Results for “from the comments”
2066 found

I expect your comments on this post will be awful, try to prove me wrong

by  Tyler Cowen in

Karl Smith asks:

I am specifically going to ask Yglesias, Drum, Cowen, Ozimek and Barro (Josh) to chime in on this. Anyone else feel free as well, but I would like to hear from these guys.

I don’t care if Mitt Romney pays negative taxes, cheated on his mistress with her daughter, fired his Grandmother while at Bain, and lied to kids to get the GOP nomination, etc.

What are the significant differences that you think we could actually see come to pass from a Romney Presidency versus an Obama Presidency?

I am generally a better-the-devil-you-know kind of guy, but I am pretty open here. So, let me here it.

Kevin Drum offers a specific answer.  I have not invested much energy in following Romney or the other Republican candidates, so this is a rough, impressionistic response.  Here are a few points:

1. I expect Romney to claim he has repealed ACA, but in fact he will change five aspects of the law and cement the rest of it in place, albeit in a less progressive manner and with lower Medicaid expenditures.   (Outright repeal actually would not be easy, not to mention filibuster issues.)  He knows he doesn’t have any other “right-wing health care plan” in his back pocket, won’t be willing to restore the status quo ex ante, and he will be willing to take the “Tea Party knock on the chin” very early on in his term, hoping to repair the fence later.  Ultimately letting the issue fester doesn’t help him, and he is smart enough to realize that.

2. The Republican Party will split very quickly.  For instance, will AEI support or oppose Romney in an early action like this?  I don’t know, but I see massive carnage.  Democrats may end up happier than they expect.

3. Romney will use conservative judge nominations, corporate tax cuts, Dodd-Frank repeal (does anyone understand it anyway?), and estate tax repeal to try to keep the base in line.  Democrats may end up less happy than they expect.

4. Medicare won’t be touched, not fundamentally.  There is some chance that a “twenty years from now” plan is passed (remember Waxman-Markey?), yet without any secure mechanism for commitment to make the actual cuts.

5. I worry if Obama wins on a platform of envy and anti-rich sentiment; such ideas rarely translate well into policy.  If Obama loses, future Democrats will continue the cash goodies they deliver to constituents but fold on a lot of regulatory issues (don’t want to appear “anti-business”), and they will pay greater lip service to Deficit Commission recommendations and the like, while insisting that the governing Republicans take the heat for an actual budget deal.  It is a much better outcome if Obama is re-elected from a promise to govern as a moderate and a fiscal conservative.  So far I don’t see that as the Democratic strategy, so I am more worried about an Obama re-election than I used to be.

As noted, those are very rough predictions and I don’t have much faith in them, but they are my best guesses.

What else can Karl Smith get me to do?

Very good summary comments from Arnold Kling

by  Tyler Cowen in

Tyler Cowen makes up long lists of the blind spots of left-leaning economists and right-leaning economists. If I were asked this question, I would boil my answers down to one suggestion for each.

What I think left-leaning economists should do more:

Look for structural reasons for policy failure, rather than attribute it always to misguided ideology. Consider the implications of imperfect knowledge on the part of government actors. Also, consider that the existence and growth of special interests is at least partly endogenous with respect to policy.

What I wish that right-leaning economists would do more:

Look for structural explanations for the growth of the state, rather than attribute it always to misguided ideology. Consider the implications of urban density. Consider that as the economy becomes more complex, the potential dispersion in wealth due to differences in ability, information, and luck becomes very large, while the ability to overcome such differences with sheer effort probably declines.

The link is here.  And here is David Henderson and yes I hereby denounce the torture of Bradley Manning, albeit in less than one hundred words.

Comments are still down

by  Tyler Cowen in

We offer our apologies for the inconvenience.  Nonetheless this is my chance to discuss all the topics which otherwise lie relatively fallow on MR.

What stance should a future Ron Paul candidacy take on how animal rights influence the Trilateral Commission, with relevance to Austrian business cycle theory, the morality of the gold standard, the likely success of "game," the most obnoxious blogger in the world, and the delusion of free will, all funded by a VAT?

