A Carbon Auction?

Robert Reich (hopefully one day my future employer…;) has a lil commentary up on TAP proposing a novel idea for reducing carbon emissions, a “carbon auction”

Companies would have to bid for the right to pollute. And, most ingeniously, the money raised in the auction would be shared equally by all citizens in the form of yearly dividend checks — just like the residents of Alaska now get yearly dividends for their share of the state’s oil revenues.

While this proposal sounds all well and good to progressive ears (make corporations spend money and give that money to the people), it does nothing to reduce carbon emissions from transportation, which account for 511.6 million metric tons of carbon and 1/3 of US emissions.  Not to mention reducing other negative externalities from more people driving. I’m also sceptical is any broad based carbon reduction strategy will be able to survive the inevitable gutting and corruption from various afflicted interests.  Surely there will be some indutsry specific shenanigans for a carbon auction, and while a carbon tax may not be perfect, it is the most likely of any proposal to be applied across the broadest base of carbon emitters.  It’s also unclear how the auction would be implemented, and Reich, probably because this was originally a radio commentary is quite sparse with the details:

In a carbon auction, companies would have to bid against other companies for a portion of the atmosphere they intend to use — within overall limits that reduce pollution levels.

Umm, how exactly would this work.  Part of the atmosphere? Would the government apportion cubic miles of atmosphere that can have X tons of carbon emitted into them?  The one part of this commentary I agree with is that a carbon tax is likely to hit the working and middle classes hardest, but that’s doesn’t have to be a problem.  A carbon tax could be revenue neutral, the revenue from the could be used to cut the payroll tax, increase the EITC and a whole host of other progressive and redistributionist tax strategies.  Furthermore, using the revenue to increase the EITC would actually be more progressive than Reich’s idea of distributing auction income to all citizens, the EITC increase would necessarily be means tested and progressive.   Us liberals should know that just because Greg Mankiw supports something, doesn’t necessarily make it a bad idea.

Mind the Pay Gap

Yglesias links to this graph showing a substantial pay gap between 24 year old men and 24 year old women, which because they’re both just out of school is an “apples to apples’ comparison” and thus evidence of some sort of pay discrimination.  Being a heartless defender of the “pay-patriarchy” it’s incumbent beyond me to explain how this gap isn’t all the result of discrimination.

There is no differentiation between job type men and women chose, (parole officer vs librarian, engineer vs graphic designer, accountant vs PR) so that could skew the results.   Of course, the gaps for job choice are probably the result of socialization and grouping within college towards particular professions due to things like comfort with your gender group (a lot more other girls in an art class than an engineering one), but that’s not discrimination, per se.  Also, some women actually do have kids by the time their 24 or plan to have kids within, say, the next two - four years and will pick a job path accordingly.   The flip side of this is that men are going to enter into careers or tracks with careers that will bring in the income to support a family, in anticipation of their wives leaving the work force, even to parkt time, thus pushing the gap up. This is not to say that pay discrimination doesn’t exist, even in the same job or for the same work, but as seemingly above-ground and respectable studies show, this is maybe 5-10 percent of the gap.  And maybe Yglesias’ comparison isn’t so “apples to apples.”

PS - Sara Mead has a chart showing a pay gap when you control for profession.  I still think most of my above analysis still applies. There is some interesting data in there, like  the pay gap from 94-01 in Education has narrowed from $13000 (35K vs 22K) to $1500 (29600 vs 28100), while the gap in “social and behavioral sciences” has expanded.

Guest Workers

I don’t want to delve into the entire immigration reform debate, FSM knows there’s been enough ink and html spilled on it.  The guest worker program has had some of closest scrutiny and most criticism - from both the nativist/restrictionist/enforcement first right and the economic left.  The best analysis so far, in my humble opinion, has been by Dani Rodrik.

Besides exerting downward pressure on American wages, the biggest concern with the guest worker program is that it will create a disenfranchised, countryless, unintegrated population in the US.  One assumes that because the USA is so sweet, no workers are going to leave when their time is up, thus rendering the program useless - and have even more people “living in  the shadows.”  The example most people bring up is various European guest worker programs that lead to large, unassimilated, restive minority groups in the countries - Algerians in France and Turks in Germany, for example.

