The problem with Politico reporting of Amity Shlaes’s Forgotten Man that
Critics of the book, including economist Paul Krugman and historian Eric Rauchway, have challenged Shlaes’ use of data, noting, for example, that the unemployment statistics she uses do not count Works Progress Administration jobs. Shlaes defends her approach, arguing that make-work jobs are not evidence of economic growth and noting that President Barack Obama recently used the same data series she did in discussing unemployment during the Great Depression.
is not that it’s “they-said, she-said” journalism, but that it’s an inadequate representation of the truth. It’s not just Shlaes versus a famously shrill Nobelist and some dude at an ag university; it’s Shlaes versus the accepted academic consensus.
As previously noted, if you were a sufficiently honest and competent researcher located like Amity Shlaes near any number of world-class reference libraries simply out to find out the unemployment rate in the 1930s, you would not find the data Shlaes cites; you would find, in the authoritative reference work, an explanation of why it’s not best to cite the data Shlaes cites. Shlaes has to go out of her way to find other data.
Shlaes likes to pretend it’s the other way around—that she’s using authoritative data while Krugman and I are citing data from an old but (she graciously concedes) “useful” paper by Michael Darby. This is not true. Darby’s paper is the opening point in a decades-long process of scholarship that extends through published papers by several other economic historians including Robert Margo and David Weir that culminates in the authoritative reference work, Historical Statistics of the United States, publishing Weir’s series and not Shlaes’s preferred data. This is what academic work is supposed to accomplish: establish by research and the adversarial process of debate and peer review a consensus. Shlaes is defying it.
This may seem rather similar to the method used to deny that tobacco use causes cancer, or that human action promotes global warming: by making something seem complicated, by saying, well, there’s disagreement, Shlaes and other denialists undermine the entire academic enterprise.
I don’t know if they tried to call Krugman, but Politico left no evidence of trying to get in touch with me; if they had, I would happily have explained the above. Perhaps they’re content simply to flack for Shlaes.
The Edge of the American West 
60 comments
April 23, 2009 at 9:42 am
RobinMarie
“This is what academic work is supposed to accomplish: establish by research and the adversarial process of debate and peer review a consensus. Shlaes is defying it.”
This is unfortunately what also makes people like Shales attractive to the conservative sentiment that scientists and academics are all together in a powerful conspiracy, anyway. Shales isn’t doing crappy scholarship; she’s fighting the power.
I recently tried my absolute best to convince my father that his notion that “there is still disagreement” about global warming was more or less bullshit, and yet I still think I failed, considering his only response back was “all I know is that a lot of people are making money off of this.”
April 23, 2009 at 11:05 am
eric
But it’s true that “there is still disagreement”, just not among serious people.
DeLong puts it like this: “A normal person would not argue that the New Deal prolonged the Great Depression.” I would probably have said “reasonable person responsibly apprised of the facts.” But that’s wordier than “normal”. Either way, though, there are still plenty of non-normal or non-reasonable persons &c. — and there always will be: you have to assume a certain crazification factor in any population.
So whether “there is still disagreement” is not where you put the bar. You put the bar at whether “there is still disagreement” among reasonable persons responsibly apprised of the facts.
April 23, 2009 at 11:06 am
saintneko
Controversy creates page-views creates ad-revenue. It’s as simple as that.
Re: Robin – he’s right, you’re right – a lot of people are making money off it, from BOTH ends – the pro and con both get media attention (page-view ad-revenue!) and then everyone else is trying to sell us a solution for it.
But hey, if we weren’t greedy would we ever have crawled out of the ocean? Let’s just hope we get consensus about this faster than we have on evolution.
April 23, 2009 at 11:16 am
max
Perhaps they’re content simply to flack for Shlaes.
Well, since she would have sunk like a stone otherwise, as far as I can tell, I imagine they fully support here. But then it appears to me that Politico is an R propaganda arm.
Shales isn’t doing crappy scholarship; she’s fighting the power.
