of the rebellion, provided little oversight of the arms shipments. Within weeks of endorsing Qatar's plan to send weapons there in spring 2011, the White House began receiving reports that they were going to Islamic militant groups. They were "more antidemocratic, more hard-line, closer to an extreme version of Islam" than the main rebel alliance in Libya, said a former Defense Department official.
He was an innovator in awesome dictator clothes and all-female bodyguard teams, so let's not pretend that he didn't have a good side.
But, by being brutally murdered, he set back the cause of all-female bodyguard teams by decades.
The way everyone has settled on the idea that the Libya intervention was an obvious mistake is super-weird. We have a long history of civil wars, even civil wars in our lifetimes, and the net outcome of them is generally bad, with or without US intervention.
Reuters reported in 2011 that President Obama signed a special presidential directive that authorized covert U.S. action to destabilize Gadhafi and stand up a new regime, up to and including facilitating weapons transfers if it was deemed in the U.S. interest.
I remember the reporting on it at the time. The US was sending arms to rebel groups from the beginning of the civil war. It was in lots of reports,
222- I don't feel like this stuff is that big a deal. It is just typical of US intervention. What if anything did we get out of it, other than more chaos?
Gaddafi dead. Reagan failed at that.
Obama: A better liberal than Clinton and a better conservative than Reagan.
(If you're reading, you can put that on the library wall gratis.)
I don't think you can reasonably count Gaddafi's death as a win for the US. He had recently given up his nuclear program and was cooperating with us on counter terrorism policy. If that's the way we treat people who try to get along with us, pretty soon no one will.
Ok, I did not know that. Still not a huge number of M-16s on the streets of Benghazi. Those guys seem quite happy with their AKs.
224: But it's also typical of US non-intervention. That's a plausible argument for non-intervention (it's cheaper, after all), but chaos is a predictable outcome of civil wars.
228: I've heard they are simpler to operate and more robust against being poorly maintained.
We should be giving M-16s to every bunch of assholes out there in hopes that they'll jam hopelessly and run out of ammo with nothing but AK rounds available.
229- I would argue that since the given reason of the bombing was that the rebels needed the help, chaos would not have be the result of non-intervention. Without the intervention the rebellion would have been crushed.
This is just going to give you more reason to classify me as a nut, but I'm starting to think that our rulers have some reason to like chaos and see it as a positive outcome.
I vaguely recall that rapprochement with Gaddafi's Libya was one of the successes of George W. Bush's foreign policy stemming from our successful overthrow of Saddam.
It seemed to me at the time that it was straight up Villager fantasy: replace the evil-in-his-heart-even-if-he's-not-doing-anything-right-now dictator with grateful, freedom loving, oil-rich neoliberals -- what could go wrong?
Other than, you know, chaos. Which the Villagers, like anti-Village conspiracy theorists, refuses to believe can arise unintentionally.
232.1: well, maybe, but what about the last five years of civil wars in the Middle East makes you think that this one, by contrast, would have been over quickly and tidily, and without any intervention from (say) the Saudis, the Russians, the Jordanians etc?
On your second point, I think that's unlikely; the U.S. is a status quo superpower and they tend to favour stability. The neocons were different, but i just don't see Obama and Clinton as pro-chaos.
230: That's the reputation that AKs and their variations have - you can bury one in wet soil and then dig it up a year later, whack it with a mallet to clear any big clumps of dirt out of it*, and be firing it off seconds later. A lot of the older Russian military guns have that kind of reputation which is part of why they're so popular. M16s have a...different reputation, though I think a big part of that is that they had trouble with the earliest versions of them and by now they're a lot better.
*Supposedly when they're in good shape they actually rattle when you shake them because that's how loosely the parts are fit together. Probably doesn't make them the most efficient guns out there, but it makes it awfully hard to jam them up.
235.1 -- I do't think there was a different intervention in the wings: it was NATO or defeat. of the rebels Now, it's true that we can't know what would have followed the crushing of the rebellion -- maybe it would have been a trajectory like Yemen (instead of the Tunisia-like thing the policy makers were thinking of) but istm that more stable at this point than current is a fair bet to make.
(And anyone who says that at the time of the LifeMarch they could have predicted the current alignment of belligerents is, imo, a complete fraud. You'll recall, roger, that our ambassador was in favor of Saleh shooting marchers, because we're against chaos.)
Libya is one of those situations where what actually happened is totally consistent with what the critics predicted would happen, and totally inconsistent with what the critics predicted would happen.