This comparison is bunk, by the most simple logic.  Mexico is RIGHT NEXT to the United States, it’s incredibly easy to get from the US to Mexico, and if proper enforcement measures (National ID cards and guest worker ID cards for starters) the enforcement pressure could be high enough that temporary workers would actually leave.  Especially if we offered them the chance to come back after a certain amount of time.

The thing about many Mexican laborers is that they don’t want to stay in the US forever, oftentimes they want to make money here and then go back to Mexico and buy a home and raise a family.  In fact, if we step up enforcement measures on the border, Mexican laborers are less likely to leave on their own accord, because they know they can’t get back.  If we have a verifiable, enforceable and large enough guest worker program, we just might be able to walk the tightrope of enriching Mexican workers, satisfying our need for low skill labor, increasing labor productivity and not creating a restive unassimilated minority group.  It’s worth a shot

PS - Read James Surowiecki on guest workers, we make similar arguments, except he has, like, statistics and stuff.

PPS - We also need to allot more H1-B visas, but that’s a post for a different day.

The Rich vs the Super-Rich

If you’re a populist or have serious, emotional resentments towards the rich or towards the entire issue of income inequality stop reading this post now.

OK, so David Sirota and Matt Taibbi stopped reading, so let’s go.

Kevin Drum is kinda shocked that the Weekly Standard has an article admitting that income inequality is in fact real.  Of course, being the Weekly Standard, it has to have some sort of twist to save itself from the horrors of what could lead into left leaning economic views, and it does this by bemoaning the fact the meager mid level CEOs have nothing on the private equity CEOs:

 But even the most handsomely remunerated corporate chieftain is a pauper compared with the moguls who run Blackstone, KKR, and the other buy-out shops. The average CEO can afford to join a country club, either with his own money or by having the corporation pick up the tab; a private-equity operator can build his own golf course.

Now, to the other 99% of the population, this is just ridiculous.  I’ll expect us all to shed crocodile tears for these put-upon CEOs.  There is however a serious point, and a cute-ish article like Matt Miller’s Fortune piece on the emerging conflict between the rich and superrich, here’s the nut of it:

Here’s my outlandish theory: that economic resentment at the bottom of the top 1 percent of America’s income distribution is the new wild card in public life. Ordinary workers won’t rise up against ultras because they take it as given that “the rich get richer.”

But the hopes and dreams of today’s educated class are based on the idea that market capitalism is a meritocracy. The unreachable success of the superrich shreds those dreams.

“I’ve seen it in my research,” says pollster Doug Schoen, who counsels Michael Bloomberg and Hillary Clinton, among others. “If you look at the lower part of the upper class or the upper part of the upper middle class, there’s a great deal of frustration. These are people who assumed that their hard work and conventional ’success’ would leave them with no worries. It’s the type of rumbling that could lead to political volatility.”

Though it seems baffling and absurd to 99 percent of the population to really care about how the rich feel so inadequate in comparison to the super-rich, it makes more sense than say, resentment from the 25th-27th percentile resentment towards the top ten or top 1 percent.  For one, there is basically no social or cultural inequality between the top 1 and top ten percent, they go to the same schools, hang out in the same country clubs, have vacation homes in the same general areas etc.  So, when noticeable consumptive inequality has sky-rocketed as the top 1/10th incomes has skyrocketed, with seemingly few social or educational differences between the two, the other 9/10s of the top 1 are gonna get pretty pissed off with increasing wealth being shoved in their face every single day. Add on the fact that the super rich are bidding up prices of vacation homes, manipulating the tax system to their advantage (who do you think benefits the most from the proposed elimination of the estate tax?) and quietly mocking the normally rich by driving a spanking new Porsche Turbo instead of the regular rich’s three year old Boxster.

It probably sounds ridiculous to look at these discrepancies and feel bad or think they are important, the top 1% all have good health care, for example.  But as Miller points out, this is where the political will is really going to come from.  People can stand income inequality in two circumstances 1. If they think they can attain that income, or at least their children can and 2.  They don’t have the consumptive inequality rubbed in their faces.  For the merely rich, they are in the same educational, social and cultural class as the super rich- ie they’ve gone through all the required steps that the super-rich have- and the consumptive inequality has only gone up.  This fulfills the two criteria for really, personally, viscerally caring about inequality.

