Matt Yglesias

Comments?

Belle Waring asks:

Question of the day: is the unremitting, permanent badness of Matthew Yglesias’ comments the result of intentional sabotage, or can it be chalked up to his policy of utterly ignoring them at all times? I favor the former explanation, because he’s influential enough that I can imagine some testy Republican or two taking it on as a volunteer project to wreck it up constantly. There was never a time when they were good, either, even in the early days.

I would simply deny that “ignoring” takes place. I read the comments most days, and even chime in from time to time. But it’s hard to engage too thoroughly when they’re so sucky. The primary interpreative technique that takes place in the section is “let’s willfully misread what Matt’s saying so as to make it something I strongly disagree with.” It’s not very fun. But I actually think things have gotten a lot better since the latest update to the software. The ability to do nested threads means some interesting chains of thought can emerge and I would encourage more people to try to participate constructively and shift the norms away from the soullite & warstler model.

Innovations in Nigerian Spam

I’m a big believer in the United Nations, international law, and other efforts to institutional global cooperation. Today I learn that it’s finally paying off:

United Nations Development Programme
United Nations House
Plot 617/618, Diplomatic Zone,
Central Area District, Garki,
Abuja, Nigeria.
Compensation Ref Number: UN277360NG

This is to officially notify you that you have been selected as one of the few beneficiary of 2010 United Nations 65th anniversary Compensation by random Email Search System(ESS). Your email id was lucky to be picked among the ten thousand emails that was selected worldwide by UN, you have been compensated with $200,000.00USD by United Nations as a sign to help the less privilege worldwide. to enmark the suecessful United Nations 65th Anniversary Celebration we have decided to give ten thousand people around the world compensation funds as a sign of reducing the global economy and financial meltdown around the world.

I just wonder why they give this thing an Abuja address? Seems like a total giveaway. Why not pretend to be in Geneva, a city renowned for its international institutions and shady banks?

Off to New Haven

Taking the supertrain (well, actually the regular train) up to New Haven today to speak at the Yale political union tonight. Blogging should continue apace, but a certain amount depends on the vagaries of iPhone tethering so you never know:

On the general subject of Yale, I learned a lot from listening to Robert Shiller’s lectures and it’s distressing to learn that Gary Gorton doesn’t think the Volcker Rule implementation is actually going to work.

Five Years of BHTV

A brilliant distillation of the past five years worth of news from BloggingHeads TV:

Among other things, a sobering reminder that I used to be considerably less bald.

Best Correction Ever

As a typo-prone blogger myself, this is the kind of thing I certainly sympathize with: “This blog post originally stated that one in three black men who have sex with me is HIV positive. In fact, the statistic applies to black men who have sex with men.”

“Hyperpartisan”

Via Thers, Jonah Goldberg gloats about his book sales:

The Atlantic has a review of reviews of the Kos book. It’s chock-a-block with Liberal Fascism bashing, mostly from people who I suspect haven’t read it, plus activist Matt Yglesias who claims to have read it but has A) a very deep personal grudge against me and B) is an admitted fan of lying for political ends. His own hyper-partisan book famously bombed, barely breaking out of triple-digit sales. So maybe he still has some issues related to that as well. But that’s neither here nor there.

I think Goldberg needs to make more enemies if he thinks my grudge against him is all that deep. But to clarify, my book Heads in the Sand was indeed a commercial failure and Goldberg is much, much, much better than I am at coming up with books that sell a lot of copies. I think his tendency to harp on this point tends to demonstrate that he’s an extremely petty person driven to a remarkable degree by well-deserved insecurity about his intellectual abilities.

The main point I’d like to make, however, is that my book’s really not partisan at all and certainly not hyper-partisan. It’s a book that’s primarily critical of Democrats, and of the nexus between “liberal hawk” intellectuals and political opportunists that drove the party leadership’s positioning in the 2002-2006 and continues to exert a substantial-though-diminished influence today.

At any rate, the book is a little bit dated but still pretty good and thanks to aforementioned commercial failure available at steep discount so make Jonah Goldberg cry and buy a copy.

