tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post2325763496698942835..comments2024-03-28T03:16:14.104-04:00Comments on Noahpinion: Russ Roberts predicts my policy positionsNoah Smithhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/09093917601641588575noreply@blogger.comBlogger82125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-35609144312143761372015-10-30T20:37:25.635-04:002015-10-30T20:37:25.635-04:00This is a perfect example.
I can state my positio...This is a perfect example.<br /><br />I can state my position on this: I don't like Fannie and Freddie in their current form. I agree with Noah on this.<br /><br />But due to the history of political thought and political outlets (newspapers), we each feel a need to direct the conversation because we take our example from what came before.<br /><br />Can any of us do that properly? As in individual, can I direct the conversation in the proper direction given my biases? Probably not.<br /><br />Existing sociological and political analysis doesn't account for the internet and its potential for free exchange.<br /><br />Given the right tools, the habits we need to overcome are those of sociological and political manipulation. Rather, we need to provide our insights and let others discuss them at will.<br /><br />This is going to be excruciatingly difficult for a lot of people of existing power structures, but I think the results will be fantastic if we can do it right.<br /><br />So this is my vision. Few share it, but if anyone out there shares it, I'd like to hear from them.<br /><br />Mr. Parker?<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-86372229312306263662015-10-30T18:53:46.989-04:002015-10-30T18:53:46.989-04:00That Fannie and Freddie thing made me wonder a bit...That Fannie and Freddie thing made me wonder a bit. I don't like Wall Street shenanigans and I get a bit upset when politicians try to divert blame onto F&F for the mortgage meltdown. So correcting others who repeat these talking points might look like I'm in favor of F&F when all I'm saying is that they were relatively well-behaved compared to many other banks. The actual point is to swivel the spotlight back on the deserving targets, not to argue that F&F is super great.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-71368706184660009252015-10-30T17:53:47.790-04:002015-10-30T17:53:47.790-04:00This was a good post. I think people are sometime...This was a good post. I think people are sometimes very surprised at some of my positions given my online interactions. A part of that is because it is very difficult to hold conversations with people if you constantly interject your disagreements, which is also a result of the fact that a lot of people tend to spout off for too long past potential points of disagreement, or in the opposite they tweet brief attitudes that never envelope the technical aspects of their views.<br /><br />I can look at prominent economists' views and I see very few who are predictable. I do think those on the right are more predictable than those considered more to the left, and Libertarians are often very unpredictable.<br /><br />It is easy to see where the differences on most issues come to play. They are generally based upon empirically ambivalent evidence. In these cases personal experiences tend to dominate the data.<br /><br />In these impiracally ambivalent cases where there are tradeoffs that effect different groups of people differently, class differences become more obvious. The wealthy are more in tune with things that effect the wealthy and the less wealthy tend to be more in tune with less wealthy people.<br /><br />I think there's a basic problem that can occur when economists talk politics and policy, and that is that they assume normal people don't understand the issue, and so they reject populist ideas over more empirically-motivated ideas. I think this is a mistaken bias.<br />Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-87075091684665074622015-10-30T08:28:33.590-04:002015-10-30T08:28:33.590-04:00I do hope that you write something. I think you&#...I do hope that you write something. I think you're overly critical of school vouchers, especially since most of the school voucher data actually weakly supports school vouchers and that the data is more natural experiment instead of carefully crafted ones.<br /><br />That Ray Fisman article was pretty bad. Here's a good response by an American economist in Sweden.<br /><br />http://www.nationalreview.com/agenda/383304/sweden-has-education-crisis-it-wasnt-caused-school-choice-tino-sanandaji<br /><br />I don't read the Natioanl Review but if I remember correctly, it is generally biased. That being said, the author isn't "free market fixes everything" in his critique.<br /><br />Public schools in Sweden do slightly worse than voucher schools, which is an important point when evaluating the effects of the Swedish voucher program.Heavy Grenadiernoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-11334539016943724872015-10-29T08:22:45.298-04:002015-10-29T08:22:45.298-04:00Just as a point of reference. I'm a liberal an...Just as a point of reference. I'm a liberal and I'm pretty much surrounded by liberals (although I'm inclined to label many of them progressives). I can assure you I've never heard anyone defend Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. JoeDoghttps://www.joedog.org/noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-26272559498775418872015-10-28T23:40:52.298-04:002015-10-28T23:40:52.298-04:00Noah, you have written repeatedly on this website ...Noah, you have written repeatedly on this website that you think that school voucher programs are a bad idea. Yet, you have not provided a single source of well identified estimates that back up your position. In contrast, there is a vast amount of experimental and quasi-experimental evidence that school voucher programs have either no or positive effects. I think your position is purely ideological.