This also illuminates a key aspect to income inequality, much of it is due the top one and, more specifically, top 1/10s income’s going up without abandon.  As Roger Lowenstein pointed out in his NYTM piece, “The real action has occurred between folks in the top percentile — those who, in 2004, earned an average of $1.3 million — and everyone else. (A little thought exercise: if the very upper crust were banished to a Caribbean island, the America that remained would be a lot more egalitarian).” Also, if you want some insight into income inequality read Clive Crook’s soon to be classic on the “income parade”

Between 1966 and 2001, median wage and salary income increased by just 11 percent, after inflation. Income at the 90th percentile (six minutes from the end of the hour-long parade) increased nearly six times as much—by 58 percent. At the 99th percentile (the last thirty-six seconds), the rise was 121 percent. At the 99.9th percentile (3.6 seconds before the end), it was 236 percent. And at the 99.99th percentile (0.36 seconds, representing the 13,000 highest-paid workers in the American economy), the rise was 617 percent.

It’s the conflict between the people whose income has risen by 121 percent and those who’s income has risen by 236 percent where all the action is gonna be.  Buckle in, income inequality is gonna be quite the ride! (In all seriousness, just read the Crook and Miller articles, they’ve sure illuminated my thinking about the issue, Crook’s illustration of the income parade really is great)

Tort Reform Deceptions and Misdirections

Tort Reform is one of those discussions that provides some great anecdotes.  On one hand you have clearly ridiculous lawsuits, like the DC area man suing Korean drycleaners for 58 million dollars because they lost a pair of pants, on the other hand you have John Edwards’  heart wrenching tale of “people like Valerie Lakey, who was the young girl I represented–5 years old, severely injured for life, on a defective swimming pool drain cover. It turns out, the company knew of 12 other children who had either been killed or severely injured by the same problem. … They didn’t tell anybody. They could have fixed it with a 2-cent screw.”  So, some empirical studies that actually calculate the cost of torts on the economy might be a helpful antidote to all these anecdotes.

The Ecnonomist’s Democracy in America blog, a big fan of tort reform, after having a great time making fun of the drycleaner (law)suit, mentions the oft cited Pacific Research Institute study that purportedly shows that torts cost the American economy 865 million dollars a year.  This seems like a huge number, yet also somewhat plausible.  Too bad that known hater of free market capitalism Richard Posner thoroughly debunked the study in his blog with Gary Becker. I won’t recount the entire thing here, you should read it yourself, but here are some highlights:

The $128 billion figure is a transfer, not a cost. But as the authors point out, the opportunity to obtain a wealth transfer can generate a cost–a cost incurred to obtain the transfer (incurring costs to obtain a wealth transfer, when socially unproductive, economists call “rent-seeking”). They assume, without analysis or evidence, that the entire $128 billion is translated into a cost {…}

They add to their new total of $200 billion the $128 billion transfer, for a grand total of $328 billion. The addition is improper, since the transfer is not a cost. They are adding apples and oranges [...]The sum of $328 billion and $359 billion is $687 billion, which is almost $200 billion short of the authors’ grand total of $865 billion. The excess malpractice costs and accidental-death costs they estimate at less than $50 billion, so there is still a big gap. I can’t figure out how they fill it.[...]So far in the report, there is nothing about the benefits of the tort system…

[And now for the knockout punch!]

The authors’ estimate of the benefits (= costs) of the average foreign tort system, when subtracted from the $865 billion “cost” of our system, results (with some further adjustments) in an estimate of an annual excess of costs over benefits of almost $600 billion. The figure, however–the authors’ estimate of the net social loss created by our tort system–is, as I have tried to show, fictitious.

Class, Culture, Brooks

At Tapped, J Goodrich is wondering why David Brooks so carefully avoids class as being the prime mover of the new culture war he predicts between the university educated cosmopolitan elites and the marginalized “rooted nationalists.” Goodrich is right to see that class is part of the equation, but there’s more going on than class vs education.
This column is typical Brooks territory, sceptical of any solid government action to say, reduce inequality and have more people become educated elites that will demand and enjoy a more open society. His focus on human capital is certainly the latent subtext of the article, and since talking about the importance of human capital, in political circles, is essentially a fig leaf for “if there is inequality, higher taxes on the rich and universal health care won’t do much about it because people just need to cultivate human capital to become middle class.”  David Brooks has sung the praises of what the nationalist masses resent - immigration, foreign exchange contact, freer trade and Japanese pitchers - which makes his previous denunciation of the liberal approach to reduces inequality all the more baffling.

