I think Stewart has pretty much always been like this (saying this as a longtime fan). His political sensibility is essentially in the tradition of Carlin’s Cranky Sarcastic Guy Populism. Between The Man and “Ugh, Capitalism”, you had The System as a reliable target of critique and explanation for evil in the world. This makes them excellent satirists, but their politics is primarily negative. Whenever either attempt to wade into constructive policy analysis it becomes pretty clear that they are not particularly informed or cautious thinkers. In Stewart’s case, this first became obvious for me I think in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Cranky Sarcastic Guy Populism occasionally involves doing some “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Inveighing against avatars of The System, and this can be cathartic, especially if it is directed at somebody who is deservingly unsympathetic (Carlson is most famous, but Jim Kramer or Judith Miller also come to mind) or issues with obvious moral clarity (the 9/11 firefighters stuff).
Stewart’s problem is that this kind of ate his brand, and he’s been doing less comedy and more self-righteous pontificating in his late career
It took a couple of paragraphs to realize that the pronoun here referred to Jon Stewart and not to the guest, “… Richard Thaler where he revealed that despite his nearly 30 years as a prominent commentator on American politics and policy, he has no idea…” so maybe replace it in the first instance with “Stewart’s”.
Idk if you can assume readers know what you know (or think what you think) about who both people are in this sentence.
This piece is kind of strange in that it is ostensibly a rebuttal of left wing critiques of economics, but it engages in what's core to that critique - there is no such thing as "economics." Ask economic questions are subject to internal scrutiny and controversy, as is true in any site of human academic or intellectual endeavor. For a very long time, conservatives and free marketers have tried to suggest that all economic questions are settled and that "economics says X," but economics doesn't say anything; it makes no more sense than saying "politics says x." It's all contested. And while this has been a left-left critique of the use of economics in political argument, it's also become a pretty standard issue progressive one too. Paul Krugman made great hay out of the abuses of "economics 101 says," in his arguments about freshwater vs saltwater economic schools, for example.
The classic case of misapplied "economics 101 says" is the minimum wage. For years, free market types insisted that $15/hour minimum wages would cause mass unemployment - "it's Econ 101!" But now we have a mountain of empirical data showing that that hasn't happened and the $15/hour is a banal fact of life in many places. Of course some people still insist that it kills jobs, but that's the whole point, right - "economics" never says anything. It's all debatable, and saying "it's Econ 101" is just a way to suggest objective unanimity where there is none.
There's more consensus amongst economists on some issues than others. I.e. apparently some claims about the negative effects of rent controls really do seem pretty widely agreed on by professionals, and certainly vanishingly few professionals seem to be confident those criticisms are false: https://prospect.org/2023/05/16/2023-05-16-economists-hate-rent-control/ 81-2%!
Just because right-wingers lie/mistakenly claim that there is an economic consensus in favour of free markets when there isn't, doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to economists when there *is* a consensus, including even when there is a consensus in favour of free market ideas, as in rent control or probably some issues about trade*. (It might be that we shouldn't listen to them even in that case, but it's a separate issue from "they never agree", which is just false.)
There's also an issue here about comparing the economic consensus to realistic alternatives, rather than to perfection. Let's stipulate that there was once a mostly wrong economic consensus on the minimum wage-which is my understanding too, but I'm no expert. How many times were people who disagreed with the economic consensus wrong, though? Even hard science is often wrong and later corrected, but nobody sensible says don't listen to hard science just because of that.
And even where disagreement amongst economists is currently broad and intractable the right reaction is probably not to just go "oh, I'll disregard economists and form my own view then", and then become *highly* confident in your view, or at least not unless economic "expertise" is entirely fake. If experts can't agree, you probably can't work out the right view from first principles either. And indeed, even if economic expertise is fake, the lack of alternative "real" experts, also probably suggests working out the correct view is hard.
"Even hard science is often wrong and later corrected, but nobody sensible says don't listen to hard science just because of that."
The thing is, when you are wrong about something that is very critical to peoples lives they take it personally. COVID really broke a lot of peoples brains because the communication of the medical communities consensus was constantly changing which created the perception that they were "wrong" about things which made people upset!
That more than anything is what this steward interview struck me as, Stewart being a political animal was/is exposed to the kind of rightwing hack economics that the republican party is constantly peddling, which shapes his perception! If the world of economics wants to be understood by the layman, or even the politically engaged lay person they need good communicators.
This is very much a complete misunderstanding of that debate.
