Tuesday, April 12, 2016

Qualifications and Meritocracy, Part 1: The Case of Paul Krugman

Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times op-ed writer Paul Krugman recently wrote a column titled "Sanders Over the Edge." Now, Krugman has been a strong backer of Clinton this primary, like he was in the 2008 primary, so it's not particularly notable that he's written another anti-Sanders column. What is notable is how astonishingly badly-researched and badly-reasoned this column is, to the extent that I was honestly astonished when I read it. As such, it has been roundly mocked on the internet. But I'm writing my own response for two reasons. One, the column was so bad it pissed me off and this is the only thing that can quell my internal demons, and two, his column actually provides a very good example of the problems inherent in our contemporary "meritocracy." In this post, I will focus mostly on showing why, in detail, Krugman is wrong. At some point in the future, I plan to write a post about the broader implications of his column.

The problems begin with Krugman's first sentence:
From the beginning, many and probably most liberal policy wonks were skeptical about Bernie Sanders.
Notice, first, that Krugman doesn't bother to give any evidence for this assertion. (As we'll see, this isn't the first time he'll do this.) There are, depending on your definition of the term, likely thousands of "liberal policy wonks" in America alone. Has Krugman read or spoken to 500 of them, or 100, or even 50? Has he conducted or read a study concerning the candidate preferences of liberal policy wonks? Of course not. Rather, he's generalizing from himself and a few others to make claims about an entire group.

What's particularly annoying about this is it's so unnecessary. He could simple have said, "I was skeptical about Bernie Sanders." Instead, he feels the need to appeal to an expert consensus, and without actually doing any research assumes that expert consensus agrees with him. Not merely in his candidate preference, either, but even in the reasons for that candidate preference:
On many major issues--including the signature issues of his campaign, especially financial reform--he seemed to go for easy slogans over hard thinking. And his political theory of change, his waving away of limits, seemed utterly unrealistic.
Once again, you'll notice he provides no evidence for either of these assertions. Unless Krugman is a psychic, he doesn't know how much thinking Sanders has done about financial reform (and no, you don't get to make wild speculations as long as you hedge with a "seems"). I talked about Sanders's theory of change extensively in my earlier post; claiming that it involves waving away limits is grossly misleading at best. This lack of research and understanding makes it especially ironic that Krugman accuses Sanders of not engaging in "hard thinking." But he's just getting warmed up.

After claiming that "some Sanders supporters" accuse "anyone expressing doubts about their hero [read: accuse me, Paul Krugman] of being corrupt if not actually criminal," once more not providing any evidence for this claim (even one link would suffice), Krugman makes the following rather hilarious statement:
Mr. Sanders is starting to sound like his worst followers. Bernie is becoming a Bernie Bro.
For those of you who are blissfully unaware of what a "Bernie Bro" is, I will attempt to explain. In February, Gawker had a good article discussing the various ways pundits and political commentators have used the term. In it, they link to the tweets of the term's inventor, Robinson Meyer, who said it has at least three different contemporary definitions: "a harmless guy who argued on Facebook in an ineffective if fairly specific way"; "a leftistish male who virulently disliked Clinton on arguably anti-woman grounds"; "a misogynist troll who attacks visible woman online for various perceived but baseless crimes."

Now Krugman is inventing a brand-new use for the term: someone who has different standards for who's qualified to be President than Paul Krugman. Perhaps one power the Nobel Prize grants is being able to redefine words at one's whims; that would certainly explain a lot about this column.

First though, Krugman decides to illustrate Bernie's Bro-ness by talking about bank reform (because, as we all know, there's nothing fraternity bros love more than bank reform). One of Sanders's main selling points is that he wants to break up the big banks. "But," Krugman asks ominously, "were big banks really at the heart of the financial crisis, and would breaking them up protect us from future crises?" I'm pretty sure Sanders has never actually claimed breaking up the banks would stop all future financial crises, but never mind! Krugman has socialists to slay:
Predatory lending was largely carried out by smaller, non-Wall Street institutions like Countrywide Financial; the crisis itself was centered not on big banks but on "shadow banks" like Lehman Brothers that weren't necessarily that big.
Let's start with the role of banking in the crisis. Yes, much blame deserves to go toward places like Countrywide who gave loans to people who couldn't hope to repay them. But the reason they lent so much money is that the banks were willing to buy up any loan they could. As the Economist, hardly a bastion of socialism, explains:
Loans were doled out to "subprime" borrowers with poor credit histories who struggled to repay them. These risky mortgages were passed on to financial engineers at the big banks, who turned them into supposedly low-risk securities by putting large numbers of them in pools. Pooling works when the risks of each loan are uncorrelated. The big banks argued that the property markets in different American cities would rise and fall independently of one another. But this proved wrong. Starting in 2006, America suffered a nationwide house-price slump.
In other words, on the basis of an incredibly bad argument and fancy mathematical tricks, the big banks bought up the bad loans, re-packaged them, and sold them to ignorant investors. If they hadn't had such willing buyers, the predatory lenders would have had no incentive to loan so much money to "subprime" borrowers. To be sure, the banks are not solely responsible for the crash, but they were one of the major players.