Increased growth can surely bring about the type of social liberalism us liberals, and even David Brooks, desires, but only if it’s equal.  If overall productivity and GDP go up, not only do people being to resent the capitalist system, they feel marginalized instead of empowered, as people are when they make large gains in wealth - even if it’s not necessarily equal.  For Brooks then, or for anyone who agrees with this basic analysis, access to education and by extension class differnces, should be the framework in which politics operates - nearly exclusively.

There is, however, a slight nuance to be added in Goodrich’s analysis.  You can easily drop “class” - in the sense of income level - and still maintain the human capital and values that got your parents to that higher class.  For example, the child of two corporate lawyers can go to Harvard, then even get a masters in education at Columbia, and be a high school teacher for their entire life.   Let’s say their dad made 300K all told a year, and the teacher, in equivalent dollars, makes around 30K at first and gets up to 75-80, they’ve dropped from upper middle to middle class, they’ve experienced negative social mobility, but they’ve retained all the markings of their higher class.  Examples like these would appear to prove Brooks’ point, that its the transmuted and essentially heritable human capital that determines success, and thus government intervention should be focused on expanding that.  The problem for Brooks’ vision is that human capital can only move down classes, but it can’t move up, at least not immediately. People don’t suddenly get rich and then acquire the human capital necessary for them to already be there.  So, the educational class distinction is largely a charade, especially considering the positive return on a college degree has shot up since the early 80s.  Brooks will one day have to face the fact that inequality, even in his framework, is a problem, and that serious government intervention is necessary.

PS - If you want some great articles on inequality, you could do worse than reading the entire NY Times magazine devoted to it.

And all the lights that lead us there are blinding

Reading the lovely and talented GFR’s post about “astronomy villages” got me thinking about those fascinating maps you see showing which parts of the world are lit up. Of course, the East coast of the US, Western Europe and Japan are lit up like a box of firecrackers, while Africa is the dark continent and entire stretches of Russia, Australia and Latin America are dim. The most striking spot on the map is the Korean peninsula, the south is very light while the North is strikingly, immediately dark.

I first became familiar with this map as a poster in the physics hallways at my school, it’s supposed to show the harms of light pollution. But look again, where would you rather live? The masses of people in Africa would surely like some light pollution, China’s people have benefited from it’s massive increase in light pollution. This is just another example of how environmentalism is a rich man’s or more accurately, industrialized countries’ game. You don’t really give a crap about being able to see stars if you can’t feed your family or have steady employment. The issue, of course, is that the “light” countries are putting the most carbon in the air. Hopefully there doesn’t have to be a strict choice between the great expansion of positive liberty that industrialization brings and the environmental havoc it could wreak, but environmentalists should recognize that industrialization has brought more good to humanity that anything, and it’s really our choice to make responsible decisions now.

Full Disclosure: I love going to Tahoe and seeing the clear night sky

Comparable Worth - Still a Bad Idea?

In a move that makes everyone want to get silly mustaches, feathered haircuts and an ounce of blow…fair pay is baaaack. Growing up in a household that was pretty freemarket oriented (all my parents and brothers have voted for democrats in every presidential election that they could - we’re a bunch of stinkin’ neoliberals) comparable worth was used as a textbook example of ridiculous Carter era liberal economic policy that the neoliberals thankfully put an end to. I’ve tacked a bit to the left on economic issues (I want higher taxes to pay for healthcare, for example) but Comparable Worth still seems absurd.

Obama has signed on to the Fair Pay Act which would allow for individuals or groups of people to sue a company if there is evidence of “gender discrimination” for different jobs in the company “whose composite of skill, effort, responsibility, and working conditions are equivalent in value, even if the jobs are dissimilar.” In all fairness, some writing against the Fair Pay Act ignores how the legislation is enforced, and make it out to be the “government setting wages,” which the complaint system isn’t, at least not explicitly.

Now, say what you will about the free market in labor, but determining the value of labor by price signaling seems to be something it is very good at. The standard “Econ 101″ case against enforced disequilibrium wages is pretty convincing, if a suit forced up the wages of say, nursing assistants in a hospital,  to be comparable to plumbers, then the hospital would probably hire fewer nurses.