As to if the counter-factual of if no U.S. Involvement would be better or worse, it would be nice to have a no U.S. Involvement civil-war as a control.
Also if our goal was stability and to end the civil war, we always could of backed the guy that was winning.
Ob. Second critic is supporters. Posting while talking.
239: You can't think of any civil wars that the US wasn't involved in?
I mean historically you have the Iranian revolution that Carter rejected direct involvement in, at that ended pretty quickly and peacefully.
238- I don't recall when the LifeMarch happened and I don't see the date in that link. I know when I look at graphics that purport to explain relationships between militant groups in Syria let alone the middle east my head hurts. I admit I might be paranoid thinking US policy makers want chaos, but US policies have been generating rather a lot of it consistently for a while now.
So any bets on whether Vox will support this new bombing campaign in Libya or not?
243: Did wonders for Carter's re-election.
Late 2011, after the Libyan war was all but over.
Everyone's talking about AKs and M16s but FN F2000s have got to be one of the odder things to come out of the Libyan civil war. And spread all over the place.
So any bets on whether Vox will support this new bombing campaign in Libya or not?
It's worth noting that Yglesias, at least, was a vocal critic of the initial Libya intervention at the time. I don't know about the other Voxers, but they don't really speak with a unified voice.
247: The Belgians sure do have a talent for making incredibly bad situations worse.
Neat! Terrorists get all the fun toys!
Certainly the USG didn't seem to have a plan for Arab Spring.
I don't know about Obama officials, but a bunch of Bush admin officials really seem to have believed, and were quoted in the news saying, that they thought the Middle East would democratize just like Eastern Europe did starting in 1989. On the other hand, "Arab Spring" evoking "Prague Spring" may have been unintentionally accurate, what with democracy coming to the former Czechoslovakia some decades after 1968.
Honestly it's time to invade Belgium. Enough with that place.
Watch out for the Waffle SS. Frites ain't free!
There's an old Doonesbury strip that's particularly relevant to invading Begium, but I can't find a searchable Doonesbury archive online.
232: I assume our rulers have an unquestioned determination to keep the Middle East from ever organizing against us, and overshoot into chaos (which is easier to hit as climate and previous-chaos stress gets worse).
242: The US had minimal involvement with the Congolese civil war in the late 90s, which grew into a regional war involving seven African countries and 5 million deaths. The US did very little initially when Yugoslavia broke up, and it was the eventual NATO bombing campaign that ended it. The US had no involvement in the Rwandan genocide.
And a definition of "success" that includes the Iranian Revolution, or Gaddafi ruthlessly murdering dissidents is a psychotic definition of success. Was the US support for Pinochet a success because order was restored after a short period of mass-murdering socialists?
The US had minimal involvement with the Congolese civil war in the late 90s, which grew into a regional war involving seven African countries and 5 million deaths.
Belgium, on the other hand...
(Actually I don't know how much involvement Belgium had in the Congolese civil war itself. But they sure had a huge role in creating the circumstances that led to it.)
They brought it on themselves. Which is why I deserve to be monarch of a US controlled Belgian puppet state. Emperor Tigre I of Ghent.
I'm not sure why anyone would volunteer to try to rule a country as notoriously dysfunctional and ungovernable as Belgium, but sure, go nuts.
254 Also Belgium is the way to go of you also want to invade France. Just saying.
I dunno, I've heard good things about Normandy too.
259 How do you say Halfordismo in Flemish?
256.2 I'm not sure how the Iranian Revolution fits in here. Also appears at odds with the rest of the paragraph but maybe I missed something in the thread.Evidence that Gaddafi was going to commit genocide in the aress then in open rebellion seems extremely sketchy though I'm sure he was going to ruthless in putting it down.
Add be. Really stupid fat fingers.
With Libya, as with Syria, I think in retrospect it's clear that there were no actually good options for the US. Whether the options the Obama administration actually selected in either case were the least bad of those on offer is debatable, but sometimes you're just screwed. Making any of this a major issue in a presidential election strikes me as weird, though. Tendencies based on past decisionmaking are valid grounds for deciding between candidates, of course, but the very essence of foreign policy is that the situations that arise are totally unpredictable. I mean, who could have predicted during the 2008 election that among the major issues the new president would face would be whether to intervene in civil wars in Libya and Syria? And yet, here we are.
Incidentally, and this is hardly an original observation but it's definitely true, "sometimes you're just screwed" has been the main lesson my generation has learned from the events of the past 15 years in many ways. The long-term implications of this remain to be seen, but I don't think the huge levels of support for Sanders from young people are at all surprising. Shit is fucked up and bullshit.