As for Lehman Brothers not being "necessarily that big," I'll quote from Alexis Goldstein, who responds (I've separated each tweet with a double backslash // and taken away her numbering):
As someone who worked across from the Lehman building for many years, I cannot begin to explain who central of a Wall St player they were // Nor how stunning & shocking was their fall. No one could believe Hank Paulson let them fail. Everyone lost their goddamn mind. // I was at Merrill Lynch at the time (no longer across the street from Lehman). We were quickly bought by BAC. Ppl feared nationalization // anyone who tries to understate that failure of Lehman by saying it was small is punking you. // 
&this idea that "they weren't a bank so breaking up banks isn't important"...ALL old white-shoe investment banks are now bank holding cos // there are no more pure investment banks like there were pre-crisis, unless you count the likes of Jefferies & let's be real: nobody does. // the banks are bigger than ever, they have no shame in asking for whatever they want, & DC still lets them literally write the law. // that is a problem & anyone who tells you otherwise is deluded. *rant over* // 
also Lehman was the biggest bankruptcy in history and was a complete, total mess. Creditor shitshow. Resolution STILL ongoing. // if anything, Lehman shows we need to break-up investment banks, too (tho few are left). Bankruptcy cannot handle them as they are now.
Moving on, Krugman defends the Dodd-Frank financial regulation bill passed in 2010:
And the financial reform that President Obama signed in 2010 made a real effort to address these problems. It could and should be made stronger . . .
How real is this effort? Let's let former Labor Secretary Robert Reich explain:
In its first major rule under Dodd-Frank, the CFTC [Commodity Futures Trading Commission] considered 1,500 comments, largely generated by and from the Street. After several years the commission issued a proposed rule, including some of the loopholes and exceptions the Street sought. 
Wall Street still wasn't satisfied. So the CFTC agreed to delay enforcement of the rule, allowing the Street more time to voice its objections. Even this wasn't enough for the big banks, whose lawyers then filed a lawsuit in the federal courts, arguing that the commission's cost-benefit analysis wasn't adequate. 
As of now, only 249 of the 390 regulations required by Dodd-Frank have been finalized. And those final versions are shot through with loopholes big enough for Wall Street's top brass to drive their Ferrari's through.
In other words, the big banks are really powerful, so the regulators tend to work for them instead of for the public (especially since many regulators hope to work for the banks themselves eventually). This is not at all new. Regulations aren't particularly helpful if they aren't enforced. So it shouldn't be particularly surprising that "[b]anks today are bigger and more opaque than ever, and they continue to behave in many of the same ways they did before the crash."

In Krugman's defense, though, he merely said that Dodd-Frank "made a real effort," not that it actually succeeded.

To continue, Krugman next actually makes some very interesting points regarding the relationship between a politican's policy positions and their value/character--not just because of what he says, but because of what he doesn't say. I will extensively analyze this paragraph (the 8th in his column) in my follow-up post, so I'll skip over it for now. Afterward, Krugman says darkly that Sanders's current campaigning "raises serious character and value issues." Krugman supports this strong contention with two pieces of evidence. I'll quote his first proffered evidence in full:
It's one thing for the Sanders campaign to point to Hillary Clinton's Wall Street connections, which are real, although the question should be whether they have distorted her positions, a case the campaign has never even tried to make. But recent attacks on Mrs. Clinton as a tool of the fossil fuel industry are just plain dishonest, and speak of a campaign that has lost its ethical moorings.
First, let's note in passing Krugman's unquestioning acceptance of the absurd claim that, unless one has direct proof of Clinton changing her position due to Wall Street money, we don't have to worry about it. This is, of course, the very argument the conservative Supreme Court used as justification for Citizens United. It also misses the point, as Alex Pareene argues (in a different context):
Bernie Sanders' critique of Clinton is not that she's cartoonishly corrupt in the Tammany Hall style, capable of being fully bought with a couple well-compensated speeches, but that she's a creature of a fundamentally corrupt system, who comfortably operates within that system and accepts it as legitimate. Clinton has had trouble countering that critique because, well, it's true. It's not that she's been bought, it's that she bought in.
As for his "dishonest" attack on Clinton, read through the linked article yourself. Every single "fact checker" admits that it's totally accurate Clinton is receiving money from the oil and gas industries, it's just a small percentage of her overall fundraising. That may make the criticism irrelevant, but it's hardly dishonest. On the other hand, claiming that Sanders is accusing Clinton of being "a tool of the fossil fuel industry," which he never did, is perhaps dishonest.

It's also rather rich considering Krugman's own candidate implied Sanders didn't support the auto bailout before the Michigan primary (a misrepresentation so egregious that backlash to it may have contributed to her losing the state), is blaming Vermont for New York's gun problems (read this for the sordid details--she doesn't technically lie, but the argument is highly misleading), etc.