Economics is a mode of thinking-- theory tied to empirical application. Economies are hugely complicated. No actual economist was insisting that "a $15 minimum wage means we're certain to get mass unemployment." What economics told us was that setting a price floor on labor was likely to, at some point, all things being equal, cause a scarcity of it. But all things are damn near never equal. What actual economists did was... study the empirical effects. The seminal empirical study on the subject was done by Alan Krueger, who was very much a card-carrying economist. Now, did his study demonstrate that minimum wages don't have any effect on employment, and that we should raise the minimum wage to $70 an hour to make everyone rich? Of course not. Nor would he make that claim. Nor does "economics say" that Policy X is better than Policy Y. Economics suggests that incentives matter, and that those incentives shape behavior, both in individuals and in the aggregate. "Krueger says minimum wages have no effect on employment, ever" is a much much much dumber and more boneheaded takeaway than "minimum wage hikes always reduce employment." And that's not because the latter is thoughtful or wise.
No, economics says a lot. And Stewart's characterization was silly and wrong. You are making the same mistake as Stewart did. Just because "some people" say stupid things about the minimum wage means nothing. And I do not know any economists who believe all economic questions are settled.
Actual life is more messy than models, but the laws of economics still hold. You raise the cost of something eventually you get less of it.
When I go shopping, I see all the self check out stands, and many fast food restaurants have turned the kiosk around and are letting customers place their own orders.
Not to mention the places that just go out of business.
"But 20 years later, that argument doesn’t hold water. "
It didn't really hold water then, you don't have John Kerry on for the laughs. Comedy isn't a free pass to smuggle your politic views past criticism.
These type of shows that mix politics and entertainment love this excuse but even South Park was rightly criticized for there ManBearPig and later tried to make up for that in show. South Park was also on Comedy Central and was a bunch of construction paper boys instead of a man at a desk in a suit.
Penn and Teller who also had a sort of Libertarian version of Adam Ruins Everything also had the same type of misses. Many of their episodes were pretty apolitical but they also choose to cross into politics and deserve the criticism when they get things wrong.
Jon Stewart also revealed he knew very little about pediatric gender medicine when he hounded the AG of Arkansas on the subject. But from his imperious and patronizing position and his condescending tone, it seemed to the casual viewer that he must've known more than the AG on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPmjNYt71fk
I’m a regular listener to the Jon Stewart podcast you’re right he does bring on professionals and influential politicians as well as subject matter experts. The number of times that he will say in an interview oh that is so interesting and try to learn from his guest is countless.
I would agree the podcast last week was not great, but I think at least part of that had to do with the guest the “expert” was almost impossible to understand between his speech, cadence and the way he was stepping around ideas and not modifying them to meet his audience. If you go on the Jon Stewart podcast you’re not trying to reach people who have taken advanced economics. Also, as someone who took Econ 101 and really didn’t understand it. I was looking forward to actually learning something, and I came away from that interview, extremely disappointed and more confused than when I started just like Jon Stewart.
I would agree with one of the previous comments is interesting that you write this article the day you release a Ross Douthat interview. Who changes his mind all the time.
Not sure why expert is in quotes but it isn't like the guy wandered onto set, Stewarts show booked him.
As a listener it makes sense for you to go in wanting to learn new things but Stewart is in his 60s and has been a political commentator for decades, his time to learn about economics shouldn't be this far in on a recorded podcast.
I would guess he does understand more than came through but his goal is more zingers than rigor.
This 100%. Thaler just isn’t a good communicator of economics for the general public. You can’t say things like (paraphrasing from memory) “Well you should set a price such that the market clears” and expect that anyone who isn’t already an econ nerd will understand you.
Communicating about economics to the general public is a genuinely difficult task though, because it is a pretty technical field. Core ideas like marginality, pareto efficiency, and economic value are all unintuitive and must be understood simultaneously to grasp a lot of econ concepts. None of that is to say it’s impossible to be a good economics communicator - it’s just a skill in and of itself, separate from the skill of being a good economist.
Yes re transmitting but no re understanding. I don’t think you can expect a comedian who covers all sorts of political (and non-political) topics to have even a solid econ-101 level understanding of economics - it’s just too technical. And I’d be willing to bet that more than half of what Thaler said just went straight over stewart’s head.
Difficult isn't the same as impossible, I think there is a market (no pun intended) on the liberal left for someone who can explain economic theory in easy to understand terms, but more often than not economists without intending to come across as uh, cold at best and sociopathic at worst when it comes to talking about addressing peoples everyday monetary worries.
For example there was a viral post on twitter where a economist said that assuming no increase in supply, an apartment/home near a hospital should always go to a high paid doctor over a low paid service sector worker, therefore it's good the doctor could afford it and the worker could not. Which might be the worst possible way you could present the utility of high compensation!