One can only wonder.

If there were a one percent chance that abortion is morally equivalent to murder, should it be legalized?  At what "p" should that line be drawn?  With what probability have pro-choice advocates established their case?

I'll let you know when comments are back up, noting that you may receive this knowledge before I do.  I hope this post is down before then.

Comments on Prebisch and other matters of the day

by  Alex Tabarrok in

This is Tyler here, not Alex.  For some reason Typepad denies the comments function to my posts only.  If you would like to leave comments on the Prebisch post, or other matters of the day, please use the comments section to this entry.  I do hope the problems are resolved soon and like Alex I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving.  You should be grateful for what you have received in life but also think what you might do in the year to come to assist others.

Does the quality of blog comments deteriorate?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Forget about MR and its superb commentators, I am talking about the typical above-average blogs.  I often have the impression that the best comments come in the first fifteen or so, after which quality declines precipitously and often exponentially.  Why might that be?

1. The truly smart people only like to make smart points on "fresh" posts.  For instance more people read the comments on fresh posts (but why?), so the
benefit of a quality comment is lower as the post becomes older.

2. As time passes, the chance that a warring twosome find each other, and take over the thread, increases.

3. There is a tendency to attack or respond to the stupidest or most controversial thing said, and the longer the comments thread runs for, the stupider this will get.

4. As the number of comments multiplies, so does the number of independent discussion threads and the optimal number of threads is exceeded.

5. (Addended) As one (early) commentator notes below, the simple fact of diminishing marginal utility.

Might some of these mechanisms also help explain why a) history of thought is "ghettoized" as a field, and b) there is such a high premium to working in hot, new fields?  The general point is that there are increasing returns to scale for high quality discussions; furthermore those quality discussions are quite fragile and require cultivation and subsidization through norms.  Freshness matters, so stale topics will indeed encounter discrimination.

Comments are open, who wants to go first? 

Final Comments + Thanks

by  Robert Hormats in

To all of you who have responded to my posting on Marginal Revolution, many thanks. I have enjoyed the dialogue and the sparring.  All of us, I believe, have our country’s interests at heart even though we may come at these issues from different perspectives. My purpose in writing The Price of Liberty – which, as I have noted in several postings is a quote from Hamilton about Revolutionary War debt and not about the Iraq War – was to trace the history of wartime financing from the Revolution through the War on Terrorism to see what we can learn from the past and how we can do things better. I think even those who have taken issue with me about the current set of policy issues will enjoy the history contained in the book.  I hope that whatever you think, you will let me know your thoughts, your comments and your criticisms. I hope you at least find it interesting – even if there are parts of it you disagree with.

Thanks again to Marginal Revolution for hosting me as a guest blogger this week.

Warm regards,

Bob Hormats

author of The Price of Liberty

Responses to Comments – Round 1

by  Robert Hormats in

To Indiana Jim: Thanks for your question. I do not combine war
spending and entitlement spending. The former is in the so-called
“discretionary” portion of the budget; the latter is in the “mandatory”
portion (i.e., it is based on a predetermined formula set by past
legislation and will be paid out under that formula until it is
changed.)

To Freelance: Thank you very much.

To Adrian: Yes. Occasionally bribing foreign governments has been
used successfully, although it has been done covertly for obvious
reasons. But after 9/11, I don’t think we had that option with Al-Qaeda
and the Taliban in Afghanistan. And some terrorist movements are so
fanatical that bribing them is unlikely to work.

To John Thacker: I do not argue that current defense spending is
unsustainable. It could be more efficient, but the levels by historical
standards as a portion of GDP are quite low, as you point out. But this
will still be the second most costly war in U.S. history if it
continues to the end of the year. The cost of entitlements is, as you
point out, likely to grow, and these could squeeze many other programs
in the budget, including defense, in the next decade. They would have
to be reformed even if there were zero money spent for defense because
they are financially unsustainable.

