wrong analysis

3 22 sparked by tucker ukraine bio-labs

hard to sep dumb from bad faith to ideological blinkers to just lie for profit/clicks

January 10, 2015

I never got around to commenting on the infamous Economist list of influential economists; they’ve been given plenty of deserved grief, to which I needn’t add. But I think I might have something useful to say about a fact that is really unmistakable when you look at a list corrected by removing central bankers, or make a more subjective judgment: these days, the economist as public intellectual is overwhelmingly likely to be a liberal.

As Noah Smith says, it was not always thus. He argues that the field of economics has changed, with greater emphasis on market failures, and there’s arguably something to that. I’d also argue that the descent of right-leaning macroeconomics into hermetic absurdity matters quite a lot, because macro looms larger in the public sphere than it does within the academy.

But there’s another important factor. Modern conservatism doesn’t have Friedman-like figures — people who would be prominent economists thanks to their research whatever their politics, who are also public intellectuals– because it doesn’t want them. The movement prefers hacks, who needn’t be even minimally competent but can be counted on to defend the party line without any risk of taking an independent stand.

Let me offer my own two short subjective lists. I think if you were going to name the two current econoheroes of U.S. liberals they would probably be Joe Stiglitz and yours truly. (Thomas Piketty has made a huge and well-deserved splash, but so far only on one issue.) The thing that is obvious about Joe is that before becoming a public figure with a political following he established his reputation with vast amounts of widely cited academic research; you can get a sense of what he did by looking at his top entries on Google Scholar. And here are mine.

Now, who would be the conservative counterparts? Who gets cited by, say, Republican governors seeking authority for their tax cuts, or published on a regular basis on conservative opinion pages? I’d say Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer. No point in looking them up on Google Scholar, although Laffer does show up, marginally, for a 1971 paper co-authored with Eugene Fama.

And it’s not as if Moore and Laffer are guys who may lack academic cred but have proved themselves as working analysts. On the contrary, they’re guys who can’t even cook numbers without screwing up, who have spent years telling us to get ready for soaring interest and inflation rates. But it doesn’t matter; being right is not what they’re paid for.

So in trying to understand where the Milton Friedmans of yore have gone, you want to look at the demand side. The right lacks heavyweight economists with independent reputations partly because they are hard to find, but also because it doesn’t want them. Only hacks need apply.

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omg trio consistently, spectacularly and devastatingly WRONG! punditry at worst/lethal

jon chait

https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/04/arthur-laffer-lawrence-kudlow-stephen-moore-public-health.html

no lnx

THE NATIONAL INTEREST APR. 25, 2020

The Fatal Calculations of the Economists Steering Our Public Health

By Jonathan Chait

One night in late March, President Trump, seized by one of his periodic bouts of dismay with his public-health officials, sought out a second opinion on how to handle the coronavirus pandemic. He called Arthur Laffer. After missing the president’s first three calls, the 79-year-old Laffer finally answered, and the two men connected for what Laffer described as “a very serious conversation,” shortly after which Trump tweeted, “WE CANNOT LET THE CURE BE WORSE THAN THE PROBLEM ITSELF.”

Trump gravitated back to his public-health advisers, but he is again lurching toward the opposite pole — one anchored by Laffer and his close allies: National Economic Council head Lawrence Kudlow and economic adviser Stephen Moore. They have seized on their historic role as the antagonists to the administration’s public-health wing because they have a particular competence of their own, honed over decades: persuading Republican officials to ignore experts.

Even before his current role, Laffer was perhaps the most successful policy entrepreneur in modern American history, at least if measured by political influence.In the 1970s, as an economics professor who had served in Nixon’s Office of Management and Budget, Laffer developed a friendship with Wall Street Journal editorial writer Jude Wanniski, whose job had previously included defending Richard Nixon’s conduct in the Watergate scandal. The two came to believe that Laffer had developed a blinding insight with world-historical ramifications. A tax rate of either zero or 100 would yield no tax revenue at all, Laffer posited. Drawing a sloping, sideways curve between those points, he further hypothesized that reducing tax rates might increase revenue.

