I sometimes look at the statistics on the back pages of the Economist. Although I am not generally interested in mathematics and (as a student of the Austrian school) do not regard mathematics as a vital part of the study of economics, I have long had a mild fondness for statistics (I know that to many people that seems a dark perversion to admit, but there we are).
Last week I noticed that the Economist had altered its presentation, whether this is a first issue of the year thing, or will be carried on the next issue I do not know, and I had the feeling that something had been left out.
However, it was only after looking again today that my tired old brain finally worked out was missing. There were no money supply figures.
Nothing for either M0 or MB (basically notes and coins, plus a few Treasury instruments) growth, and nothing for any of the broader measures of credit money (M3 and so on). Certainly measuring credit money growth is not easy (there are lots of arguments) – but no money supply stats at all? At least not in the paper version of the Economist, and it is the paper version that most people, who look at the Economist at all, look at.
Perhaps the young people who now dominate the staff of the Economist believe that inflation, which they may think of as rising prices in the shops, if they are not aware that a rising money supply may also cause asset price rises in such things as the stock market and the property market, comes about by union power: for example, obstructing a entrance of an enterprise by ‘picketing’, or government bans on replacing workers who do not turn up to work – or some other non market means, raising wages which, if the money supply is not increased to pay for wages being pushed higher than supply and demand would have done, really leads to higher unemployment – not to greatly rising prices in the shops or in the asset markets. Or perhaps they believe that it is caused by exchange rates – and that governments, via central banks, should set interest rates to influence these exchange rates (no matter how many times efforts to manipulate exchange rates blow up in peoples faces there is never any shortage of folk advising yet more manipulation).
It is hard to know. After all I am not an economist, I am only a student (in the old sense of the word) of this subject so my level of knowledge of the subject should be well below the standard of economists in Britain. But this is not the case, most economists in Britain seem to know very little about economics. Perhaps this is because there are few economics departments in British universities where even Chicago school (let alone Austrian school economics) is taught – so young ‘trained economists’ get hired by the Economist ‘newspaper’ (as the magazine calls itself) but do not know much about economics.
This would explain, why the Economist supports things like ‘land reform’ (i.e. land theft) in Latin America, the absurdity of government ‘anti-trust’ or ‘anti-monopoly’ policy all over the world (a policy based on the treating the ‘perfect competition’ model of neoclassical economics, with everyone having the same level of knowledge and all enterprises being much alike, as something ‘fair’ that governments should try and create in the real world), and supporting ever more taxpayers money for the ‘public services’ (in most of the countries of the world).
Of course it would not explain why the Economist supports the European Union (although not all its activities), but I can not think of anything that could explain that level of perversity.
Still… I should return to statistics.
The vanishing of money supply stats put me in mind of something that used to annoy me about the United States Annual Abstract of Statistics.
There was no simple presentation of the size of State and local government spending or taxation.
The stats for government spending and tax were given only ‘per capita’, which of course takes no account of the fact that in some States of the United States people have higher incomes than in other States.
Later on on found that till the mid 1970’s the Annual Abstract had also given State and local government spending and taxation per thousand Dollars of income – which (again of course) made it very easy to see what percentage of the economy was going to State and local government in a given State of the United States (if you are interested the private Tax Foundation still provides such information).
Was it all a dark plot to disguise the real size of government in different States? Much as some people have suggested that the liking of the statistical office for the ‘median’ (the number in the middle of a group of stats – for example with “1, 3, 4, 5, 7,” the median would be “4”) rather than the ‘mean’ (get all the amounts and divide by “number of numbers” – what the layman thinks of as an “average”) as its measure of average, is due to a hated of inequality (which using the mean for such things as “average income” is supposed to ignore). I do not think so – I think it is more the fashions of the world of statistics which I, as a non-mathematician, should not expect to understand, although I do not expect the ‘mode’ to become a popular measure of average any time soon.
However, it is irritating that the Statistical Office stopped publishing a useful number, such as total State and local taxes per thousand Dollars of income, but continued to publish a useless number, such as total State and local taxes per capita.