I guess the big Kahuna in this argument isn’t whether there are equilibrium wages, or if the price signaling for the price of labor is effective, but what the extent and nature of “wage discrimination” is, and how the government should react to it. From Fortune’s editorial:

Or maybe not. June O’Neill, a certifiably female economist who served as director of the Congressional Budget Office under President Clinton, wrote a peer-reviewed paper for the American Economic Review (May 2003), trying to account for the pay gap. What she found was that women are much more likely over the course of their lives to cut back their hours or quit work altogether than men. That matters, because even though the BLS was comparing full-time workers, if you go part-time or take years out of the labor force, that has an effect on earnings down the line, due to loss of seniority or missed promotions.

More precisely, of women aged 25-44 with young children, more than a third were out of the labor force; of those women who did have jobs, 30% worked part-time. (The comparable numbers for men were 4% out of the labor force and 2% working part-time).

All told, women are more than twice as likely to work part-time as men and over the course of their lifetimes, work outside the home for 40% fewer years than men. That accounts for a significant chunk of the pay gap. Then there is a more subtle factor. Despite the many advances the women’s movement has brought the U.S., what it hasn’t done, thank heavens, is make men and women the same. The simple fact is - and there is nothing nasty or conspiratorial about it - the sexes continue to choose different avenues of study and different types of jobs.

Here’s an illustrative example. The college majors with the top starting salaries, according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers, are: chemical engineering (almost $60,000), computer engineering, electrical engineering, industrial engineering, mechanical engineering. Men make up about 80% of engineering majors. Women predominate among liberal arts majors - whose salaries start at a little more than $30,000. Putting it all together, O¹Neill figures that these differences - in choice of work, years in the workforce, and hours of work - could account for as much as 97.5% of the differences in pay between men and women. “The unadjusted gender gap,” she concludes, “can be explained to a large extent by non-discriminatory factors.” [emphasis mine]

I’ve yet to hear a comprehensive, logical, evidence based attack on this set of arguments. It seems basically true to me, and makes me incredibly skeptical that A. there’s widespread, explicit “discrimination” going on among employers against women’s work and b. the problem seems so structural that intervening at the late stage of actually getting paid for “women’s work” looks like it will cause more harm than good.

The wage gap is not some totem to gender discrimination, the way some make it out to be, if it was, it would stagnant at 81 percent forever. It has, of course, gone up as more women have entered the labor force for longer periods of time. This is where the government intervention ought to be, ensuring that a woman can, more than so now, have kids and not totally drop out of the labor force by thinks like government subsidies for child care, ensuring access to contraception, overturning the Hyde Amendment, strict enforcement against pay discrimination for the same work, enforcements of pregnancy discrimination laws and the like would all be positive steps for working women. Having congressional action amending Title VII to essentially overturn Ledbetter vs Goodyear should be an immediate action for the Democratic congress as well. Intervening at such a late stage as the Fair Pay Act does, on the other hand, seems more likely to make women unemployed and wreak havoc on the American economy, if enacted on any large scale.

A Pox Upon the Heterodox!

Chris Hayes article on the marginalization of “heterodox” economics by the “neoclassical orthodoxy” has made the rounds. If you want an indepth discussion, check out TPM Cafe’s great roundtable on it.

I think the discussion is a bit confused. What is the problem? Is it that economists’ methodology leads them to be in virtual lock step on such issues as trade and then scorn and reject dissenters like Alan Binder?

The issue here seems to be about what the proper scope for economics is, not whether mainstream economics is the best descriptive framework for economic acitivity.

Neoclassical economics, or just mainstream economists, is a set of tools. It’s a way to analyze the productive and consumptive activity and interactions of people. It uses certain terminology, ideas and theorems to do this. There is, of course, a ton of disagreement over nearly everything. With Keynesians and Neoclassicists, there’s debates about price stickiness and menu costs, for example. There isn’t a ton of debate about how to look at such problems, however. Economics, at its base, is a descriptive, empirical exercise, not a proscriptive one. Dani Rodrik nails it:

To me it represents nothing other than a methodological predilection for deriving aggregate social phenomena from individual behavior–and as such it is a very useful discipline for any social science. You say people have some preferences, they face certain constraints, take others’ actions into account, and go from there. Neoclassical economics teaches you how to think, not what to think.

He and Paul Krugman both take no issue with the methodology, they just reach different conclusions than many of their colleagues.