Well, I managed recently to prove to myself quasi-mathematically, that DeLong was right that Marx and von Mises were using the same economic model. The big difference between them is about social order; Marx wants to help the poor, and von Mises thinks he is helping the poor more over the long-term by allowing (and supporting) short-term mass unemployment.
Unfortunately, someone like Shales thinks pretty much the same way, but she can’t get away with saying that, so she’ll just lie, because well, she’s trying to save the world.
max
[‘I think she would say (if she were honest) that the academic enterprise is unneccesary, we have all the information we need, and so we should just do the right thing. The right thing being mass unemployment and deflation.’]
April 23, 2009 at 11:18 am
eric
Controversy creates page-views creates ad-revenue. It’s as simple as that.
I don’t think so. If you really wanted controversy, wouldn’t you call me or Krugman or any of the zillions of other non-denialist scholars to give you a nice juicy quotation about how Shlaes’s views are insupportable? It looks to me as if they’re content to shill for Shlaes.
April 23, 2009 at 11:22 am
Vance
That would create more controversy within the article, but would tend to make the pseudo-controversy die down.
April 23, 2009 at 12:40 pm
RobinMarie
“You put the bar at whether “there is still disagreement” among reasonable persons responsibly apprised of the facts.”
Exactly, or, that is what everyone should do. But what troubles me is how to get to those that might have a chance of being pulled out from the crazy section and explain to them that scholars and scientists generally aim to keep themselves within the realm of the reasonable.
I’m really not offering any positive point here, I’m just bitching, and trying to delay the inevitable conclusion that I am going to have to give up and place a substantial portion of my immediate family into the crazy column.
saintneko: absolutely; my point was more that I sent my father a very clear, several paragraph long articulation of how the scientific community generally works, and his only response was to chalk it up to greedy and manipulative liberals. Hence my above statement about the crazy column.
April 23, 2009 at 2:42 pm
Jonathan Rees
I suspect that Amity Shlaes will eventually play the same role in New Deal historiography that Stanley Elkins does in the historiography of slavery. Hopefully Politico will still be in business by the time that happens so that they can report this story better.
April 23, 2009 at 2:45 pm
kid bitzer
“Doubt is our product,” a cigarette executive once observed, “since it is the best means of competing with the ‘body of fact’ that exists in the minds of the general public. It is also the means of establishing a controversy.”
a very good book about how industry undermines science and the academic enterprise:
April 23, 2009 at 3:48 pm
Ben Alpers
None of which explains how someone with a BA from Yale in English, who was fired from a position as a columnist at the Financial Times for shamelessly and incoherently shilling for the Bush Administration’s response to Katrina is a Senior Fellow in Economic History at the Council on Foreign Relations. That CFR position, more than anything else, seems to establish Shlaes’s expertise in two areas–economics and history–in which she clearly has little expertise and on which her book focuses.
Of course, from the content of the book it’s clear she’s just repeating ancient right-wing lies about the New Deal. But since we live in a lazy media environment in which argumenta ad vericundiam frequently substitute for independent fact-checking, her CFR position is a crucial part of the package.
So what in hell’s name was the CFR thinking?
April 23, 2009 at 4:35 pm
Walt
The CFR was thinking that we live in a lazy media environment in which argumenta ad vericundiam frequently substitute for independent fact-checking. Did you read Brad DeLong’s posts about the conference they had about the New Deal? They had to scramble at the last moment to find more non-wingnuts to give the illusion of balance.
April 23, 2009 at 4:52 pm
kid bitzer
verecundiam. respect mah authoritah.
April 23, 2009 at 4:59 pm
Walt
Wikipedia agrees with you, so you must be right.
April 23, 2009 at 5:00 pm
kid bitzer
wrong wrong wrong, walt.
wikipedia agrees with *me*, so *it* must be right.
respect mah authoritah!
April 23, 2009 at 5:14 pm
Jason B.
But since we live in a lazy media environment in which argumenta ad vericundiam frequently substitute for independent fact-checking, her CFR position is a crucial part of the package.
If I ever had any doubt about my nerd-dom, it was quashed when I got excited over the proper pluralization of argumentum in that sentence. I need to get out more.