Do I Have Anything Interesting to Say?

Kartik Athreya, a self-described “rank-and-file PhD economist operating within a central banking system” who by his own admission has “contributed no earth-shaking ideas to Economics and work fundamentally as a worker bee chipping away with known tools at portions of larger problems” has published an essay condemning writ large bloggers and op-ed writers who’ve tried to explicate macroeconomic policy controversies in the wake of the financial panic of 2007-2008. He names me by name as one of the sinners, and argues that “it is exceedingly unlikely that these authors [i.e., people like me] have anything interesting to say about economic policy.”

I think there’s a lot that’s wrong about Athreya’s essay, much of it explained by Scott Sumner, but most of all I think his argument hinges on two category errors, one about what I’m doing and one about what he’s doing.

First me. Do I have anything interesting to say about economics? Well, “interesting” is relevant to audience. I should hope that PhD economists working in central banking systems aren’t learning about economics from my blog! That’s what grad school, conferences, the circulation of academic papers, etc. is for. But perhaps you’re a citizen of a liberal democracy who speaks English and tries to keep abreast of political controversies. Well you’ve probably heard politicians talking a lot about jobs and the economy. You’ve probably noticed that voters keep telling pollsters that jobs and the economy matter to them. Jobs and the economy may matter to you! You may have seen that political scientists have found that presidential re-election is closely linked to economic performance, and thus deduced that the fate of a whole range of national policy issues hinges on economic growth. Well then I bet you are probably interested in the fact that a wide range of credible experts (with PhDs, even) believe the world’s central banks could be doing more to boost employment. Is Athreya interested in this? Well, I hope he would know it whether or not he reads my blog—he’s working at a central bank somewhere and probably knows a lot more about this than most people.

But now to Athreya. His essay seems to partake of the conceit that what economic policymakers do is just economics and that for political pundits to second-guess their decisions would be on a par with me trying to second-guess someone doing particle physics. Completely apart from the fact that the “science” of economics is a good deal less developed than what you see in real sciences, the fact is that economic policy is economics plus politics. For example, according to Ben Bernanke, the Fed could reduce unemployment by raising its inflation target but this would be a bad idea because it runs the risk of causing inflation expectations to become un-anchored. That’s a judgment that contains some “economics” content but it’s largely a political judgment. It’s part of his job to make those judgments, but it’s the job of citizens to question them.

At any rate, the next time anyone finds me claiming to have broken original ground in macroeconomic theory I hope someone will call the expertise police. But you don’t need a PhD in sociology to see how it might be the case that the Federal Reserve Board of Governors would be unduly attuned to the interests of college educated Americans to the exclusion of the working class, or that the European Central Bank might be unduly attuned to the needs of Germans to the exclusion of Spaniards and Italians.

The Time To Blog

Describing the trend toward a progressive political blogosphere in which “95% or more of the audience share goes to three or four dozen bloggers who are now full-time media and / or political professionals,” Chris Bowers asserts that the new equilibrium cannot be reversed because:

[B]ecause it is virtually impossible for a hobbyist to compete with professionals who are actually paid to spend all day blogging. No one has enough free time to blog as much as Matthew Yglesias, David Dayen, or the front page of Daily Kos.

I have my doubts about that. Obviously at the moment we have a large number of unemployed people in this country. And in a more enduring way, we have a lot of retired people in this country. And with every passing year we have more. In a lot of ways, I think retirees are going to prove to be the killer ap of digital content creation. It’s just that at the moment relatively few retired people are all that comfortable with digital media. Ten, twenty, thirty years from now that’ll be very different. Obviously someone who’s affiliated with a larger institution will always have certain advantages over an amateur, and the blogosphere gives heavy advantages to early adopters, but I think a lot is going to continue to change on the internet as demographic change continues.

Request

Do readers think it would be possible to arrange some more condescending emails from people who’ve spent more time in China than I have pointing out that ten days on a semi-official junket can only give you a superficial understanding of a very large country? I’m actually a complete idiot, who doesn’t understand this at all. Also the underlying premise of my blog is in no way that a smart person who writes quickly can entertain and inform with non-expert commentary and aggregation on a wide array of subject.