David Ruccio, heterodox extraodrnaire, wants to tear down the whole artifice, and take a dump on Adam Smith’s grave while he’s at it:

We do heterodox economics, or what some refer to as political economy—as against economics (which, as Chris correctly argues, has become identified with a tiny number of theoretical approaches). We write about rates of exploitation and the role of power in increasing inequality and the existence of patriarchy and structural racism. Not only do we want to argue that economic actors are sometimes irrational or guided by norms and values; some of us also want to analyze economic institutions and events without even starting from individual actors. Or efficiency. Or constrained optimization.

Ruccio doesn’t have a great explanatory artifice, at least one that compares to the mainstream. In a Kuhnian sense, the contradictions and anomalies haven’t piled up so that a new approach is necessary. Ruccio acknowledges that what he is doing is different, he doesn’t want to talk about what most economists talk about, he wants to talk about exploitation, structural racism, inequality etc. It should be no surprise that he is marginalized from the mainstream

But where do the more moderate left-liberals, the Galbraiths, Blinders and Rodriks fit in. They don’t want to burn down the building, they just have some concerns about the effects of, say, offshoring on the economic security of American workers. They suffer from a conceptual disconnect between economics and politics. Every economist knows that trade which exploits comparative advantages in production encourages growth in GDP and maximizes efficiency. Immigration too, besides George Borjas, most economists agree that relatively open immigration will encourage growth and raise the incomes massively of many people.

Where the mainstream methodology begins to affect policy conclusions is in the relevant moral community. Low skilled immigration from Mexico, for instance, raises the wages many times of the immigrants themselves, while lowering or at least stagnating the wages of low skilled American workers. Offshoring too, helps out Indian workers much more than it hurts Americans. And the approach of mainstream economics, looking at aggregate phenomena, will (nearly) always say that increased trade and immigration are good. But economists aren’t philosophers, they can’t necessarily determine, by way of their economic training, the best or must just way to distribute or encourage the distribution of goods. Their training as economists just tells them the most efficient way to increase the economic welfare of the aggregate whole of everyone.

This odd sort of aggregate comsopolitanism also drives much of the division when discussing inequality. The mainstream economist will be worried about aggregate growth and median income, but those who are more concerned with politics will have a broader discussion of the harms of inequality, discussing non economic goods for example. The mainstream economists aren’t necessarily wrong, it’s more of a “blind men and the elephant” situation.

PS - Alex Tabarrok and Bryan Caplan have good posts about trade and the relevant moral community, it’s good to see economists discuss these issues more forthrightly.

Christopher Hayes - Secret Straussian?

In an otherwise interesting, important and surely contentious article that I’ll post about in depth later, Chris Hayes writes a bizarre paragraph that makes one wonder about the quality of The Nation’s editors.

So extreme is the marginalization of heterodox economists, most people don’t even know they exist. Despite the fact that as many as one in five professional economists belongs to a professional association that might be described as heterodox, the phrase “heterodox economics” has appeared exactly once in the New York Times since 1981. During that same period “intelligent design,” a theory endorsed by not a single published, peer-reviewed piece of scholarship, has appeared 367 times.

Ok, this is stupid for a few reasons. One, ‘heterodox economics’ as Hayes explains, is not a term of art. It’s an imperfect phrase used to describe a disparate group of economists who don’t have much in common besides a rejection or questioning of the assumptions, methodology and conclusions of the “neoclassical orthodoxy.” Intelligent Design, on the other hand, is a term of art used by its proponents like William Dembski, Michael Behe and those in the Discovery Institute. It actually purports describes a whole set of postulations about the nature of life on earth, and is rather unified, notwithstanding its lack of falsifiablilty or scientific rigor.

Why now, you may ask, would the New York Times be willing to write about an oft derided, nonscientific fig leaf for creationism? I mean, they oppose right wing economic policies, and yet don’t give the ‘heterodox economists’ any love. It’s because Intelligent Design is so dumb, so contrary to evolution. It’s because Bush said they should teach the controversy, its because three GOP candidates don’t believe in evolution, it’s because many Inteligent Design’s proponents try to gussy up Williams Jennings Bryant style creationism in scientific garb, and have a knack for self promotion. Thus the NY Times covers it.

Surely Hayes knows all of this, yet still manages to throw in this misleading non sequiter into his article. Are Nation readers this dumb? Are their editors so foolish? Or, in a suprising Straussian move, is Hayes’ esoteric message that ‘heterodox economics’ is, in fact, on par with I.D.?