April 23, 2009 at 5:30 pm
Walt
kid, I see that you’re quoting South Park, so you must be right about that too.
April 23, 2009 at 5:30 pm
eric
They had to scramble at the last moment to find more non-wingnuts to give the illusion of balance.
The question is, why didn’t CFR let it go off unbalanced.
April 23, 2009 at 6:28 pm
kid bitzer
i had not known i was quoting south park. i thought i was quoting ari.
(https://edgeofthewest.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/respect-mah-authoritah/)
April 23, 2009 at 6:49 pm
Mark Palko
Maybe Shales is just channelling her inner Lewis Carroll.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_the_Tortoise_Said_to_Achilles
April 23, 2009 at 7:36 pm
Michael Turner
if we weren’t greedy would we ever have crawled out of the ocean?
For the record, when I crawled out of the ocean, it was on a heroic leave-no-half-legged-fish-behind mission. (Yes, the rescue attempt was successful, thank you for asking.)
I’m down with Vance’s diagnosis on this one. The longer they keep Shlaes from the slaughter, the longer they can milk her for pageviews. That’s assuming media greed — it might be more easily attributed to media ignorance or media stupidity.
I hasten to add: by “slaughter” I mean “utterly stripped of any intellectual respectability.” Crazification will still leave her with a large audience.
Panel discussion I’d like to see: Paul Krugman and Brad Delong vs. Amity Shlaes and . . . well, so many candidates end up dropping out with dog-ate-my-homework excuses that they finally need to use Alan Keyes. But they don’t tell Shlaes she’s paired with Keyes until about 30 seconds before air-time, so she can’t drop out.
April 23, 2009 at 9:28 pm
fromlaurelstreet
you could have a panel discussion with experts showing how shlaes is wrong twice a day every day for the rest of eternity and it wouldn’t matter, because the fall back position is always “well, that’s your opinion.”
you wouldn’t think there would be any argument that waterboarding, for which people have been prosecuted and executed, is a crime but there is.
there is no discourse in this country at this point, just a lot of shouting.
April 23, 2009 at 11:02 pm
Michael Turner
Well, that’s your opinion, though, isn’t it?
April 24, 2009 at 7:18 am
politicalfootball
I once had a Louisiana lawyer tell me that it is, in some ways, more difficult to defend someone who is innocent than someone who is guilty because it’s hard to know exactly what crazy bullshit the lawmen are going to come up with when they are framing someone, and therefore it’s tougher to prepare a defense.
I think of this every time I see folks like eric and Krugman getting tangled up with someone like Shlaes or a publication like Politico. It can be easier to sound plausible when you don’t have to worry about being correct.
April 24, 2009 at 7:46 am
Rich Puchalsky
The notion that they are just selling controversy fails. There are all sorts of controversies that don’t just happen to confuse the issue on a subject of importance to the right.
I’m heartened by how quickly “denialist” has caught on in this context. It took a long time for the environmental community to fully incorporate the reality that tobacco industry tactics were being used on their issues. Now that it has been widely recognized as a meta-tactic, the cycle of catching on is much shorter.
Here are some informal characteristics of denialism, as I see it:
* describes a behavior, not an ideology. The denialist need not consider him or herself to be one, they need only act like one;
* quickly distinguishable from skepticism by e.g. its recycling of long-rejected arguments and misrepresentation of opposing points;
* works to create doubt instead of reduce doubt;
* always in service of an economic interest or an ideology that provides non-obvious but easily traceable support;
* corrupt elites recruited as top layer, right-wing populism called on for lower layer.
April 24, 2009 at 8:13 am
politicalfootball
It’s very natural among people of good will to fall into a spurious moral equivalence, to wit:
there is no discourse in this country at this point, just a lot of shouting.
This isn’t an ideal way to phrase this – there’s plenty of discourse; it’s just that none of it is emanating from the poisonous right wing. In fact, I think that’s pretty much fromlaurelstreet’s intended point, but this phrasing isn’t helpful in clarifying the reason there is so much shouting, and it lets the actual culprits off the hook.
