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.
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 market. 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 (which isn’t necessarily the same as dollar value but also isn’t quite the same as utility??), are all unintuitive and must be understood simultaneously to easily 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
"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.
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.,
Many many people (including people deeply invested in politics) have not taken Intro to Economics. I always say that is the solution to "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 fire the world "obviously" works.
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
Great piece! I actually stopped watching Stewart nine years ago because of my belief he had become that which he hated. I didn’t know he had recently embarrassed himself as this piece depicts, and it was amusing to read about.
>The fundamental problem is that people who are using energy are not actually paying those costs. They’re just paying what the utility charges them to turn on their lights, which is significantly less than the costs all of society bears when more carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.
Interestingly enough, with the way electricity is regulated as a natural monopoly, this isn't necessarily true. Typically, in utility regulation, the retail price is set quite a bit higher than marginal costs. This is much to the chagrin of economists of course, who would much prefer to set electricity prices at marginal costs and have fixed cost collected somewhere else.
But the implication is, depending on how suboptimal electricity prices have been set and your estimate of CO2, often the MC + Societal Cost of Carbon < Retail Price.
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.
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 market. 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 (which isn’t necessarily the same as dollar value but also isn’t quite the same as utility??), are all unintuitive and must be understood simultaneously to easily 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.
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.
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
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.
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.
That’s the “leftist” fascism that drove me away. Social-pressure to agree to unsubstantiated definitions based on half-remembered memes.
He says “nuanced opinions” I say “unformulated self-contradictory first-level value judgements.”
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.
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.
"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.
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.,
Many many people (including people deeply invested in politics) have not taken Intro to Economics. I always say that is the solution to "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 fire the world "obviously" works.
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
Great piece! I actually stopped watching Stewart nine years ago because of my belief he had become that which he hated. I didn’t know he had recently embarrassed himself as this piece depicts, and it was amusing to read about.
>The fundamental problem is that people who are using energy are not actually paying those costs. They’re just paying what the utility charges them to turn on their lights, which is significantly less than the costs all of society bears when more carbon is pumped into the atmosphere.
Interestingly enough, with the way electricity is regulated as a natural monopoly, this isn't necessarily true. Typically, in utility regulation, the retail price is set quite a bit higher than marginal costs. This is much to the chagrin of economists of course, who would much prefer to set electricity prices at marginal costs and have fixed cost collected somewhere else.
But the implication is, depending on how suboptimal electricity prices have been set and your estimate of CO2, often the MC + Societal Cost of Carbon < Retail Price.
See for example, this paper: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/pol.20190758