Just as it is irritating that the Economist published inflation numbers (the staff there, like most modern people, perhaps think of ‘inflation’ as price rises in the shops), while not publishing money supply growth figures – as if the money supply could explode and there be no consequences ever.
I’ve also noticed a “drift” in the positions of the Economist over the years. As you implied, likely due to new blood, educated in the Correct Views of modern academia.
If you asked the appropriate decision maker at the Economist why these data disappeared, I’ll bet you’d get a very earnest answer along the lines of “We feel it’s not relevant/useful/indicative, because . . .” followed by some Keynesian piffle. Same kind of blather they’ve used for years to beat the drum for VAT.
I’ve also noticed a “drift” in the positions of the Economist over the years.
I’ll second that.
Not particularly relevant to your discussion, (and no criticism intended of course,) but as someone with a fondness for stats I thought you might appreciate being told that not only is the median of your set of numbers equal to 4, so is the mean. 😉
The reason for picking the median is not a hatred of inequality, but worry over skewed statistics. Skew is when the data is all bunched up at one end. Consider the salaries of the people working at company X: these go 1, 1, 1, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 86. The mean is obviously 100/10 = 10, but should they advertise to job applicants that “our average salary is 10 dollars per shift” you might be forgiven for thinking that was a tad misleading. The median aims to provide something more “typical” that isn’t distorted by funny things going on at the extremes. The fact that they use it is a flashing red alert sign to any statistician that funny things are going on at the extremes.
A proper statistician always asks the question “what’s the distribution?” If you know that the distribution has a certain form – a nice symmetrical bell shape, say – then single-number or two-number summary statistics can sometimes tell you everything you need to know. But if you don’t know what the distribution is, then such statistics tell you virtually nothing about what is going on. There are cases where they are the appropriate statistic to use, but mostly I think they are compiled to satisfy the “management-by-metric” idiots, who pick a handful of numbers and then try to manipulate them in some “desirable” direction. The tragic results include what Tony’s targets did to the NHS and schools.
You should not mourn too much the passing of The Economist’s money suppy statistics. To interpret it you have to relate it to the GDP, a notoriously meaningless statistic. And one is then at risk of confusing money with wealth – an error that has led to Socialism and other evils.
And just who are these statistics aimed at? Can you seriously imagine any actual economist religiously collecting back issues in order to gather the data vital to their work? Or the governer of the Bank of England turning the page and thinking “Crikey, money supply’s down; I’d better do something about that”?
It is like the way they put the FTSE or Dow Jones indexes every day on the TV news – not because any of their viewers are actually interested, or even really know what they are – but as a sort of intellectual pretension and easy journalistic padding. On a day-to-day basis the thing’s bloody random, and who’s going to remember how they all tot up over the months? If the market crashes, that’s news – otherwise forget it.
It’s the same with any economic statistic. It is the failure of planned economies and government fiscal tinkering. And the ruin of many a private company, too. Summary statistics can raise alarms and tell you what needs investigating further, but are no substitute for understanding.
Well, it seems that one of the reasons could be that the Fed has stopped reporting the M3 as of early last year. Very ominous if you ask me.
With all due respect, you might want to take another hack at editing this piece. Starts to be heavy going around the part where you attribute inflation to union power. At least, I think that’s what you mean.
Ummm, land reform worked pretty well in Japan. MacArthur was a big proponent of breaking up the feudal estates and giving the peasants something of their own.
As to the Economist, it seems rather conventionally soft left these days. Certainly not what I would expect from the name.
Anyone who thinks The Economist is left-wing can surely never have read the mainstream UK (never mind European) press with attention, or watched TV. It may be to the left of you, but it is by far the most classically liberal publication sold in any quantity.
Paul,
I like statistics. I even miss the fat-stock prices and Hagberg numbers on (now a misleading title) Farming Today. The Economist treats statistics with more care and respect than any non-academic publication I can think of. Its staff are numerate. And there are a lot more numbers available in the online edition for subscribers.
The figures in the back of the book are on a variable cycle of different data-sets, but they are all derived from official statistics. They can’t publish in The Economist what isn’t available, and won’t generally publish what isn’t comparable.