Likewise, Robin and saintnekko:
Re: Robin – he’s right, you’re right – a lot of people are making money off it, from BOTH ends – the pro and con both get media attention (page-view ad-revenue!) and then everyone else is trying to sell us a solution for it.
But, of course, the interest of the Money People in this matter is overwhelmingly in favor of ignoring the problem. There isn’t a money-motivated anti-warming lobby that resembles in any serious way the money-motivated pro-warming lobby. (Yeah, you got your ethanol people, but I mostly don’t consider them anti-warming in any meaningful sense.)
April 24, 2009 at 11:29 am
AWC
I find it annoying that Politico doesn’t offer any contrary views about Shlaes’ equity arguments. Liberals are allowed to speak (and minimally) only about factual questions, not about the ethical issues that are at the center of the book.
This leaves one with the impression that the New Deal’s legitimacy depends solely upon its effect on recovery rather than the egalitarian society it created, a society generally lionized (“The Greatest Generation”) by the very conservatives who are reading the book.
April 24, 2009 at 11:36 am
ari
Wanna write a guest post making that point, AWC?
April 24, 2009 at 11:41 am
AWC
Sure. How long?
April 24, 2009 at 12:19 pm
mk3872
You should write to Politico. I am sick & tired of their lack of understanding of how journalism works. This was treated as like a Barnes & Noble book signing press release. Her book is so incredibly damaging and clearly intended to push an agenda of discrediting the New Deal so that people will push Obama NOT to act from the public sector.
BTW, wasn’t she at the SEC during the period when regulators were all intentionally looking the other way while abuses and over-leveraged risks were occurring in the financial sector??
April 24, 2009 at 12:36 pm
ari
However long you want, AWC.
April 24, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Tim
Kid Bitzer says:
“I suspect that Amity Shlaes will eventually play the same role in New Deal historiography that Stanley Elkins does in the historiography of slavery.”
This is SO not fair to Stanley Elkins, whose work is still worth reading 50 years on, and who — though he may have overreached in reasoning by analogy — at least knew what evidence was.
April 24, 2009 at 1:19 pm
Ben Alpers
What Tim said.
Even Elkins (mis)reading of concentration camps was based largely on the work of Bruno Bettelheim, who was, at the time, one of the dominant interpreters of the concentration camp experience.
Mistakes based on SOTA scholarship are utterly different from mistakes based on cherry-picking out-of-date and discredited data.
April 24, 2009 at 2:24 pm
ChicagoismynewBlog
Congrats on the success of your blog! I started my very own wordpress blog recently so when you have the chance, check it out! Good luck.
http://chicagoismynewblog.wordpress.com/
April 24, 2009 at 2:48 pm
kid bitzer
hey, tim?
i say plenty of unfair stuff, and even more stupid stuff, and you’re welcome to slam me for it.
but in this case, you are quoting “jonathan rees”, not me.
if what jonathan said about elkins was unfair to elkins, then take it up with jonathan.
don’t be unfair to me.
April 24, 2009 at 3:11 pm
Vance
KB was quite fair for his time.
April 24, 2009 at 3:21 pm
kid bitzer
sure; by today’s standards it’s only fair to middling.
but half a century ago it was state of the art-fair.
April 24, 2009 at 4:55 pm
Niitaon
It’s not that there is a conspiracy of scientists about global warming. Some percent of scientists have theories about human impact on global warming and the other ones have more complex theories where human impact is not so big or is not there at all. So if you sit at the committee where decision has to be made, you can later say that it was a political decision to choose the way of majority instead of proposing something from the middle.
April 24, 2009 at 7:03 pm
Matt Dernoga
Excellent Post. Check out this SCANDAL on big industry and global warming denial that was unearthed today.
April 25, 2009 at 11:25 am
ChicagoismynewBlog
Congrats on the success of your blog! I started my WordPress blog recently so when you get the chance, I hope you take a look. Good luck in the future also!
http://chicagoismynewblog.wordpress.com/
April 25, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Tim
Sorry for the confusion, kid bitzer.