Back in the USA

(cc photo by kevindooley)

I arrived at Dulles Airport yesterday evening and got back home, so today we should be back on our regular blogging schedule. Obviously I have a lot more to say about China and I expect that my trip will inspire further reading and research that will, along with the trip itself, serve as useful background as China continues to be in the news. I’ve also been very grateful that I’ve largely been able to avoid the pseudo-controversy over whether Barack Obama should have “done more” (magic powers? x-ray vision?) to combat the horrible Gulf of Mexico oil spill.

For now, though, I’d like to thank my guest bloggers Matt Zeitlin, Ryan Powers, Dara Lind, Satyam Khanna, Ali Frick, and Jamelle Bouie for holding down the fort while I’ve been gone. Their work is very much appreciated, as is their fortitude in putting up with some of the feistier commenters. At any rate, I’m trying to get back into the swing of the news cycle, so we’ll see what I come up with.

For now let me just observe in general that I’ve always found DC’s Chinatown, where I more or less live, to be painfully inauthentic. I mean, international chains with Chinese letters on the signs? Kitschy Chinese restaurants? It turns out, however, that major Chinese cities generally do have neighborhoods that are just like that so we can (sort of) hold are head high.

Gone Fishing (in China)

(my cc photo)

By Matthew Yglesias

So . . . I’m flying to China as you read this. The trip I’m going on is the same one Chris Hayes took last year to produce this article sponsored by the China-US Exchange Foundation. I’ll be back on June 2, and I’m very excited about the trip. I love to travel and I’m very interested in the world abroad, but have never been to China or the region more generally. Obviously once you start looking on a map it turns out that “China” is the name of a pretty giant place and it’s utter hubris to think you could learn or understand much based on a brief trip. But still, you’ve got to start somewhere.

At any rate, as regular readers know I love to blog and don’t intend to stop just because I’m traveling. But given the time zones, some uncertainty about my schedule, and the vagaries of Chinese internet access I thought it would be the better part of wisdom to line up some guest-bloggers to carry the load while I’m gone. I’m very excited about the team and I think I’ll let them introduce themselves over the weekend.

Standing While Working

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been taking a page out of Donald Rumsfeld’s book and standing while working instead of sitting at my cubicle. I don’t have a fancy standing desk, so instead my laptop is just perched on a big stack of books. It’s a bit hard on my feet, though I’m getting used to it, and in other regards I’ve been feeling much better—less of a drowsy, somewhat depressed feeling in the late afternoon and less stiffness in my legs and back overall. I also assume you burn at least slightly more calories this way, if only because it encourages you to fidget around more as you shift your weight.

A brief piece in Businessweek makes the case against sitting with the bombastic headline “Your Office Chair Is Killing You.” I think the main point would be that the human body evolved to walk around and that while sitting feels comfortable in the spirit of taking a break, our bones and muscles aren’t really designed with the expectation of sitting in a chair all day.

Rush Limbaugh Hits ThinkProgress

I can’t actually understand what Rush Limbaugh is trying to say about our team here:

RUSH: The Think Progress blog here is a George Soros operation, and they have a post on me today: “Limbaugh suggests Obama is touchy about Arizona law because you can’t produce his own papers.” Remember when I said that yesterday? I knew that’d tweak ‘em. I knew that’d tweak ‘em. They quote me as saying, “Papers = Nazi. ‘Your papers, please,’ equals Nazi. That’s why Obama using the term. I can understand Obama being touchy on the subject of producing your papers. Maybe he’s afraid somebody’s going to ask him for his,” and then they link to the audio on my website to listen to it. Then they talk about all the other “false claims,” and Snerdley said during the break, “You know, you’re going to get blowback on this comparison here to Hitler and the Soviets.” Fine! Let the blowback come. What did I say that’s wrong?