It is not just the Fed that doesn’t report M3. The Bank of England has for some time preferred M4.
There is an M3-like measure, called M3H (for “harmonised broad money”) that is supposed to aggregate the entire EU for the purposeds of the ECB. Whether that fund of funds is good for anything is rather an open question.
… As, for me, is whether governments setting out to manage economic aggregates is a good idea.
For the most part, the economics pieces in The Economist are classically liberal. But the foreign policy and – in particular – the environmental articles reflect MSM-standard “conventional wisdom”: Bush and Israel suck, global warming requires enormous taxes and state intervention now, etc. The refreshingly careful and skeptical attitude to such things that used to make The Economist a good read a few years ago is all but gone.
Paul, well observed. First off, I have become disenchanted with the Economist and its writing style for some time. It has the tone of a know-all teenage brat. On some issues such as anti-trust as you mention, it is indeed operating inn a world as if the doctrine of “perfect competition” was still regarded as the correct way to explain the case for markets, when in fact the very assumptions on which perfect competion rests would, if they existed, make central planning possible.
The Economist also tends to take drearily predictable views on issues like drug control, campaign finance reform and the like. It is relatively sane, however, on drug legalisation, the dangers of creeping state paternalism, and has bee generally good at holding the line on issues like free trade and globalisation.
The same sort of arguments can of course apply to the Financial Times, which tends to be largely written for corporate man, is often hostile to laissez faire and the case for limited government and tax cuts. Apart from Martin Woolf, Sam Brittain (who is alas getting very old), and one or two others, it is fairly thin. It’s coverage of companies and market movements is pretty good.
On money supply data, it is interesting that the European Central Bank, influenced by the old monetarists of the German Bundesbank, still tracks M3 data and comments on movements in broad monetary growth.
I suspect that if people took monetary growth seriously, and figured out its potential for harm, we would be having a lot of sleepless nights. Just look at the amount of financial gearing now going on the fields of credit, derivatives and private equity.
No doubt the Economist has drifted leftwards, but the dropping of the money supply figures probably has a far simpler explanation – lack of interest. Money supply targeting failed – not least because of the tendancy for the relationships between the aggregates and inflation to break down once targeted. Even Friedman distanced himself from money supply targeting, noting that in 2003 that “The use of quantity of money as a target has not been a success,” … “I’m not sure I would, as of today, push it as hard as I once did.” Rather policy has moved on to inflation targeting.
It´s a very interesting theme and a simple answer of many questions
Really? How so? Worked well in what way?
And of course Japanese rice farmers are perhaps the most regressive protectionists in Japanese politics, forcing Japanese people to pay for their wildly inflated prices. That is MacArthur’s legacy too.
Johnathan
I don’t think you can compare the Economist with the FT. Whilst the Economist may sport some naive political views, for example that inter-governmental organisations like the EU and the UN are worth preserving and even expanding, on economic matters it remains defiantly laissez-faire.
The FT, on the other hand, has become a Blairite publication through and through. Statism infects all its articles and editorials.
I can no longer bear reading the latter but still enjoy reading the former.
Inflation is back with avengeance, though. Money is still ultra-cheap and the Fed will exacerbate the probelm this year by attempting to bail out homeowners.
Great article on this here
A lot of stuff here, I will reply to some of it.
No I do not equate union power to inflation – I was just considering the possibility that some of the Economist staff might think that way.
Editing: Well you see I never learnt the laws of English grammar (Mrs Williams, the lady who taught me to read, never got around to them and I have never taught myself about them) so I write with lots of brackets (what some people call writting with parentheses). Other people come along and (as a good turn to me) take a lot of the brackets out (so that the stuff obeys the laws of English grammar) – unfortunatly this does make my stuff harder to understand, but such is life.
Pa Annoyed: – yes the mean and the median are the same in the example I gave (although that does not invalidate what I said, it would indeed have been better to give a different example).
However, I did not say I thought that the cult of the median was part of a dark plot – I said I did NOT think that (at least the non paranoid part of my mind does not think that).