In my everyday browser, IE6, the comment is lined up with your name, and the rules between comments just aren’t there.
I just opened this page up in Firefox, and sure enough, the comment I disagreed with is Jonathan Rees’s.
Not a slam — just a scholarly disagreement.
Still, I’m happy to be able to blame my confusion on Bill Gates.
April 25, 2009 at 2:26 pm
kid bitzer
thanks, tim.
and i’ll join anyone in blaming anything on bill gates.
April 25, 2009 at 5:34 pm
fred zen
On the contrary, what Schlaes made clear is that your ‘consensus’ is a piece of tawdry dishonesty typical of the left. When you want to claim that the new deal improved the economy the relevance of changes of employment to this claim is only for employment that is productive. The government fake jobs were quite properly not counted for the very simple reason that such jobs are not producing anything that anyone was prepared to pay for off their own bat. No doubt the choir that you’re preaching to will go along with what you say here and in the other post where you ‘explain’ why fake work should be counted, but no one both honest and not stupid will buy your arguments.
April 25, 2009 at 6:19 pm
bitchphd
Oh goody.
April 25, 2009 at 6:44 pm
Walt
Fred, given that Eric has already responded to points like yours at great length here on this very blog, you look pretty stupid right about now. But hey, if spinning little fantasies about “the left” helps get you through the night, then I guess it’s all right.
April 25, 2009 at 8:11 pm
URK
BTW, if anyone has one of those “fake jobs” opening up in the fall, I’d be interested. I promise to buy real stuff with my fake money form my fake job.
April 25, 2009 at 8:19 pm
URK
In fact, not only will I buy lots of real stuff, I’ll also keep paying the mortgage on my real house, and the electric bill to the real power company, and if it’s a good enough fake job, maybe I’ll even go see some real movies or take in a real play or a real rock and roll show.
April 25, 2009 at 10:46 pm
Michael Turner
fred zen: The government fake jobs were quite properly not counted for the very simple reason that such jobs are not producing anything that anyone was prepared to pay for off their own bat.
I love this notion of “fake job”, because it makes just about every job created in the name of national defense a fake one. Actually, it makes almost every job made possible by government a fake one. So that means the unemployment rate right now in the U.S. is, what, maybe over 35%?
Thanks fred, that’s kind of . . . zen.
What is the sound of one hand clapping? When it’s a hand on the Zen Right, it’s indistinguishable from crapping. (Not to make fun of anybody’s accent or anything.)
April 26, 2009 at 6:27 am
Jason B.
. . . such jobs are not producing anything that anyone was prepared to pay for off their own bat.
Even without the garbled phrase at the end of this statement this is one of the dumbest things I’ve read in months. Thank you, Mr. Zen, for keeping the wingnuttery alive.
April 26, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Ben Alpers
I love this notion of “fake job”, because it makes just about every job created in the name of national defense a fake one.
Including, of course, U.S. involvement in World War II, which, in the wingnut view, is the first thing that had any meaningful impact on the Great Depression.
Perhaps Shlaes, fred zen, or one of their co-religionists can explain why they don’t consider D-Day the ultimate example of the wastefulness of government spending on “fake jobs.”
Over 16 million served in the military during WWII (roughly 13% of the population). And that’s without considering the millions of civilians producing make-work supplies for these fake jobs. It looks to me like the Great Depression actually got worse during the War. Someone had better alert Shlaes. This could be the topic of her next book!
April 26, 2009 at 12:54 pm
Walt
It all make sense when you realize that killing is one of the primary purposes of life. Its usefulness needs no justification.
April 26, 2009 at 1:09 pm
max
Its usefulness needs no justification.
You’re not really articulating the neo-con economic theory properly, Walt. Killing people causes lots of blood to be spilled and then the blood fairies come and take the blood back to the money fairies in the money tree who turn it into fertilizer for the money trees. THEN the rich people with the special ‘charm the money fairies’ gene go and talk the money fairies into giving the rich people lots of cash which they then distribute to the people of the world via the efficient market mechanism.