The “Laffer curve,” which at one point Laffer drew on a cocktail napkin for an impressed Dick Cheney (the Smithsonian now claims to display the original), formed the basis of what became known as “supply-side economics.” The doctrine held not only that tax cuts could increase tax revenue, but that changes in tax rates were the primary driver of all economic events. Republican economist Herb Stein coined the name as a term of derision, intending to highlight the absurdity of building a model entirely on one side of the economy instead of considering both supply and demand. Economic experts mocked Laffer’s notion that reductions in tax rates at existing levels could produce anywhere close to enough new economic growth to pay for itself.

And the experts … were completely right. After supply-siders converted Ronald Reagan and promised his tax cuts would pay for themselves, revenue hemorrhaged. Reagan’s non-supply-side advisers prevailed upon him to sign a series of tax increases for the purpose of “reducing the size of the nation’s fiscal disaster,” his budget director later admitted. When Bill Clinton raised the top tax rate from 31 percent to 39.6 percent, supply-siders insisted he would kill the recovery and reduce tax revenue. Instead, revenue soared far higher than anybody had forecast.

Kudlow and Moore began ascending in the 1980s, shuttling between right-wing think tanks and media — especially the Journal editorial page, which remained the high temple of the supply-side cult. I first came across Moore when he was writing Journal columns arguing that the supply-siders had been right to predict Bill Clinton’s tax hike would reduce revenue. (A hallmark of supply-side thought has been to refuse to concede any error or complication in its analysis.) The supply-siders went on to insist that George W. Bush’s tax cuts would produce untold prosperity. Moore wrote a book called Bullish on Bush, and Kudlow wrote the foreword to The Bush Boom and a series of columns dismissing “pessimistas” who detected economic turmoil. “There’s no recession coming. The pessimistas were wrong,” he wrote in December 2007.

In the spring of 2016, just after Trump had sewn up the nomination, Laffer, Kudlow, and Moore set out to meet the candidate at Trump Tower. Like many members of the conservative elite, they initially harbored reservations. But unlike foreign-policy hawks or social traditionalists, their concerns were devoid of any moral component, like a suspicion of dictators or philanderers. Their sole misgiving concerned Trump’s populist rhetoric and occasional campaign vows to raise his own taxes. The troika wanted to find out if he really meant it. To their relief, he didn’t. “He wanted tax cuts. He wanted to deregulate, he wanted to get the government out of the way,” Kudlow recounted in the foreword to Laffer and Moore’s laudatory book, Trumponomics. “The three of us saw Trump in a whole new light.”

We’ll come out of this soon, the economy will reopen, the economy will restart. It will, I hope, take care of itself. Markets will take care of themselves over time.

— Larry Kudlow, optimistic as oil prices tanked, on April 22

Kudlow joined the administration as Trump’s chief economic adviser. Trump announced he would nominate Moore for the Federal Reserve Board, but the Senate killed Moore’s bid over a combination of embarrassing ignorance of the subject — just two years before, he’d admitted on a panel, “I’m not an expert on monetary policy” — and years of sexist comments, including an obsessive hatred of women working as play-by-play commentators on basketball games. He and Laffer instead served as outside advisers and allies to Trump, who last summer bestowed a Presidential Medal of Freedom on Laffer.

Trump rewarded their confidence by implementing a large corporate tax cut, which was intended to encourage more corporate investment and therefore “would yield about the same revenue — and possibly more — than the current system,” Laffer and Moore wrote in Trumponomics. Naturally, it failed. Business owners got a windfall, but there was no corporate-investment boom and corporate-tax revenue fell by more than a third. Just as naturally, they acted as if events had proved them right.