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-28482509020649521112015-10-28T17:18:35.317-04:002015-10-28T17:18:35.317-04:00I see a number of problems with the Colombia study...I see a number of problems with the Colombia study. <br /><br />1. The study restricts it's data to winners and losers in the application process. In reality, there are 4-5 groups to study - not 2. Winners, losers, non-applicants who went to private secondary school, non-applicants who went to public secondary school, and possibly non-applicants who did not attend secondary school at all. <br /><br />2. Voucher success is not as simple as comparing winner achievement to loser achievement. We need the right counterfactual - how would student X have done if left in the original system compared to how they did in the voucher system. Did losers do poorly because a good chunk of the most motivated students in their class were moved to a private school? Did winners do better because they were placed in schools that had the option to reject the trouble makers?<br /><br />3. Winners and losers were chosen at random, but applicants were not. This creates a huge sample selection bias. The applicants are much more likely to be students who benefit from enrollment in the private schools. Non-applicants may have chosen not to apply because they were too poor to afford even half the tuition or because parents had no time to fill out the application. <br /><br />4. Colombian private schools are highly regulated - much more than in the US. To call your institution a school in Colombia you must teach the nationally mandated curriculum. You cannot graduate a student unless he/she has completed the state mandated curriculum. As such, they have a good deal of controls in place to prevent things like what Corinthian Colleges did here. I think Noah is talking about vouchers as discussed here in the USA - where the winner gets to take the voucher to any "school" no matter what the fees/curriculum. Ibnyaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02200468798337178145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-63634671730592936122015-10-28T16:33:11.538-04:002015-10-28T16:33:11.538-04:00"My instinct says that the most important hea...<i>"My instinct says that the most important health care problem in America is high excess cost of care, not the number of the uninsured."</i><br /><br />Uninsured patients pay far more for health care than insured patients. All medical billing includes a charge amount for each service. This charge is largely a fiction, because insurers negotiate their own rates with providers in secret. The prices in the resulting fee schedule depend on how much negotiating power the parties have. A large insurer can negotiate lower prices. A nationwide hospital system can negotiate higher prices. One thing that providers do to make sure they don't leave money on the table is set that initial charge really high. They want to have the charge be higher than any fee schedule that could possibly be negotiated. The next time you get a medical bill, take a look at your insurer's Explanation of Benefits. You should see the charges and a discount next to them. This discount is the difference between the charge and the fee schedule allowed amount. <br /><br />Now guess who doesn't get a discount? That would be the uninsured or patients who went out of network. Individual patients have zero negotiating power. It is only by pooling patients into a large insurance group that a good deal can be negotiated. <br /><br />Next consider the kinds of "insurance" you could buy pre-ACA. Some of them offered very low rates, but such narrow networks and excluded so many procedures that the patient was effectively uninsured/out of network for anything substantial. The adverse selection problems meant pre-existing conditions clauses resulted in canceled policies as soon as a substantial claim was made. <br /><br />The high costs of health care had to drop as a result of the ACA, just because fewer patients were stuck with exorbitant charges, but on top of that ACA-compliant policies front load the costs of preventative care and annual check-ups into the premiums. This means a lot more conditions will be caught when treatment is cheap, so long term costs should drop, too.Ibnyaminhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02200468798337178145noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-46887373137999596852015-10-28T15:58:26.056-04:002015-10-28T15:58:26.056-04:00I disagree-the NRA has become mainly a lobbying gr...I disagree-the NRA has become mainly a lobbying group and a political action committee connected to the reactionary culture war conservatives.<br />I was really struck by this when I found some old issues of NRA magazines from the 1960s that really emphasized hunter training programs, gun safety training, and responsible ownership. Today it seems to be just another predatory lobbying group that markets fear and terror to extract dollars and build their power base. <br /><br />If Obama is coming to get my gun, he started late. In the meantime, toddlers and hunting dogs are slaughtering people.