It’s a peculiar problem to the left that their activist class treats all social issues as morality plays where any scarcity of goods or services, or any issue with their distribution must be a result of pantomime villains (“the rich”) hoarding resources, and the way to solve those issues must be to punish them enough.
The one thing my economics education taught me is that incentives matter, and you can get a whole lot of progress just by getting them right. Certain very rich people very much don’t help by competing Western European-level marginal tax rates to Hitler invading Poland. But we could go a long way toward making life a lot better for a lot of people if we could just think about economics as a mode of thinking that helps us to understand individual and collective economic behavior, and use it as a tool to order how we think about designing public policy.
FWIW It seems the right has its share of social issue bugbears, like "immigrants" or "the woke" being the scapegoat for all sorts of things. I think it's more a sign that the partisans of both the left and the right in this moment of US history are led more by their heart than their head.
Certainly right. Though there's also no longer a technocratic class on the right. At this point, it's all one of two categories-- aggrieved white nationalists peddling white rage, or super rich people weaponizing white rage to deliver themselves tax cuts/deregulation. The latter category used to drive the ship-- they'd throw the white power doofus class some red meat around election time, then pass tax cuts for themselves when they got into power. Then Trump arrived, and the animals were let out of their cages. Now we've got ICE out there harassing random brown people. It's not handing the donor class much to point out that, while they certainly didn't care much about the welfare of brown people or immigrants, they weren't actively interested in punishing them. They mostly just didn't think about them at all. But now the monster's out of that cage, and we're getting truly horrific stuff.
Let’s not credit the field of economists or economists generally too much.
1) There is no other discipline that is so rife with disrespect and disregard for other fields, other toolboxes and other concerns.
2) There is a seed of valid criticism in Stewart’s ignorance. Economics does very poorly with the idea of values other than monetary values. Money was a GREAT invention, and it really does allow the broader exchange of rather dissimilar goods in larger markets. But not everything important can be priced. And economics does an incredibly poor job of accounting for that fundamental fact.
3) There are LOT of economists, and far more people who have studied economics. The field should have a lot more successes than we see, given their numbers, funding and standing in elite circles.
4) It seems to odd to credit economics for controlled trials—something that has long been used in lab science and medical research. It took economics far too long to adopt this basic tools—which gets back to the disciplinary arrogance I mentioned above.
5) Let’s not forget the over-reliance on linear regression—perhaps with transformed variables and perhaps with interaction terms. That’s undergraduate-level statistics. Sure, it seems reasonable when one lack the substantive expertise to build a model that might actually resemble reality—but, again, that’s the disciplinary arrogance undermining the value of the field again.,
"But not everything important can be priced. And economics does an incredibly poor job of accounting for that fundamental fact."
No it doesn't. It says very clearly that economics is the field for understand markets and how people and economies interact with each other.
It's job isn't to order everybody's whole life and makes no claim to. There are other fields for other areas of life, and many things will be left up to people/politics.
Economics will tell you what the most efficient solution is and what the trade offs are. But then people need to evaluate alternatives.
And yet, many economists and policy makers present it like it is.
They should all be pointing out these limitations, so the findings are not over read. But they rarely, if ever, do that.
You seem to be missing my point about the necessary arrogance into which so many economist are trained. It is far more a cultural problem in field than a technical problem.
I never noticed any of that from any of the economics text books I read, or in the economics classes I took.
Traditional economic theory is pretty clear on this. Of course I'm sure there are some people somewhere on the internet that gets out over their skies.
You’ve never noticed economists working outside of their expertise in policy areas in which they don’t have substantive expertise, and yet don’t have domain experts as co-authors?
You have seen the textbooks argue that the economics disciplinary lens and toolbox are limited and should NOT be used in a whole bunch of ways or applications?
The textbooks taught the implications and consequences of the fact that the assumption of rationale is false? That means information is never perfect and almost always asymmetrical?
People are allowed to have opinions about subjects not in their area of expertise. That doesn't say anything about what the dominant view is of the subject area.
The textbooks I've read and the classes I've taken all were very clear that economics provided plenty of answers about efficiency and tradeoffs, but that actual value judgements would need to be made by people and politics.
IE policy X will do Y, but will have Z tradeoffs, then politicians can decide whether the benefits from Y, are worth the tradeoffs of Z. Doubly so when the tradeoffs from Z are not easily quantifiable.
For example, what are the non economic values of having national parks or other large undeveloped plots of land.
1) I have opinions about many things that I do not opine on professionally, that I do not clam in my disciplinary tools box and lens are well suited. That’s disciplinary humility.
2) is infer that you agree that your economics textbooks do NOT discuss those key things that I pointed out. As a discipline, Econ is very bad a recognizing its limitations. That is what I am saying.
