Comments on: Chait Empiricism Watch

By: martu

martu — Tue, 17 Feb 2009 03:42:14 +0000

Well, the difference between being wasteful in 2002 and being wasteful in 2009 is… (ooh, everybody will have to think really hard about this, because there's not like there has been any obvious change in the economy or anything, right?)

By: martu

martu — Mon, 16 Feb 2009 19:42:14 +0000

By: DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Chait Empiricism Watch

DYSPEPSIA GENERATION » Blog Archive » Chait Empiricism Watch — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 22:00:37 +0000

[...] Read it. [...]

By: D. Hume

D. Hume — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 16:34:07 +0000

That makes sense. I have started to notice other commentators misusing that term as well, I was just a bit surprised to see you do it since you were once a graduate student in philosophy like myself, but if the term becomes part of the common parlance I suppose that complaining about its incorrect usage instead of just accepting that it has both an academic and a more popular meaning and speaking accordingly would be as silly as my friends and family having to hear rants that they didn't know what the word valid meant.

By: Will Wilkinson

Will Wilkinson — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 15:09:57 +0000

Sorry if that was obscure. I'm referring back to Chait's ridiculous claim that his politics is simply an application of the findings of empirical research, while everybody else is an evidence-be-damned ideologue.

By: D. Hume

D. Hume — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 14:49:33 +0000

You studied philosophy, you shouldn't be using the term empiricism so wrongly here.

By: Thane

Thane — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 12:39:13 +0000

The other thing that kills me is: the federal government has been spending crazy amounts of money on wars for the past five years. Wouldn't we have seen some miraculous multiplier effect from the trillion plus spent on fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, and if we haven't, doesn't that put the lie to the idea that we can just spend our way to a higher aggregate demand curve.

By: Brian Moore

Brian Moore — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 02:55:01 +0000

People have really gone off the deep end with this economic crisis thing. When people bring up the most absurd of Keynes' statements ( the money in the mineshaft) as good policy instead of crazy-man talk, they've totally lost it. There are a large subset of people who do not care one tiny bit about the facts. They know that if they can craft policy and public opinion on this to their favor, they are set for life. Chait knows which side he's on.

By: Nathan

Nathan — Fri, 13 Feb 2009 00:04:03 +0000

Didn't we basically sell stuff to Europe at astronomical prices for a good 10 years leading up to WWII? All while accumulating much more stable savings in the form of government bonds. The economic recovery was well under way before joining the war when dumping tanks into the ocean was relatively equal to blowing them up with people inside.

By: Thorstein Veblen

Thorstein Veblen — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 23:00:56 +0000

What's wrong with what Chait said? Robert Higgs is a hack...

http://firelarrysummersnow.blogspot.com/

By: Adina

Adina — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:57:16 +0000

I'm most angry about his lazy journalism. He disparages Greg Mankiw for failing to reply to Matt Yglesias' criticism of Mankiw's stimulus proposal, and reads into all these reasons why Mankiw did not or could not reply. Turns out Mankiw indeed gave a (brief) reply to Yglesias in a Feb. 10 blog post. Chait is a lazy journalist, and didn't bother to check before making accusations.

By: John V

John V — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:47:17 +0000

Ha. I like Fishback's summary. I see he got a lot of his points on WW2 from the same source as my comments above: Robert Higgs.

Very good article. Thanks, Will.

By: John V

John V — Thu, 12 Feb 2009 19:37:05 +0000

Chait:

World War II was an effective stimulus that, economically speaking, consisted of 100 percent waste. If war hadn’t broken out, we could have enjoyed the same economic benefit by building all those tanks and planes and dumping them into the ocean.

It’s not that cut and dry at all. Some other major differences were:

-An enormous chunk of the normal workforce (young men) was overseas fighting a war. While “employed” in a manner of speaking, they were not counted as part of the workforce. This is the main reason employment dropped so low.

-price and wage controls along with rationing of goods

-people were not really consuming at normal time rates because of the rationing and controls.

All of this created a great deal of pent up demand and a barrage of consumption after the war as wages and prices moved more freely once the controls were lifted.

Add in that that most of the industrialized was in ruin after the war and you have a perfect storm. None of these factors by themselves would have had the end effect that was seen. It was compounding effect of all of them.