Land reform – well the small Japanese farms have indeed been a problem in some ways (for example the voting streght of the American created small owner farmers and how this led to subsidies and protectionism for farming in Japan), but the Latin American stuff is worse.
You see there has been “land reform” in many Latin American nations (sometimes several times) and what tends to happen is that the peasants sell their little farms after a while (because you can not really make a decent living on a peasant plot – unless you are growing illegal drugs of course).
So the “modern” version of “land reform” (supported by all the “progressive” people in Latin America) is to not hand over the land to individual peasants – but to establish some form of collective ownership.
This was tried out after the Mexican Revolution (in wide areas of Mexico) – it reminds me of the old “Mir” sytem that used to exist in wide areas of Russia (at least between the time of Alex II and Stolypin) and it is really stupid. Of course it is possible that the Economist people do not even know what “Land Reform” means these days – their knowledge of Latin America (and so many other things) is about on the same level as my knowledge of grammar.
Lastly Guy Herbert.
I have been told in the past that I should not get angry with you – and it is true that I should not (you have never actually done anything that I should be angry with, so it must be my poverty and advancing age that puts me in an unjust frame of mind – and I must resist this).
So I will simply say please stop the insults (about my having no knowledge of the British media and so on) and look at the OBJECTIVE FACTS.
Last week the “Economist” was (as a cover story) defending the United Nations and saying it should have a bigger role in the world. Now I do not care WHERE this stuff is written (for example there was a similar line of “argument” today in the “right wing” Sunday Telegraph – by the Harvard Prof Niall Ferguson a man of the “right” who has noticed that there is more money is writing “left” stuff, as he said in the recent television advert what he values most in life is “money” and one certainly gets a lot of money as a Harvard Prof) it is still crap.
It may not be “leftwing” (whatever we choose to define leftwing as meaning), but it is statist world government crap.
This week there was an offensive cover on President Bush and Iraq (a war that the “Economist”, unlike me, supported) and a story (sort of an editorial) demanding that everyone in the United States have health insurance – by law.
That is to the “left” (if “left” is to mean statist) of Britain – where people do not have to buy health insurance if they do not want to. Like the United States there are governent hospitals (in Britain the N.H.S. in the U.S. county hospitals and so on) and like the United States they are not very good.
The Economist justified its demand by saying that “by law” (all fifty States? Federal law? what?) private hospitals in the United States have to give emergency treatment to anyone who turns up and needs it.
This is using one government intervention to “justify” another government intervention – a very old fallacy indeed.
Now, to be fair, there was also a longer article in this weeks Economist that listed the problems that have shown up with various State government efforts to either pay for people to have health insurance (it always cost much more that it is claimed it will, people who really need it do not sign up for the scheme, people who do not need it do sign up for the scheme, and so on) or making people who do not want to buy health insurance – are you really going to fine poor people or (the following is me – not the Economist) toss them in jail (perhaps for the nonpayment of fines) for the “crime” of not buying health insurance.
However, after honestly reporting the problems (which I AGREE WITH YOU most of the British media would not), the Economist supported the schemes anyway – and said that other States should follow suit – and the Federal government should back the whole thing.
It is like the Economist reporting on the U.N. and the E.U.
Again problems and corruption will be honestly reported (and again I AGREE WITH YOU that most of the British media would not report such things), but then the Economist supports these organizations anyway.
So the postition is “X has problems with it, but X should still have more money and wider powers”.
As for the alternatives:
In a two page (plus) article on health care there was ONE LINE on the free market alternative – we were told that “the right” hold that “deregulation would hold down the growth of costs”.
That was it, NOTHING MORE.
Nothing about how such things as Doctor licensing (expossed as a scam by Milton Friedman more than half a century ago) raise costs, or the closing of medical schools that would not play ball with the A.M.A. – or about the Tort law distortion (this time the Doctors are victims) has raised costs.
Nor was there a word about how Medicare and Medicaid (which cost five billion Dollars together in 1965 and cost many hundreds of billions of Dollars now) have had a “knock on”effect of raising general health costs.
Also nothing about all the regulations hitting insurance companies and and H.M.O.s (which inflate costs).