3) You are confirming everything I am saying by ducking the issues have raised , insisting the theory is goo when well applied and pointing to a couple disclaimers I class.
The fact that you don’t see these things is kinda my point. Econ is very bad about recognizing this. And so many economists inject the disciplinary arrogance and it becomes part of their lens for everything.
What was interesting is that Jon Stewart didn't just come across as an ignoramus. He managed to seem both smart and stupid at the same time. He was like a student asking good questions but then also adding very off-base commentary.
Is it true that hiking the minimum wage doesn't lead to job loss? I'm not sure I've seen that research.
1) I've never heard any economist saying raising the minimum wage would cause a fatal blow to an industry, they are typically making the point that there are tradeoffs - higher wages will mean less jobs because the profits are the profits and using those profits to pay some people more means some people can't be paid at all (or will need to be part-time).
2) Is it not the empirical case that minimum wages do in fact decrease industry specific-employment? I've seen plenty of research on California's AB 1228 leading to slowing growth in jobs for the fast food industry, etc.
Good points re Stewart. He regularly doesn’t know what he’s talking about and so—entertaining though he can be—he doesn’t contribute much if anything to productive discourse. So if there’s a general principle that we shouldn’t listen to (or certainly promote) people who don’t contribute to productive discourse, why did the Argument post an interview with Ross Douthat this same morning? The justification can’t be “he has a major platform” because that applies to Stewart as well.
I think he often knows more than his guests! He’ll often okay dumb to get his guest to explain something further. Or just to a subtle way of correcting or redirecting. But it’s crazy to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s shockingly well-informed.
My grand theory of Stewart is his worldview hasn’t evolved beyond the Bush-era. He has this view of economists because that’s what Bush administration economists were advocating for. It’s as simple as that.
Many many people (including people deeply invested in politics) have not taken Intro to Economics. I always say that if the solution to whatever is, "if everyone would just..." then you don't have a solution. Since everyone will not just understand economics, I don't know what the solution is... But I agree that a lot of political to debate comes down to different information and different understandings of how the world "obviously" works.
I think the key failure of the reposes to the 2008 GFC was that no prominent Wall Street executive was criminally prosecuted. A handful of examples would have mattered a great deal. And having studied the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy investigation, I thought it was very clear that Dick Fuld the CEO was guilty of fraud.
This is very much wrong. There was a lot of stupidity among the highest levels of the Wall Street class. There was very little of what is legally cognizable as fraud. Lehman found itself dangerously levered and overexposed to residential real estate. That’s dumb. It’s not fraudulent. And Dick Fuld’s net worth fell off a cliff as a result of its failure. Until the day collapsed, the vast majority of his wealth was in Lehman stock. When it went bankrupt, he instantly went from mega rich to ordinary rich. No one should cry tears for him, but this idea that he knowingly made false representations of material fact with an intent to deceive just doesn’t begin to hold up.
You mean repo 105? Yes, I’m well aware of it. Were they questionable? Yes, absolutely. Criminal fraud? By Dick Fuld specifically? Again, not even close.
You’re making a legal claim here. Specifically a criminal legal claim. It’s nowhere close to right.
The conclusion of the investigation was that Fuld was likely guilty of fraud. If it’s not fraud to “paint” your balance sheet at the end of every quarter for a day to appear less leveraged and not disclose it, then your definition of fraud mystifies me.
I still think I’m talking to an LLM. What;’s your human name?
I confess I don't necessarily understand the criticism of Stewart on this one? He isn't claiming that a carbon tax is not a correct idea. He is saying it is a politically dead idea.
This is no different than the sugar taxes that some cities have done. Ostensibly, there is absolutely no reason adding costs to things won't impact their use. If you think you can run on that as a solution to obesity, though, good luck?
Is the complaint that populists just don't care about economic theory? Hard to disagree there. But that is almost baked into the idea of populism, no? Old school populism, even.
He may not have articulated it well, but his point on carbon taxes is basically the same as Victor and Cullenward’s thesis that carbon pricing has largely failed because its political economy challenges are inherent, not incidental: https://www.brookings.edu/books/making-climate-policy-work/.
I think Stewart has pretty much always been like this (saying this as a longtime fan). His political sensibility is essentially in the tradition of Carlin’s Cranky Sarcastic Guy Populism. Between The Man and “Ugh, Capitalism”, you had The System as a reliable target of critique and explanation for evil in the world. This makes them excellent satirists, but their politics is primarily negative. Whenever either attempt to wade into constructive policy analysis it becomes pretty clear that they are not particularly informed or cautious thinkers. In Stewart’s case, this first became obvious for me I think in the aftermath of the financial crisis.
