1hundredsixty8

The pressing needs of my current work project have consumed much of the last week. The long hours of command-line crunching will be continuing, so I thought I would take advantage of this Memorial Day weekend to comment on some of the recent stories in the media and in public policy.

Firstly, all of us should take some time this weekend to think about what the members of our military have experienced in the last decade. While we traditionally use Memorial Day to honor all our veterans- those who fought in World War II, Korea, Vietnam, Desert Storm, and all the smaller conflicts (Panama, Grenada) in between- it is the last generation, the Iraq and Afghanistan veterans, who deserve special recognition. Enduring the longest sustained period of armed conflict in our history, having been deployed multiple times, fighting an asymmetrical war, they are returning home to shameful treatment by the society that asked so much of them. No matter what the personal motivations of a member of the military might be, and no matter what our own views of the moral, political and socio-economic rationales for these wars, this is a time when we should all acknowledge that we can do better: Our veterans should not be honored with mere parades, but with proper medical care, jobs, education.

Scandalaria

I did not pay too much attention to the recent eruption of Washington scandal mongering. It is always difficult in these situations, without a full reading of all the facts, for the public to truly comprehend what has transpired in any of these cases. I might add that, for the most part, the media does not do a thorough job of exposing the details. The Benghazi kerfuffle is a case in point: The Republicans want to lay responsibility for the tragedy at the feet of the Administration, but are not able to muster a compelling case. Was this an instance of an inter-agency clusterfuck between the State Department and the CIA? One thing is certain: The spooks at Langley will be the last to say.

The IRS-targeting-Tea-Party-groups-who-claim-tax-exempt-status again seems to have sparked an effort to prove that this was, at worst, an attack by the White House on its conservative enemies, or, seemingly more likely, a coverup by the White House of embarassing bureacratic bungling by the generally-loathed IRS during campaign season. It is tough to separate the signal from the noise on this, but it would seem reasonable to conclude that, if the Administration was going to use the IRS against its political enemies, it would have gone after more formidable foes than small-fry Tea Partiers.

The issue I find most fascinating is the Department of Justice’s obtaining telephone records of specific Associated Press personnel in an effort to track down leaks. Is this serious overreach by the DOJ?  Most likely. What is interesting are the the howls of protest from various media outlets about the infringement of their journalistic rights. Point taken, but did they complain as vociferously as our civil liberties were systematically diminished after Septemeber 11? One outcome of the affair has been the uniting of media from both the Left and the Right in issuing complaints.

Oklahoma Tornado

I have one take-away from what is a natural disaster/ human tragedy that involved loss of life and large amount of property damage in the city of Moore, OK. Two salient facts emerged in the reporting of the storm’s aftermath: This had happened previously in Moore, and very few homes have a basement. Evidently, given the clay-like composition of the soil in the area, building homes with basements is expensive; as a result, most homes are erected atop concrete slabs. In addition, the citizens, who tend to be politically conservative, have resisted attempts by local government to make basements, or even safe rooms, a requirement in new residential construction. This may be their way of taking a defiant, libertarian position, but, in an ordinary sense, it is an example of finances and reductionist ideology trumping safety and common sense.

Econofeud

Last month, I commented on the controversy in academia over the recent discovery of errors in a 2010 paper by Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff by a University of Massachusetts graduate student (“April Showers”, April 28). We were then witness to “a bunch of academics duking in out in the pages of the New York Times”. Since then, the feud has escalated: Michael Kinsley, putative liberal writing in the New Republic. rebuked Paul Krugman, who himself had previously criticized Reinhart-Rogoff,  While he was at it, Kinsley referred to economist Brad DeLong as Krugman’s "attack dog”. For their part, R-R sent a long letter to Krugman that characterized his criticism of their work as “personal”. Krugman, of course, defended himself is his Times blog. While I was reaching for more popcorn, the inimitable Joe Scarborough chimed in, tweeting that Kinsley had “deboned Paul Krugman.”

While most of the media (the part that is actually interested in this esoteric intramural bickering) has cast the entire affair in terms of Keynesians versus non-Keynesians, I have a different view: On one side, we have serious academics- Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, the well-regarded DeLong, and the equally well-regarded Reinhart and Rogoff. On the other, we have the non-academic, non-economist commentators such as Scarborough and Kinsley. Is this nothing if not another example of the low regard of intellectuals in modern-day America?

Finally, a shout-out goes to Josh Barro, the writer who was profiled recently by Jonathan Chait in The Atlantic. I am glad that his clear thinking and writing are being recognized.