And so on and so on – in short it is not about “deregulation holding down the growth of costs” is deregulation radically reducing costs.
And (finally) there was the great fallacy at the heart of it all – that the only choices were private insurance or the government.
What about (to give only one example) the vast network of mutal aid that used to exist (and could exist again) – the time (before the government undermined them) when “fraternity” did not normally mean “group of students” in the United States and “friendly society” did not mean smiling at people at parties in Britain.
You KNOW ALL THIS GUY (80% of industrial workers in Britain members of Friendly Societies even with the low wages of 1911 – and so on).
But you will not find such stuff in the Economist.
“So, what?”
O.K. – but what you will find is (as stated above) “the governement has X, Y, Z, problems – but it should be bigger”.
Whether it is the United States or just about anywhere else that is the Economist default position on “public services”, “anti trust law”, “transport projects” and so on.
Even when they seem free market they are often not. Such as the demand for an “end to the government subsidy of home owners” – this turns out to mean HIGHER TAXES on people trying to pay a mortgage.
Sure they are indeed pro free trade (although even here they sometimes want more welfare for the “victims” of it) and anti farm subsidies.
But that does not counter balance the rest of the stuff.
In short they are more often asking for more government than they are asking for less government (although that is not the way they put it).
So whilst other bits of the media (the B.B.C. and so on) may be more “leftwing” the Economist is certainly (if anything) “leftwing” 9again if we are defining this word, which I do not think I used, as wanting a bigger government).
It is not me being an ignorant gutter snipe Guy – what the Economist is like happens to be an objective fact.
I am sorry, but I do not recognise the characature of the modern study of economics presented here. Like Paul, I am a `student’ of economics, rather than an economist; like him, I have a fondness for statistics. Unlike him, I know next to nothing about macroeconomics, so I cannot comment on the immediate matter of interest in the post.
But I venture the following proposition: Paul would be very surprised if he sat in on a modern graduate class in economics. And he would be laughed out of the room if in said class he ventured the opinion that antitrust/competition policy was these days based on assumptions of perfect competition. Modern industrial organisation theory has gone a long way to take on board the insights of imperfect information economics and the insights of game theory into strategic behaviour. Cournot and Bertrand, not Marshall and Walras are the order of the day. And modern industrial economics is what the leading competition policy practitioners know and use.
I’ll also venture the following hypothesis: the reason Austrian economics is no longer all that fashionable among professional economists (it made a brief revival in the 1970s and still undoubtedly repays careful study) is that while Austrians were banging away about the unrealistic nature of neoclassical economics, neoclassical economics was quietly abandoning all those features that the Austrians most criticised. Like I said, study of the Austrians will still pay dividents. But if the Austrians and their sympathisers continue to criticise mainstream economics like this, they condemn themselves to irrelevance.
I really like most of the articles on things I know nothing about, but anything I know anything about leaves me slightly down. As a keen reader of Mark In Mexico and student of Mexican politics (I studied for my JD in San Diego, and the trade law focus there was heavily Mexican), so I was saddened when they decided to support for the violent socialist uprising there.