Cranky Sarcastic Guy Populism occasionally involves doing some “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!” Inveighing against avatars of The System, and this can be cathartic, especially if it is directed at somebody who is deservingly unsympathetic (Carlson is most famous, but Jim Kramer or Judith Miller also come to mind) or issues with obvious moral clarity (the 9/11 firefighters stuff).
Stewart’s problem is that this kind of ate his brand, and he’s been doing less comedy and more self-righteous pontificating in his late career
It took a couple of paragraphs to realize that the pronoun here referred to Jon Stewart and not to the guest, “… Richard Thaler where he revealed that despite his nearly 30 years as a prominent commentator on American politics and policy, he has no idea…” so maybe replace it in the first instance with “Stewart’s”.
Idk if you can assume readers know what you know (or think what you think) about who both people are in this sentence.
This piece is kind of strange in that it is ostensibly a rebuttal of left wing critiques of economics, but it engages in what's core to that critique - there is no such thing as "economics." Ask economic questions are subject to internal scrutiny and controversy, as is true in any site of human academic or intellectual endeavor. For a very long time, conservatives and free marketers have tried to suggest that all economic questions are settled and that "economics says X," but economics doesn't say anything; it makes no more sense than saying "politics says x." It's all contested. And while this has been a left-left critique of the use of economics in political argument, it's also become a pretty standard issue progressive one too. Paul Krugman made great hay out of the abuses of "economics 101 says," in his arguments about freshwater vs saltwater economic schools, for example.
The classic case of misapplied "economics 101 says" is the minimum wage. For years, free market types insisted that $15/hour minimum wages would cause mass unemployment - "it's Econ 101!" But now we have a mountain of empirical data showing that that hasn't happened and the $15/hour is a banal fact of life in many places. Of course some people still insist that it kills jobs, but that's the whole point, right - "economics" never says anything. It's all debatable, and saying "it's Econ 101" is just a way to suggest objective unanimity where there is none.
There's more consensus amongst economists on some issues than others. I.e. apparently some claims about the negative effects of rent controls really do seem pretty widely agreed on by professionals, and certainly vanishingly few professionals seem to be confident those criticisms are false: https://prospect.org/2023/05/16/2023-05-16-economists-hate-rent-control/ 81-2%!
Just because right-wingers lie/mistakenly claim that there is an economic consensus in favour of free markets when there isn't, doesn't mean we shouldn't listen to economists when there *is* a consensus, including even when there is a consensus in favour of free market ideas, as in rent control or probably some issues about trade*. (It might be that we shouldn't listen to them even in that case, but it's a separate issue from "they never agree", which is just false.)
There's also an issue here about comparing the economic consensus to realistic alternatives, rather than to perfection. Let's stipulate that there was once a mostly wrong economic consensus on the minimum wage-which is my understanding too, but I'm no expert. How many times were people who disagreed with the economic consensus wrong, though? Even hard science is often wrong and later corrected, but nobody sensible says don't listen to hard science just because of that.
And even where disagreement amongst economists is currently broad and intractable the right reaction is probably not to just go "oh, I'll disregard economists and form my own view then", and then become *highly* confident in your view, or at least not unless economic "expertise" is entirely fake. If experts can't agree, you probably can't work out the right view from first principles either. And indeed, even if economic expertise is fake, the lack of alternative "real" experts, also probably suggests working out the correct view is hard.
*Krugman is a free trade guy, I think.
"Even hard science is often wrong and later corrected, but nobody sensible says don't listen to hard science just because of that."
The thing is, when you are wrong about something that is very critical to peoples lives they take it personally. COVID really broke a lot of peoples brains because the communication of the medical communities consensus was constantly changing which created the perception that they were "wrong" about things which made people upset!
That more than anything is what this steward interview struck me as, Stewart being a political animal was/is exposed to the kind of rightwing hack economics that the republican party is constantly peddling, which shapes his perception! If the world of economics wants to be understood by the layman, or even the politically engaged lay person they need good communicators.
"This piece is kind of strange in that it is ostensibly a rebuttal of left wing critiques of economics"
No it's not. Read it again. It's about Jon Stewart and the perceived rejection of economics across the political spectrum.
This is very much a complete misunderstanding of that debate.
Economics is a mode of thinking-- theory tied to empirical application. Economies are hugely complicated. No actual economist was insisting that "a $15 minimum wage means we're certain to get mass unemployment." What economics told us was that setting a price floor on labor was likely to, at some point, all things being equal, cause a scarcity of it. But all things are damn near never equal. What actual economists did was... study the empirical effects. The seminal empirical study on the subject was done by Alan Krueger, who was very much a card-carrying economist. Now, did his study demonstrate that minimum wages don't have any effect on employment, and that we should raise the minimum wage to $70 an hour to make everyone rich? Of course not. Nor would he make that claim. Nor does "economics say" that Policy X is better than Policy Y. Economics suggests that incentives matter, and that those incentives shape behavior, both in individuals and in the aggregate. "Krueger says minimum wages have no effect on employment, ever" is a much much much dumber and more boneheaded takeaway than "minimum wage hikes always reduce employment." And that's not because the latter is thoughtful or wise.