True, FDR promised a balanced budget when he took office, but he
rapidly abandoned that pledge well before the war. But you are correct;
I was underscoring FDR’s call to make sacrifices at home to support the
troops on the battlefield through taxes, borrowing and the other things
you correctly mentioned.

To Barkley Rosser: I agree that Medicare presents a more difficult
problem than Social Security, which in fact, as you correctly point
out, enjoys a surplus. But neither is sustainable over coming decades
given the current trajectories of benefit payments and inflows. The
danger is that neither program will be sustainable without some
reforms, and the sooner they occur the less disruptive they will be.
The alternative is a bid increase in borrowing and/or taxes as well as
a drawing of funds from other programs. In all of these cases, we leave
our children a very bad legacy.

To Mr. Noah: What kind of guide do you need?

To Jay Livingston: Yes, I am. Great to hear from you. Where are you
living now? What great times we had together at Pocono. Hope you are
well. Best regards.

To Barkley Rosser: I agree with your May 28 posting in which you
said that the Social Security System is not in crisis, and indeed there
is a chance that it will not be for some time. But there is a high
probability that inflows will fall far short of benefits within a
couple of decades. That was the risk in the early 1980s, when with a
few changes the Greenspan Commission put it on a sustainable basis and
improved the chances that it would be there for many decades to come.
All I am arguing is for a few adjustments today, similar to those in
1983; to be sure that it is around for those who need it for a very
long time. And I do not want to see it reach a point where it gets so
out of balance that major change will be required, so let’s make minor
ones today.

More of my responses to your comments will be posted tomorrow.

Thanks again,

Robert D. Hormats
author of The Price of Liberty

Which posts attract the most comments?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Some posts attract many more comments than others. Holding constant the general level of readership, I believe the following features predict higher numbers of comments:

1) If a post sits at the top of a page for a long time

2) If the post invokes a sense of moral outrage

3) If many readers feel they can bring facts or personal experience to bear on the question

4) If the post simply asks for comments or feedback

What do you all think?

Typepad comments

by  Tyler Cowen in

Sometimes it shows up on the blog that there are zero comments, but of course MR readers have more to say than that.  Don’t be fooled by this recurring glitch in Typepad.

MR readers also have complained that when writing comments, the right side of the line runs into the ads and is impossible to read when editing.  Do any of you have useful suggestions for addressing this problem?

On-line comments?

by  Tyler Cowen in

Nature, one of the world’s most prestigious scientific research journals, has embarked on an experiment of its own.

In addition to having articles submitted for publication subjected to peer reviews by a handful of experts in the field, the 136-year-old journal is trying out a new system for authors who agree to participate: posting the paper online and inviting scientists in the field to submit comments praising — or poking holes — in it.

Lay readers can see the submitted articles as well, but the site says postings are only for scientists in the discipline, who must list their names and institutional email addresses.  Nature says its editors screen out those they find irrelevant, intemperate or otherwise inappropriate.

Meanwhile, the papers also make their way through the journal’s traditional peer-review gauntlet.  Nature says it’s taking both sets of comments into account when deciding whether to publish.

So far, there have been only 70 posts on the 62 papers that authors have decided to put on the Web site, according to Linda Miller, U.S. executive editor of Nature, published by a unit of Macmillan Publishers Ltd.

The experiment (at http://blogs.nature.com/nature/peerreview/trial/) is an early sign of how the scientific publishing establishment is pushing the limits of its hallowed but opaque peer-review system.  Critics of the traditional process say it lets not only low-quality papers, but also sometimes fraudulent ones, slip through the gates.  The Nature trial of a Web-based system could usher the spirit of Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia edited by its readers, from the margins of scientific publishing to the mainstream.

That is part of an article by the excellent Nicholas Zamiska, in today’s Wall Street Journal, p.B1.  I have long wanted to see this happen, but I fear for economics, and perhaps other fields, it will not work.  The simple problem is that not enough people care about the results of enough papers to start a fruitful dialogue.  Still, at least opening up the papers for on-line comments seems to be a simple free lunch, at least for the world if not always for the reputation of the authors and journal editors.

Comments are on this post are…open…