At this point I'd be delighted if we just stopped supporting KSA in its murderous campaign against Yemen. Like stop supplying ordance, refueling, and even fucking targeting. Why isn't that an issue?
The spice must flow, Barry. KSA has the spice and Yemen doesn't.
But I agree that it's insane. Shit is fucked up and bullshit.
(I hope 271 made sense. I've never actually read Dune.)
Made sense, but failed for explaining its punchline.
Yeah, I worried about that. Oh well.
Standards are lower for the late night/Asian shift. I think it's in the TPP.
Contrariwise, I feel we should lift our game, in order to free our hemisphere from unfair prejudice.
I think it's because the US is a client state of KSA, and not the other way around.
At some point the politics will catch up with the economics, though. The end of the oil age really does seem to be in sight. (And I say that from the vantage point of a petrostate where that is very much a bad thing economically in the near term.)
271. Juan Cole had a piece the other day on a statement by the Crown Prince which suggested that KSA is preparing to get out of the spice business. Not entirely convinced, but an interesting idea. What would Iran do?
And that's notwithstanding the obvious fact that the price of oil will eventually go back up. I just don't think that will matter in the long term given how much is likely to change in the next few years.
280: and/or it's because the US knows that the Saudis can launch, or permit to be launched, terrorist attacks against the US if the US does anything to inconvenience the Saudis. They probably know this because the Saudis have told them explicitly that either stuff keeps blowing up in Yemen or stuff starts to blow up in California. That's what they did to the UK in 2006 when the BAE bribery investigation was getting a bit close to the Saudi royals, and Blair caved in.
They did it the once.
I'd love to see a source for 285. And here I thought I couldn't hate those evil fuckers more. When what's happened to Syria happens to them (and I believe it will happen sometime) it will be hard to refrain from cheering .
282: Interesting, thanks. I'm not quite as sanguine about renewables replacing fossil fuels in the short term as Cole seems to be (you still need a backup), but it's definitely true that the energy sector overall has shifted a lot more than most people realize. And it's also true that fossil fuel companies and producers know this and are working on adapting to it. As always, we here in Alaska are behind the curve in adapting to the new reality, but it'll happen here too sooner or later.
Crown Prince which suggested that KSA is preparing to get out of the spice
business.
Haven't they been saying that for 40 years?
271. Juan Cole had a piece the other day on a statement by the Crown Prince which suggested that KSA is preparing to get out of the spice business. Not entirely convinced, but an interesting idea. What would Iran do?
I'm no Saudi/OPEC watcher, but the announcement seemed more like a way of spinning the part privatisation of Aramco and the macro-economic circumstances forcing them to do so than anything else. Basically it doesn't look good now to have your entire economy be dependent on oil, so they pitch this sell off their major asset as being a transition from an oil economy to a "diversified" economy in which they, err, own shares in an oil company. There's some guff about them actually diversifying in future, but I'm more than a little skeptical about having a major economy that is literally just a sovereign wealth fund. Not least because you just replace oil shock risk with financial shock risk. Imagine what it would be like to live through the 2007/2008 crisis if your entire GDP came from shares and bonds.
286, 287: the first part of 285 is speculation on my part. But the second part is absolutely true.
Here's an initial report on the decision by the Serious Fraud Office to drop the investigation :
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/6180945.stm
At the time, as the BBC says, the reason given by the government was "continuing this investigation would damage national security", but there were grounds to suspect that in fact this was just spin, and in fact it was done to safeguard Typhoon sales to the Saudis.
However, subsequent court cases brought by anti-arms trade campaigners confirmed that the reason given by the government was correct - they actually had caved in to Saudi threats.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/court-condemns-blair-for-halting-saudi-arms-inquiry-807793.html
The government's decision was overturned by the High Court in 2008, as the report above says, but ultimately upheld later that year on appeal to the House of Lords, which ruled that in fact the threat was serious enough to justify the government and the SFO giving in to it.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/jul/30/bae.armstrade
Cosign 287.2: with the caveat that if it can happen without plunging the world into another oil shock recession, that would be better.
I was aware of the content of 291 at the time it was reported but it still manages to piss me off anew every time I'm reminded of it. The fact that they control Mecca and Medina makes doing much of anything difficult.
I've offered to take over, but like the British crown, there's a "no Catholics" rule.
It may help you to fully appreciate 291 if you hum "Rule, Britannia" while you read it.