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-3412317358264332342015-10-28T14:24:32.601-04:002015-10-28T14:24:32.601-04:00The car analogy is a really bad one. Cars have a m...The car analogy is a really bad one. Cars have a major purpose other than killing or injuring people. Sure, in the process sometimes people die, but we do everything to prevent that! Heck we even force people to wear seatbelts!<br /><br />This is not the case with guns. Guns are buit to kill or injure. Also requirements to own and use guns in the US are ridiculous.Anonymousnoreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-49420243859303958712015-10-28T12:58:18.332-04:002015-10-28T12:58:18.332-04:00Noah, just wondering, are you opposed to Pell Gran...Noah, just wondering, are you opposed to Pell Grants as well? If not, what is the substantial difference with that an vouchers?YouNotSneaky!https://www.blogger.com/profile/06378267534638281151noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-28189917114850048592015-10-28T11:29:19.585-04:002015-10-28T11:29:19.585-04:00Perfectly said.
(Perfectly said, that is, if you ...Perfectly said.<br /><br />(Perfectly said, that is, if you remove the last paragraph, which says everyone of a certain age uses and accepts Robert's use of logical fallacies to project their ideologies, yet people of another age don't.)<br /><br />Proof is listening to his EconTalk interviews of<br />- Matt Ridley (climate change skeptic), where Roberts doesn't call him on anything (like arguing mainly about the lower probabilities of high temperature predictions--what about talking about the danger of slightly lower rises? The majority of the interview was about those two being like other outsiders who were laughed at and later proved correct). Just a garbage-laden ideological "interview".<br />- Thomas Piketty, when he argues against everything Piketty says, making me wonder whether he is unfamiliar with any one single downside to inequality.<br /><br />I've only listened to about five of his interviews, and usually hear several incidents of slanted illogic, and ask myself how Stanford keeps him employed.Joe T.noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-9707832991301417632015-10-28T06:51:32.295-04:002015-10-28T06:51:32.295-04:00A quick check suggests that Canada's per capit...A quick check suggests that Canada's per capita gun ownership rate is similar to European rates. About 30 per 100 people. France is a little higher while Germany is a little lower. The US, in 2012, had 112 per 100 people.<br /><br />Vox has an <a href="http://www.vox.com/2015/10/3/9444417/gun-violence-united-states-america" rel="nofollow">article on the stats.</a> In as much as we have evidence on the question it indicates that reducing the number of guns in the population is likely to reduce the number of gun crimes and gun deaths. The article also points out that it is unlikely any changes will be made in the near future.SRdVhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/02926003339750066184noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-90767151461120218302015-10-27T21:24:19.458-04:002015-10-27T21:24:19.458-04:00I think so, yeah. But then all these people are li...I think so, yeah. But then all these people are like "You'll never be value-neutral so stop pretending, just embrace the ideology!" Russ is one of those, but a lot of the people saying that are actually lefty types.Noah Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09093917601641588575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-10940790595615596972015-10-27T21:20:23.788-04:002015-10-27T21:20:23.788-04:00My take from this is the incredible hubris of econ...My take from this is the incredible hubris of economists. Being rather clever people they tend to vastly overrate their cleverness. Wouldn't both the profession and the public be better served if the economist would limit himself/herself to explaining the anticipated consequences (both intended and unintended) of a policy or issue, instead of being an advocate for a position? Anonymoushttps://www.blogger.com/profile/15535844723513639993noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-66472472758359262662015-10-27T20:22:37.834-04:002015-10-27T20:22:37.834-04:00You say vouchers have failed wherever they are tri...You say vouchers have failed wherever they are tried.<br /><br />The official evaluation of the DC voucher program (final report) showed that it increase graduation rates by 12 percentage points (intent-to-treat estimate) and 21 percentage points for treatment-on-treated. Hardly any program has that large of an effect in education.