Can we just skip ahead to you agreeing to debate Demsas and then you backing out?
No, economics says a lot. And Stewart's characterization was silly and wrong. You are making the same mistake as Stewart did. Just because "some people" say stupid things about the minimum wage means nothing. And I do not know any economists who believe all economic questions are settled.
Actual life is more messy than models, but the laws of economics still hold. You raise the cost of something eventually you get less of it.
When I go shopping, I see all the self check out stands, and many fast food restaurants have turned the kiosk around and are letting customers place their own orders.
Not to mention the places that just go out of business.
"But 20 years later, that argument doesn’t hold water. "
It didn't really hold water then, you don't have John Kerry on for the laughs. Comedy isn't a free pass to smuggle your politic views past criticism.
These type of shows that mix politics and entertainment love this excuse but even South Park was rightly criticized for there ManBearPig and later tried to make up for that in show. South Park was also on Comedy Central and was a bunch of construction paper boys instead of a man at a desk in a suit.
Penn and Teller who also had a sort of Libertarian version of Adam Ruins Everything also had the same type of misses. Many of their episodes were pretty apolitical but they also choose to cross into politics and deserve the criticism when they get things wrong.
Jon Stewart has been trying to have it both ways for 20+ years now...
And smugly dismissing anyone who points it out.
Jon Stewart also revealed he knew very little about pediatric gender medicine when he hounded the AG of Arkansas on the subject. But from his imperious and patronizing position and his condescending tone, it seemed to the casual viewer that he must've known more than the AG on the subject. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NPmjNYt71fk
I’m a regular listener to the Jon Stewart podcast you’re right he does bring on professionals and influential politicians as well as subject matter experts. The number of times that he will say in an interview oh that is so interesting and try to learn from his guest is countless.
I would agree the podcast last week was not great, but I think at least part of that had to do with the guest the “expert” was almost impossible to understand between his speech, cadence and the way he was stepping around ideas and not modifying them to meet his audience. If you go on the Jon Stewart podcast you’re not trying to reach people who have taken advanced economics. Also, as someone who took Econ 101 and really didn’t understand it. I was looking forward to actually learning something, and I came away from that interview, extremely disappointed and more confused than when I started just like Jon Stewart.
I would agree with one of the previous comments is interesting that you write this article the day you release a Ross Douthat interview. Who changes his mind all the time.
Not sure why expert is in quotes but it isn't like the guy wandered onto set, Stewarts show booked him.
As a listener it makes sense for you to go in wanting to learn new things but Stewart is in his 60s and has been a political commentator for decades, his time to learn about economics shouldn't be this far in on a recorded podcast.
I would guess he does understand more than came through but his goal is more zingers than rigor.
This 100%. Thaler just isn’t a good communicator of economics for the general public. You can’t say things like (paraphrasing from memory) “Well you should set a price such that the market clears” and expect that anyone who isn’t already an econ nerd will understand you.
Communicating about economics to the general public is a genuinely difficult task though, because it is a pretty technical field. Core ideas like marginality, pareto efficiency, and economic value are all unintuitive and must be understood simultaneously to grasp a lot of econ concepts. None of that is to say it’s impossible to be a good economics communicator - it’s just a skill in and of itself, separate from the skill of being a good economist.
This is why Krugman is so popular, because he's unusually good at explaining econ to laypeople.
Yep, Krugman very much fills that niche.
Isn't that the job of Jon Stewart in this case though? To faithfully understand and transmit the ideas in a more understandable way for his audience.
I understand that there's a need to put his own spin on it, but being incurious can't be it.
Yes re transmitting but no re understanding. I don’t think you can expect a comedian who covers all sorts of political (and non-political) topics to have even a solid econ-101 level understanding of economics - it’s just too technical. And I’d be willing to bet that more than half of what Thaler said just went straight over stewart’s head.
Difficult isn't the same as impossible, I think there is a market (no pun intended) on the liberal left for someone who can explain economic theory in easy to understand terms, but more often than not economists without intending to come across as uh, cold at best and sociopathic at worst when it comes to talking about addressing peoples everyday monetary worries.