But all this is set-up for the real meat of his column, the discussion of what some person somewhere surely called "qualified-gate." For those blissfully unaware of this incident, a brief history.

On April 4, Sanders was interviewed by the New York Daily News. The media quickly decided he bombed the interview and showed a lack of policy knowledge, even though he actually didn't. Later, Clinton was interviewed by Joe Scarborough, who asked her several times if Sanders is qualified to be President. Clinton never gave a clear yes or no answer, but claimed he didn't really understand what he was talking about--which is, perhaps, an implication that he's not really qualified, but I suppose reasonable people can differ on this. (Krugman claims she was "careful in her choice of words," which is true as far as it goes.) Sanders himself then said Clinton claimed he was unqualified to be President, which is false (he was possibly misled by this Washington Post article--remember to always read past the headline!). Anyway, in response, Sanders argued that it's really Clinton who's not qualified, due to her voting for the Iraq War, trade agreements like NAFTA, and taking massive campaign contributions from Wall Street and other special interests.

If this sounds to you like a tempest in a teapot that almost everyone will forget about a week from now, you're right. But to Krugman, Sanders's recent statement is of earth-shattering importance. First, he claims that Sanders is "imposing a standard of purity, in which any compromise or misstep makes you the moral equivalent of the bad guys." For those keeping track, this is the third time Krugman has attributed to Sanders a position he's never actually stated, which is actually kind of impressive considering the space constraints of a New York Times column.

But it's the possible electoral consequences of Sanders's "qualifications" argument that really sets Krugman off. After all, Clinton is in the lead for the nomination, "based largely on the support of African-American voters, who respond to her pragmatism because history tells them to distrust extravagant promises." This is luckily the last time Krugman makes a grandiose claim with no evidence, but it's a doozy. It's really something special for a very white pundit like Krugman to make sweeping claims about why black Americans vote the way they do. Especially since, given the timing of the column, he almost certainly got this idea from Jonathan Chait, another very white pundit who made this claim on the basis of scanty evidence. (Seriously, read Chait's article--he offers literally no statistical evidence whatsoever.)

As a very white person myself, it really pisses me off when white people use people of color as props to support whatever political view they hold. Stand on your own fucking two feet instead of fetishizing marginalized communities.

Moving on, Krugman is thankfully almost done. He ends by wondering if Sanders will refuse to endorse Clinton in the general. (I guess he's forgotten the kinds of attacks Clinton made on Obama in 2008 before endorsing him.) Here's the last paragraph of his column:
The Sanders campaign has brought out a lot of idealism and energy that the progressive movement needs. It has also, however, brought out a streak of petulant self-righteousness among some supporters. Has it brought out that streak in the candidate, too?
I suppose the message to Sanders supporters is: please bring lots of energy in support of the candidate I, Paul Krugman, support--but never, ever "self-righteously" think your political beliefs are more valid than mine. Speaking as a Sanders supporter, I'm honestly more annoyed by the condescension of the first sentence than by the hypocritical petulance of the second. And the less said about his final cowardly rhetorical question the better.

Note, finally, that nowhere does Krugman ever actually substantively respond to Sanders's argument that showing poor judgment by voting for the Iraq War and bad trade deals is disqualifying for the Presidency. So in his stead, I will discuss this topic in detail in my next post.

Monday, April 11, 2016

"Hillary Clinton will kill lots of people, but why do liberals hate her?"

Journalist for the New Republic Jeet Heer recommended an article, claiming it's "The best case for Hillary Clinton I've read." In this article, Elie Mystal states:
Hillary's foreign policy is terrifying. If elected, she will kill people. Many of them will be terrorists and some of them will be criminals, but all of them will be people and she will not let other, non-terrorist people, stand in the way of killing the people she thinks we need to kill. And when she's not killing people, she will be spying on people in case she needs to kill those people later. 
So... that's bad. 
But I don't understand liberals who hate Hillary Clinton.
I know and read a lot of socialists, and many of them have rather harsh things to say about "liberals." Most of the time, I think that's unfair. But Mystal's statement here represents the worst tendencies of liberalism as an ideology.

Seriously, read that again. "Hillary Clinton has a terrifying foreign policy"--foreign policy, of course, being the area where the President has by far the most power. "She will kill lots of people, many of whom are civilians. And she will be spying on many more. Anyway, on a completely unrelated note note, it appears many liberals don't like her for inexplicable reasons!"

Reading the article, you'll note that as justification for his Clinton vote despite his belief she'll kill lots of people, Mystal argues she's more likely to "make a deal (with the devil, no doubt)." In other words, Mystal is willing to elect someone who he admits will kill lots of foreigners if that means "a crappy law that has some positive outcomes" will get passed.

I don't mean to pick too hard on Mystal personally, and I actually don't hate Hillary Clinton myself--in general, I'm not sure if hating politicians is very helpful. But when even self-proclaimed liberals blithely slide past the prospect of tons of deaths just as long as it's foreigners who are dying, something is seriously wrong with our political culture.

Later tonight I'm going to make a post tearing apart Paul Krugman's latest column.