Their US trade policy summary (Link)is misleading enough and short enough to be worth quoting in its entirety. The first sentence carries no factual errors, but combines the “he said X, but he did Y” form of attack with a reference to his Father that seems to be included purely as an infantile ad hominem. The second sentence is the best in the piece. The third is unfalsifiable opinion, but seems hard to correlate with Bush’s fierce defense of a non-interventionist China policy, an explosion of FTAs (most notably with Chile, Singapore, Australia, and a bunch of Arab nations), a defense of Dubai Ports World, a bunch of TIFAs, BITs, and Open Skies agreements, and so on. He’s spent a bunch of time with that and Doha for a guy who isn’t interested in it and, a brief patch after 9/11 aside, he’s been pretty consistent in the amount of time he’s dedicated to it throughout his terms. The next sentence notes two facts, then misleadingly implies that Bush did not push to remove the Byrd amendment and, albeit less clearly, that he has not removed it. As a sentence that has more truth than untruth, it is still well above average for the piece. The next sentence is false only in its ommissions, implication, and context, but is devestatingly so, particularly when taken in context with the following and final sentence. It clearly implies that the CAFTA is the only FTA passed, particularly when you see the comparison with his Father in the first sentence, the claimed lack of enthusiasm in the third, and the claimed lack of American FTAs in the last. I mentioned the chief completed FTAs above, so I’ll go to the last sentence. It is true that the Doha rounds collapse and the Economist has the decency to accept that Bush offered a lot in the negotiations. The stuff about the FTAA is just straight bullshit. In fact, the CAFTA is just one of five of Bush’s American FTAs (along with Chile in his first term, Peru and Colombia signed and awaiting ratification, Panama with negotiations completed under the understanding that labor will be renegotiated). You’ll notice that 3 of those are in progress (i.e. not stalled). The FTAA has been a dream, for a good while now, of “free-trade zone stretching from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego.” We don’t know how Congress will behave this year, but it seems likely that Panama, Colombia, and Peru will eventually pass (although they may need beefed up labor chapters, possibly in line with the CAFTA environmental chapters). At that point, the dream will have arrived. Incidentally, a good number of the trade treaties went unreported by the Economist, so it may be that the summary is an accurate representation of the Economist’s articles on the subject, but it is not a representation of the truth. Instead, it is an utterly unmerited attack on Bush.
In a summary of “American trade policy” there is no mention of the fact that Congress passed the Byrd Amendment with an unvetoable majority, nor of Congressional hostility to DPW, nor of the fact that we now know that there was an explicit deal in which the farm bill was wrung out of Bush in return for Fast Track authority. It’s all about Bush, and it’s not even accurate about that.
I did not write much about economic theory (at least not in this posting). iwas attacking the Economist magazine (or “newspaper” as it calls itself) – not (say) some Chicago School academic. I fully accept (and formally apologize if I have implied otherwise) that a lot of Chicago School people would regard a lot of what is written in the Economist as mistaken.
As for what Lindsay says: Actually there are more Austrian school people in American university economics departments than there have ever been (although they are still a small minority). So things have got better – not worse.
For further information see the Ludwig Von Mises institute (who know rather about these things than I do).
As for “irrelevance” – a politician may trim his opinions in order to “stay relevant”, but that is not the role of thinker (of any sort).
An economist (or anyone else thinking about a subject) must say what he believes to be the truth. If these leads to him being unpopular and not (say) not getting published, or not getting a university post – well such is life.
For example, if someone says “in a way we are all Keynesians now and in another way none of us are Keynesians” (Milton Friedman) all that will be reported is “we are all Keynesians now” – and soon polititicians (like Richard Nixon) will be quoting the words and using them as an excuse for their statism.
Indeed is is almost just to “quote the words out of context” as there is no “we”, no happy group of scholars who basically agree on matters. And Lord Keynes himself (as the late Henry Hazlitt was fond of pointing out) never said anything that was both true and origninal – and a lot of the false things he wrote were also not origninal.
To pretend that a nonenity (such as Lord Keynes) was a great thinker (in order to “get on with people”) is not acceptable.
And it does not “work” anyway. As the late W.H. Hutt pointed out, the Keynesians did not win any debates – they did allow any debates. They set to work gaining control of the awading of qualifications and the appointment of staff (as the left do in all the humanities and social sciences). So no matter how nice and polite non “leftists” were – they got crushed anyway.
The only way to fight the left is on their own terms. Trying to be “nice” or to “get along” means certain defeat. Compromise just leads to more compromise – and before one knows it one has become a “leftist” (or at least one is teaching statism and going along with statism in discussions even if one, privately, “does not believe a word of it”).
Turning to pommygranate:
I agree that the Economist is not as bad as the Financial Times – which is indeed Blairite in a lot of its articles.
However, the F.T. also has a tradition of cooperation with the Soviet Union – not as odd as it sounds as the K.G.B. made a special effort to form relationships with the “representatives of Finance Capital”. This relationship continues with the F.S.B. who dominate Putin’s Russia (although the Marxism seems to have decayed into more ordinary criminal and power seeking behaviour).