For example there was a viral post on twitter where a economist said that assuming no increase in supply, an apartment/home near a hospital should always go to a high paid doctor over a low paid service sector worker, therefore it's good the doctor could afford it and the worker could not. Which might be the worst possible way you could present the utility of high compensation!
It’s a peculiar problem to the left that their activist class treats all social issues as morality plays where any scarcity of goods or services, or any issue with their distribution must be a result of pantomime villains (“the rich”) hoarding resources, and the way to solve those issues must be to punish them enough.
The one thing my economics education taught me is that incentives matter, and you can get a whole lot of progress just by getting them right. Certain very rich people very much don’t help by competing Western European-level marginal tax rates to Hitler invading Poland. But we could go a long way toward making life a lot better for a lot of people if we could just think about economics as a mode of thinking that helps us to understand individual and collective economic behavior, and use it as a tool to order how we think about designing public policy.
FWIW It seems the right has its share of social issue bugbears, like "immigrants" or "the woke" being the scapegoat for all sorts of things. I think it's more a sign that the partisans of both the left and the right in this moment of US history are led more by their heart than their head.
Certainly right. Though there's also no longer a technocratic class on the right. At this point, it's all one of two categories-- aggrieved white nationalists peddling white rage, or super rich people weaponizing white rage to deliver themselves tax cuts/deregulation. The latter category used to drive the ship-- they'd throw the white power doofus class some red meat around election time, then pass tax cuts for themselves when they got into power. Then Trump arrived, and the animals were let out of their cages. Now we've got ICE out there harassing random brown people. It's not handing the donor class much to point out that, while they certainly didn't care much about the welfare of brown people or immigrants, they weren't actively interested in punishing them. They mostly just didn't think about them at all. But now the monster's out of that cage, and we're getting truly horrific stuff.
Let’s not credit the field of economists or economists generally too much.
1) There is no other discipline that is so rife with disrespect and disregard for other fields, other toolboxes and other concerns.
2) There is a seed of valid criticism in Stewart’s ignorance. Economics does very poorly with the idea of values other than monetary values. Money was a GREAT invention, and it really does allow the broader exchange of rather dissimilar goods in larger markets. But not everything important can be priced. And economics does an incredibly poor job of accounting for that fundamental fact.
3) There are LOT of economists, and far more people who have studied economics. The field should have a lot more successes than we see, given their numbers, funding and standing in elite circles.
4) It seems to odd to credit economics for controlled trials—something that has long been used in lab science and medical research. It took economics far too long to adopt this basic tools—which gets back to the disciplinary arrogance I mentioned above.
5) Let’s not forget the over-reliance on linear regression—perhaps with transformed variables and perhaps with interaction terms. That’s undergraduate-level statistics. Sure, it seems reasonable when one lack the substantive expertise to build a model that might actually resemble reality—but, again, that’s the disciplinary arrogance undermining the value of the field again.,
"But not everything important can be priced. And economics does an incredibly poor job of accounting for that fundamental fact."
No it doesn't. It says very clearly that economics is the field for understand markets and how people and economies interact with each other.
It's job isn't to order everybody's whole life and makes no claim to. There are other fields for other areas of life, and many things will be left up to people/politics.
Economics will tell you what the most efficient solution is and what the trade offs are. But then people need to evaluate alternatives.
And yet, many economists and policy makers present it like it is.
They should all be pointing out these limitations, so the findings are not over read. But they rarely, if ever, do that.
You seem to be missing my point about the necessary arrogance into which so many economist are trained. It is far more a cultural problem in field than a technical problem.
I never noticed any of that from any of the economics text books I read, or in the economics classes I took.
Traditional economic theory is pretty clear on this. Of course I'm sure there are some people somewhere on the internet that gets out over their skies.
You’ve never noticed economists working outside of their expertise in policy areas in which they don’t have substantive expertise, and yet don’t have domain experts as co-authors?
You have seen the textbooks argue that the economics disciplinary lens and toolbox are limited and should NOT be used in a whole bunch of ways or applications?
The textbooks taught the implications and consequences of the fact that the assumption of rationale is false? That means information is never perfect and almost always asymmetrical?
People are allowed to have opinions about subjects not in their area of expertise. That doesn't say anything about what the dominant view is of the subject area.
The textbooks I've read and the classes I've taken all were very clear that economics provided plenty of answers about efficiency and tradeoffs, but that actual value judgements would need to be made by people and politics.
IE policy X will do Y, but will have Z tradeoffs, then politicians can decide whether the benefits from Y, are worth the tradeoffs of Z. Doubly so when the tradeoffs from Z are not easily quantifiable.
For example, what are the non economic values of having national parks or other large undeveloped plots of land.
1) I have opinions about many things that I do not opine on professionally, that I do not clam in my disciplinary tools box and lens are well suited. That’s disciplinary humility.