<br />http://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20104018/pdf/20104018.pdf<br /><br />A NYC RCT showed that vouchers increase the college attendance rate of black students by 25% (from 36% to 45%). http://educationnext.org/the-impact-of-school-vouchers-on-college-enrollment/<br /><br />And since you bring up international evidence, evidence from randomized lotteries on a Colombian voucher program (Josh Angrist was the lead author, if you know him) found that after 3 years, "winners were about 10 percentage points more likely to have finished 8th grade, primarily because they were less likely to repeat grades, and scored 0.2 standard deviations higher on achievement tests." http://economics.mit.edu/files/24<br /><br />So while you are still free to point to evidence that vouchers are not as successful as claimed, it is indisputably false to claim that they have always failed. Stuart Buckhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/05731724396708879386noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-67323903545594881162015-10-27T20:15:56.958-04:002015-10-27T20:15:56.958-04:00How would you test it?How would you test it?Noah Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09093917601641588575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-86028306397832626642015-10-27T20:13:47.864-04:002015-10-27T20:13:47.864-04:00Well, remember that Russ could have gotten 50% in ...Well, remember that Russ could have gotten 50% in expectation simply by flipping coins! ;-)Noah Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09093917601641588575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-75944142090924887072015-10-27T20:02:17.377-04:002015-10-27T20:02:17.377-04:00I think I am an outlier in an important sense, whi...I think I am an outlier in an important sense, which is that I don't take disagreements personally at all, and I am really hard to offend. I think there's this dynamic that pushes people in the public sphere to glom onto an existing ideology. I think it goes like this:<br /><br />New Pundit: "According to these papers I've read, it would increase total GDP if we raised taxes and spent the money on road construction."<br /><br />Conservative commenters: "LIBERAL SHITLORD, GO BACK TO SOVIET RUSSIA!!"<br /><br />Liberal commenters: "WOOHOO, YOU'RE ONE OF US!!"<br /><br />New Pundit: Hmm, these conservative commenters seem like a bunch of idiots, and these liberal commenters seem like reasonable, good people. Perhaps I should investigate what other things the conservatives are wrong about and the liberals are right about... *googles*<br /><br />I think this dynamic keeps reinforcing itself until most pundits are part of one of the ideologies.<br /><br />But since academic economists are mostly insulated from this dynamic (no comments sections!), most of them continue to hold an eclectic array of opinions.<br /><br />I'm a weird pundit, in the sense that you can call me a shitlord or an idiot or whatever you want and I'll still just listen to what you say. Maybe I have Asperger's or something, who knows!Noah Smithhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/09093917601641588575noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-12996430201587897722015-10-27T19:33:54.869-04:002015-10-27T19:33:54.869-04:00With so many people having KDS, Krugman Derrangeme...With so many people having KDS, Krugman Derrangement Syndrome, and always accusing him of things he never says, even if someone is predictable, it doesn't mean most other people will be able to predict them. I would guess those close to them have a much better grasp than someone that doesn't. If you don't grok someone, you probably can't explain them, only lump them in pools. Lordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06747994571555237739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-36047731187249107242015-10-27T19:22:40.820-04:002015-10-27T19:22:40.820-04:00People are never as good at the turing test as the...People are never as good at the turing test as they believe themselves to be and the better they think they are, the worse they are because they have only a small range of sets to choose from. Lordhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/06747994571555237739noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-57068377377834778442015-10-27T18:24:56.264-04:002015-10-27T18:24:56.264-04:00If you're a moderate (in your case moderate le...If you're a moderate (in your case moderate leftist), it's harder to predict policy positions than if you're a hard-liner on either side - and Russ still did a pretty good job :-)Larry Siegelhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17788272534966549403noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-47892452214254666222015-10-27T16:53:06.529-04:002015-10-27T16:53:06.529-04:00The thesis seems to be that if positions on many i...The thesis seems to be that if positions on many issues are predictable based on one's position on a single issue then the positions are ideological. I don't think that thesis can be defended.doncastrohttps://www.blogger.com/profile/04899327656859890216noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-33328199341209700082015-10-27T15:33:52.019-04:002015-10-27T15:33:52.019-04:00All considering, I think Russ did a good job. Noah...All considering, I think Russ did a good job. Noah will probably disagree, but I think he's an outlier in this case. I think most people are more like Krugman - they hold a pretty easily predictable set of standard party beliefs.edarniwhttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17905272341190277475noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-17232051.post-91871936981817353912015-10-27T15:21:35.685-04:002015-10-27T15:21:35.685-04:00Conceivably, but a test like this is a bit of an i...Conceivably, but a test like this is a bit of an ideological turing test, so some people might actually be pretty decent at putting some of the stuff together. <br /><br />I imagine noah would be one of those since he seems to understand some of the issues from a gut level as well as intellectual. Anonymousnoreply@blogger.com