What did I say that’s not factually correct? The Soviets, the communists divided people by class. That’s how they promoted war and chaos in their culture: Haves versus have-nots. Obama’s doing that in this country. Joe the Plumber. “We wanna spread the wealth around.” Hitler, as we all know, used race as his divide and conquer technique. Well, what’s going on now here? What’s untrue about that? Did Hitler do that? Ask the Jewish people and the gypsies. Ask anybody if Hitler did it. Ask anybody if the Soviets did it. Both statements are true. Are we not being divided by class in this country? Is that not what this agenda is all about, redistribution? And Obama is throwing the race card here on this Arizona immigration bill. So let the blowback come. I am not afraid of the blowback. Truth is the truth. That’s why truth will drive liberals crazy if they listen to this show.

I guess this is why Jews and racial minorities are such vehement opponents of Barack Obama and loyal friends of the conservative movement?

The Trouble With the Well-Informed

Tim Lee makes an excellent point about last year’s scandal involving TV networks and former generals to bolster a general observation about the problem with military expertise:

Similarly, last year the New York Times documented that the “military analysts” you see on cable TV programs tend to have close (and almost always undisclosed) ties to the Pentagon. The tricky thing about this is that it may very well be true that these folks are the most knowledgeable about military strategy. What better way to become an expert than to work in the military for decades? But at the same time, if you want impartial analysis of current policy, you don’t want all of your experts to be people with close ties to the people running that policy.

On a selfish note, this would be my defense of the role of generalist commentators in the media/political ecosystem. It’s of course important to know actual facts, and a generalist has an obligation to try to learn. And real experts and serious reporters both have invaluable roles to play. But in many situations, information is concentrated among “insiders” who can be the best-informed without having the best perspective.

Against “FinReg”

In an unfortunate turn of events, superstar blogger and television personality Ezra Klein has coined and repeatedly used the term “FinReg” in his posts considering an overhaul of America’s financial regulations. Since it seems this will be The Issue Of The Day once health care passes, I want to take this opportunity to try to draw a line in the sand against this term.

It sounds like something out of 1984—sign on for the FinReg bill or MiniLove will get you! Obviously, for Twitter purposes it’s useful to have a shorthand briefer than “financial regulation” in the way that “hcr” has served for “health care reform.” But in that case we need something shorter than “FinReg.”

Maximum Tumblr

Ever since it became clear around 2005 or so that established media organizations were going to want to have blogs, I’ve been waiting for bloggers to be proclaimed out-of-touch dinosaurs. And I think Marisa Meltzer delivers:

At its best, Tumblr is a sort of modern-day zinemaking. Zines, self-published do-it-yourself magazines (often featuring photos and text cut from other magazines and photocopied) with limited distribution, have always been a part of underground culture, both as a product and as a galvanizing part of the community. As in the zine world, activists and weirdos alike thrive in their Tumblr microcommunities, posting photos of signs that read “Feminism Is for Lovers” or collages of child stars. Blogs have been accused of killing off zines (though they are still being produced), and tumblelogs seem to channel the spirit of zines more so than any long-form blog.

Ah, long-format blogs with our lack of rebellious zine-like, Tumblr spirit. I was never cool enough for ABC No Rio either, video above provided exclusively for illustrative purposes.

Filibuster Panel Tomorrow

Exciting panel discussion tomorrow in DC featuring yours truly and entitled “The Filibuster and the Pace of Judicial Confirmations”

While it has been around for a long time, the filibuster has been used with increasing frequency in recent years. The filibuster, or the threat of a filibuster, has been used to stop a wide variety of legislative initiatives. The filibuster is also a potent tool that a minority party may use to stop or stall presidential nominations, both for executive department positions and for the federal judiciary. The effect of the filibuster on judicial nominations has been pronounced: As of January 5, 2010, only thirteen judges had been confirmed in the 111th Congress. During the same period of the 107th Congress, President George W. Bush’s first year, twenty-eight judges were confirmed. The fact that President Obama has enjoyed overwhelming majorities in the Senate makes this difference all the more striking.

What is the current status of the filibuster? Where did it come from, and what are its future prospects? What other Senate rules are responsible for slowing down the confirmation process? What are the distinctions between the use of the filibuster in the nominations context and elsewhere? A panel of experts will discuss these questions and more.