2) is infer that you agree that your economics textbooks do NOT discuss those key things that I pointed out. As a discipline, Econ is very bad a recognizing its limitations. That is what I am saying.
3) You are confirming everything I am saying by ducking the issues have raised , insisting the theory is goo when well applied and pointing to a couple disclaimers I class.
The fact that you don’t see these things is kinda my point. Econ is very bad about recognizing this. And so many economists inject the disciplinary arrogance and it becomes part of their lens for everything.
What was interesting is that Jon Stewart didn't just come across as an ignoramus. He managed to seem both smart and stupid at the same time. He was like a student asking good questions but then also adding very off-base commentary.
Is it true that hiking the minimum wage doesn't lead to job loss? I'm not sure I've seen that research.
1) I've never heard any economist saying raising the minimum wage would cause a fatal blow to an industry, they are typically making the point that there are tradeoffs - higher wages will mean less jobs because the profits are the profits and using those profits to pay some people more means some people can't be paid at all (or will need to be part-time).
2) Is it not the empirical case that minimum wages do in fact decrease industry specific-employment? I've seen plenty of research on California's AB 1228 leading to slowing growth in jobs for the fast food industry, etc.
Good points re Stewart. He regularly doesn’t know what he’s talking about and so—entertaining though he can be—he doesn’t contribute much if anything to productive discourse. So if there’s a general principle that we shouldn’t listen to (or certainly promote) people who don’t contribute to productive discourse, why did the Argument post an interview with Ross Douthat this same morning? The justification can’t be “he has a major platform” because that applies to Stewart as well.
I think he often knows more than his guests! He’ll often okay dumb to get his guest to explain something further. Or just to a subtle way of correcting or redirecting. But it’s crazy to say he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He’s shockingly well-informed.
My grand theory of Stewart is his worldview hasn’t evolved beyond the Bush-era. He has this view of economists because that’s what Bush administration economists were advocating for. It’s as simple as that.
Many many people (including people deeply invested in politics) have not taken Intro to Economics. I always say that if the solution to whatever is, "if everyone would just..." then you don't have a solution. Since everyone will not just understand economics, I don't know what the solution is... But I agree that a lot of political to debate comes down to different information and different understandings of how the world "obviously" works.
I think the key failure of the reposes to the 2008 GFC was that no prominent Wall Street executive was criminally prosecuted. A handful of examples would have mattered a great deal. And having studied the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy investigation, I thought it was very clear that Dick Fuld the CEO was guilty of fraud.
This is very much wrong. There was a lot of stupidity among the highest levels of the Wall Street class. There was very little of what is legally cognizable as fraud. Lehman found itself dangerously levered and overexposed to residential real estate. That’s dumb. It’s not fraudulent. And Dick Fuld’s net worth fell off a cliff as a result of its failure. Until the day collapsed, the vast majority of his wealth was in Lehman stock. When it went bankrupt, he instantly went from mega rich to ordinary rich. No one should cry tears for him, but this idea that he knowingly made false representations of material fact with an intent to deceive just doesn’t begin to hold up.
Did you read the investigative report commissioned by the bankruptcy judge? If you had I doubt you would say I am wrong.
Yes, I followed the bankruptcy quite closely. Fraud, again, has a legal definition. It's not a close case.
You did not answer my question. Did you read the report? Are you familiar with the 105 transactions? I suspect not.
You mean repo 105? Yes, I’m well aware of it. Were they questionable? Yes, absolutely. Criminal fraud? By Dick Fuld specifically? Again, not even close.
You’re making a legal claim here. Specifically a criminal legal claim. It’s nowhere close to right.
The conclusion of the investigation was that Fuld was likely guilty of fraud. If it’s not fraud to “paint” your balance sheet at the end of every quarter for a day to appear less leveraged and not disclose it, then your definition of fraud mystifies me.
I still think I’m talking to an LLM. What;’s your human name?
Are you a person or an AI?
I confess I don't necessarily understand the criticism of Stewart on this one? He isn't claiming that a carbon tax is not a correct idea. He is saying it is a politically dead idea.
This is no different than the sugar taxes that some cities have done. Ostensibly, there is absolutely no reason adding costs to things won't impact their use. If you think you can run on that as a solution to obesity, though, good luck?
Is the complaint that populists just don't care about economic theory? Hard to disagree there. But that is almost baked into the idea of populism, no? Old school populism, even.
He may not have articulated it well, but his point on carbon taxes is basically the same as Victor and Cullenward’s thesis that carbon pricing has largely failed because its political economy challenges are inherent, not incidental: https://www.brookings.edu/books/making-climate-policy-work/.