And so, when the coronavirus struck, Trump had on hand a coterie of loyalists who would not hesitate to question legitimate experts.Kudlow forcefully endorsed Trump’s optimism that the virus would never spread. On February 25, Kudlow said it had been “contained … pretty close to airtight.” Even two weeks later, he was insisting, “I would still argue to you that this thing is contained.”

When public-health officials persuaded Trump to abandon his denialism, the supply-siders formed the resistance. Applying Laffer’s old dictum, “All economic problems are about removing impediments to supply, not demand,” they reasoned that the problem facing the economy was not a deadly pandemic but, as ever, bad incentives imposed by government — in this case, restrictions on business and excessively generous unemployment benefits that “discourage work.” If the government just stopped suppressing incentives, the economy would spring back to life.

The Journal editorial page published some of the first pushback against the wisdom of lockdowns. As early as mid-March, Moore denounced on Fox News the first closings, in California, as “a very dangerous, almost Orwellian situation.” Trump began repeating the supply-siders’ warnings that he had ceded too much authority to scientists (“If it was up to the doctors,” he mused, “they might say shut down the entire world”). Trump relented to his public-health experts but, by early April, was again listening to the supply-siders. Moore began proposing May 1 as a deadline to reopen the economy, a timeline Trump endorsed soon thereafter.

The supply-siders’ struggle to tug Trump away from his medical experts has both public and private facets. Laffer and Moore promoted a new administration task force to focus on economic reopening, a counterweight to the coronavirus task force led by doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx. Moore encouraged anti-shutdown protests in several states to pressure governors to speed up their timetables for reopening businesses. “I call these people the modern-day Rosa Parks,” he explained, “They are protesting against injustice and a loss of liberties.”

In their book, Laffer and Moore fondly recall Kudlow’s instructing Trump to ignore budget forecasts that tax cuts would reduce revenue. “Don’t get stressed out by the phony numbers of Washington’s bean counters,” he said. “They are always wrong.” The message today is largely unchanged. The main difference is that the experts they are urging the president to dismiss are counting lives. We’re the beans.

This article appears in the April 27, 2020, issue of New York Magazine

an 3 22

Fox News' National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin recently pushed back against conservative primetime host Tucker Carlson for his conspiracy theories and inaccurate reporting on Russia.

On Wednesday, March 9, Griffin appeared on "The SeanHannityShow" where she addressed the Russian misinformation suggesting the United States is allegedly running secret bioweapon laboratories in Ukraine.

“In terms of Ukraine’s biolabs, which have come under scrutiny tonight,” Griffin said, “those are Soviet-era bio-labs that the U.S. has been engaged [with] since 2005 in trying to help Ukraine convert the research facilities safely.”

Griffin also weighed in on the concerns some U.S. officials have about Russia's use of such weaponry amid their invasion of Ukraine. “White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki said Moscow’s talk today about these biolabs has led to concern by U.S. intelligence,” Griffin said, “that Russia could use chemical or biological weapons in Ukraine to create a false flag operation using them.”[twt

Griffin's latest remarks are distinctly different from Carlson's remarks. According to Yahoo! News, the conservative primetime host, who has been criticized for repeatedly pushing Russian propaganda, "used the admission by Under Secretary of State Victoria Nuland that there are biological research labs in Ukraine as a reason to push the same narrative as Russia."

“Ukraine is the poorest country in Europe,” Carlson said. “It’s hardly a hotbed of biomedical research. We’re assuming these weren’t pharmaceutical labs. Probably not developing new leukemia drugs. From your answer, Victoria Nuland, we would assume, because you all but said it, there’s a military application of this research. They’re working on bioweapons.”

However, Griffin claims that the information about the labs is not considered to [be] a secret or new development. “It is a long program that has existed, where the Pentagon has partnered with these biolabs,” Griffin said, adding, “The U.S. has been very open about its involvement there with that. But what Russia does is they take that information, distort it, turn it around and turn it into disinformation.”

wrong analysis

Where Are The Friedmans Of Yesteryear?