This program is the second in a new ACS series, The Future of the Courts: Nominations, Confirmations, and the Pursuit of Justice. This series of programs features experts on the courts examining issues such as the importance of the courts, the status of judicial vacancies, and the confirmation process.

The panel discussion will feature:

• Moderator, Sarah Binder, Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution
• Makan Delrahim, Shareholder at Brownstein Hyatt Farber Schreck LLP and former Staff Director and Chief Counsel for the Senate Judiciary Committee under then-Chairman Orrin Hatch
• Martin Paone, Executive Vice President of Prime Policy Group and former Democratic Secretary in the United States Senate
• Matthew Yglesias, Fellow at the Center for American Progress Action Fund

As you can see, the other panelists are considerably better qualified than I, so I’ll be attempting to make funnier jokes to offer some added-value. That’s noon tomorrow at the National Press Club.

Will Blog for Food

Andrew Brietbart promises to take down the “the institutional left” within “the next three weeks”:

Working as I do here in the institutional left, I’m pretty frightened about my looming unemployment. I’ve been considering an ideological conversion lately, but my thinking had been that it would be smarter to wait until some future time when the right is feeling embattled and defensive again (early 2013, I would think) and eager to embrace converts.

Bloggy CAPAF Events Today

Just wanted to briefly highlight two events today that colleagues from the ThinkProgress team are involved with.

First—Next Up, Comprehensive Immigration Reform: How We Will Make It Happen. This features opening remarks from my boss Faiz Shakir and Rep Louis Gutierrez and then a panel with the Internet’s own Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, Maria Elena Durazo from the LA AFL-CIO, and Andrea Nil from the Wonk Room. Nico Pitney from the Huffington Post will moderate.

Second—33 Minutes”

Please join us for a viewing of a modern-day “Reefer Madness,” the Heritage Foundation’s film about nuclear threats “33 Minutes.” Missile defense has long been a central tenet of the conservative national security faith. Though the Obama administration has wisely redirected the U.S. investment toward proven missile defense systems, there remains a well-funded and deeply entrenched conservative commitment to larger and larger missile defense programs that are of questionable utility against 21st century threats.

“33 Minutes” makes the case for larger missile defense, arguing that terrorists are primed to acquire nuclear missiles that could strike the United States. “Once terrorist-supporting states get their hands on a nuclear missile,” claims the film “they would be free to attack us and our allies with impunity.” The film makes a number of startling and claims regarding both the proven effectiveness of missile defense, and the threat that ballistic missiles in the hands of terrorists actually pose to the United States.

Joining us for a critical discussion of this film are two experts in the field of nuclear nonproliferation, Joe Cirincione, president of Ploughshares Fund, and J. Peter Scoblic, executive editor of The New Republic and author of Us Vs. Them: Conservatism in the Age of Nuclear Terror.

This one also features Matt Duss and Max Bergmann from the Wonk Room.

NYT Going Paid: What Does It Mean for Me?

It looks like The New York Times is going to implement some kind of system where you have to pay to read the website. For my part, unless they’re charging some really absurd fee, I’ll happy pony up the money. I think that if newspaper publishers think that people in general “should pay to read our content” they’re insane—there are just way too many newspapers. But the Financial Times is very good and I pay for it already, the New York Times is also very good and I’ll pay for it too. I’m not sure there’s any other paper I’d pay for, though.

But this raises the question from a blogger’s point of view of how I should react to a paid model for the Times. Obviously if there’s some really unique piece of reporting that it’s the NYT and not anyplace else, I’ll link to it. But a lot of news stories are slightly routine—everyone has a writeup of major political and foreign developments. So will I owe it to the readers to find Washington Post or AP or Reuters or BBC or Politico versions of those stories to link to? Or should I try to send a clear message to everyone that they ought to suck it up and pay to read the best newspaper in the world? Personally, I’d find it regrettable if the result of this decision was that I wound up spending more time publicizing inferior news sources but I’d also find it regrettable if the result was that I’m linking to more stuff that people can’t click through.