However, as I have explained, I do not agree that the Economist is laissez-faire – although there is one way that this can be argued for.
The Economist tends to give HONEST INFORMATION.
For example, (as I pointed out) the Economist reported the absurd results of the various State govenment experiments with health care – now althouth the Economist’s conclusion was that there should be more statism, a LOGICAL conclusion would be that the existing statism should be done away with.
If one were cynical one might conclude that some people on the Economist are putting information into articles in the hope that readers will draw the opposite conclusion from the official conclusion of the Economist itself.
It is the same on the E.U., the U.N. and many other topics. The information in the articles after (at least to my mind) contradicts the conclusion the article comes to.
Of course at other times nothing in terms of political economy is really going on.
For example, the Economist supported the left comming to power in Italy. As one world expect the left are busy increasing taxes, trying to steal television stations that do not agree wtih them (so that they have a near monopoly on information – in line with the Gramsci’s upside down idea of Marxism, i.e. the cultural superstructure determining the economic base), and they are even cooperating with various nasty F.S.B. operations (as is well known Prime Minister [and ex President of the E.U. Commission] Prodi has long had links to the K.G.B.- F.S.B.).
And the left dominated courts (again the Gramsci idea of control of the institutions – this time the judges) will be used against opponents of the regime (some have already been arrested – it is always possible to find some tax they have not paid, or some regulation they have violated).
Now the Economist did not really want this. Its support for the left in Italy was simply due to a feud with Mr B. (the former Prime Minister) that went back some years.
Childish and stupid yes – but not wicked.
The Financial Times would have (and did) support the left in Italy in the full knowledge of what they would do.
Of course both the Economist and the F.T. are owned by the same group – but they are not the same.
To be fair on the Economist and Mexico:
Although there was a terrible section (group of articles in the same issue) in the Economist some time ago (calling for higher taxes, more welfare spending, and more “anti trust” law for example to hit the main telephone company) the violence of the left has meant that (in my opinion anyway) the Economist has turned against them.
The armed revolts, the refusal to accept the results of the election that was clearly “free and fair” (and so on), I get the impression that the Economist has had enough of the Mexican left.
Hopefully they will have another look at their support fo the left in Guatemela. The Economist is stuck in the war years (it does not even seem to understand that the conservatives now in power were OPPONENTS of the military popularists who killed the indians).
Guatemela has one of the best universities in Latin America (in economics and political philosophy) – but the Economist chooses to ally itself with mobs who occupy private farms by violence, and politicians who think that Casto and Chevez are role models.
Paul,
“I did not say I thought that the cult of the median was part of a dark plot”
No, you didn’t, but I did. They only use the median if the distribution is skewed. But they carefully don’t tell the punter which way it is skewed, or by how much. They give the impression of being fair and open while not saying anything.
I do like that phrase though: “cult of the median”. 🙂
I see.
I clearly did not read what you wrote carefully enough.
Paul: even after the struggle had turned violent, the Economist supported kicking out a democratically elected governor on the basis of an armed revolt. They even called the article (misleadingly) (Link)the governor v most of the people. Most of the people don’t want either side fighting and would rather be able to get to work.
Paul,
By `irrelevance’. I meant not that Austrian views are unfashionable (though that may be true) but rather that the Austrian critique of `mainstream’ economics is a less relevant critique of mainstream economics today than it was of mainstream economics 30 years ago.
It would be wrong for Austrian economists (or anyone else) to change their views for the sake of fitting in, but they might at least take a leaf out of Keynes’ book on one thing: “When the facts change…”
Indeed, nobody (including Ludwig Von Mises) ever claimed that history (including the history of economic thought) was anything other than an empirical subject – so that yes (unlike economics) in history when the “facts” (the data) changes what one says should change to.
So one should say most university economists believed X at such-and-such a date, but they believed Y at this later date.
Of course Lord Keynes was as disrespectful of historical facts as he was of economic law – this made him (contrary to what F.A. Hayek maintained) an unreliable source of historical information (even of events in his own lifetime).
On James of England’s point.
Yes I had forgotten about State Governor matter. You are correct about this and, therefore, I was wrong.
I apologize for my error.