Oh, I almost forgot Fred’s bats: the bats are bloodsuckers who steal the blood from the blood fairies and prevent the blood fairies from taking the blood to the money fairies; instead the bats take the blood to the genetically inferior people who then become powerful enough to steal money from the money fairies. This is ecologically unsound and inefficient.
max
[‘Fred is just trying to save the earth, or at least the part with the money trees on it.’]
April 26, 2009 at 1:18 pm
AWC
It’s not just those 16M make-work Army jobs. I’d like Shlaes to explain how the US could have won the war without adopting New Deal industrial policies.
I have another idea for Shlaes’ next book. She can tell the story of the poor WWII profiteers, punished by the big bad federal government for selling tires and gasoline at the market price.
April 26, 2009 at 2:55 pm
Walt
I’m pretty sure that if she thought of it, Shlaes would write that book.
April 26, 2009 at 9:18 pm
andrew
As late as 1938, FDR had still failed to win the second world war.
April 26, 2009 at 10:28 pm
Hal
Fred, here’s the thing: First off, most “fake jobs” are in the private sector, not the public one. That’s because most jobs are in the private sector. Notwithstanding that, there’s a reason Dilbert is set in the private sector.
But, secondly, I defy you to identify for me just which New Deal jobs were “fake.” As someone else has pointed out:
April 27, 2009 at 1:34 am
Hal
No luck on finding Brad’s architecture student. But:
* An article from the Oklahoma Historical Society on WPA armories still in use.
* A similar article on sites in New Mexico.
* From Google’s cache, a piece in the Des Moines Register covering the New deal infrastructure legacies in that state.
April 27, 2009 at 5:24 am
Michael Turner
The kind of doublethink going on here was most vividly demonstrated to me one day, when I was arguing with a skeptic over the effectiveness of stimulus spending. I tried this tack: if creating jobs (albeit somewhat “artificially”) couldn’t possibly boost an economy out of a recession, can you explain how too-loose credit and too-easy mortgage terms contributed so much to our(otherwise modest) economic growth during the housing bubble?
My sparring partner pivoted nimbly, suckerpunching: “And who caused the housing bubble? The Federal government, through Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the Community Reinvestment Act!”
Now, that particular propaganda line had, by then, been so thoroughly debunked that I was left gobsmacked hearing it from anybody. (Sitting there stupefied and slackjawed, stunned into submission by someone else’s unexpected stupidity, and thereby losing the argument — don’t you hate it when that happens?)
It is a doublethought of great beauty, though, you must admit. The government can’t haul an economy out of recession by creating jobs, spurring spending and running deficits. Except when it can. But in those cases, you just say it like it’s a bad thing. In a machine-gun spray of talking-point allusions. It’s not just doublethink. It’s also almost precisely “duckspeak” of 1984.
April 27, 2009 at 6:31 am
kid bitzer
off topic–
this, from p.z. myers, contains giant squid. giant space squid, to be exact.
i can’t vouch for all ten minutes of content, having only watched the first one or two. in which there were giant space squid.
very curiously portrayed.
April 27, 2009 at 8:37 am
eric
As late as 1938, FDR had still failed to win the second world war.
Still funny.
April 27, 2009 at 1:10 pm
Hal
Michael Turner: “It is a doublethought of great beauty, though, you must admit. The government can’t haul an economy out of recession by creating jobs, spurring spending and running deficits. Except when it can. But in those cases, you just say it like it’s a bad thing.”
Well, here’s a similar problem in the argument. What you usually hear is:
“The New Deal didn’t get us out of the Great Depression — WWII did.”
Here’s the problem, from a Republican point-of-view: This is still a Keynesian statement. It says the New Deal wasn’t big enough, and it was only with the spending generated by WWII that government investment in the economy finally did get big enough.
Here’s what you don’t hear:
“The New Deal didn’t get us out of the Great Depression — GM, GE, and the rest of the private sector did. After all, they had 12 years to work at it.”
Oops.