Day of Brad
By A pair of excellent posts from Brad Delong this morning. The first deals with the question of how a reasonably smart group of people (as, frankly, Rumsfeld, Cheney, Wolfowitz, et al are) came up the the set of policies this administration has employed. His answer is canonical:
Those who think that every Prince who has a name for prudence owes it to the wise counsellors he has around him, and not to any merit of his own, are certainly mistaken; since it is an unerring rule and of universal application that a Prince who is not wise himself cannot be well advised by others, unless by chance he surrender himself to be wholly governed by some one adviser who happens to be supremely prudent; in which case he may, indeed, be well advised; but not for long, since such an adviser will soon deprive him of his Government. If he listen to a multitude of advisers, the Prince who is not wise will never have consistent counsels, nor will he know of himself how to reconcile them. Each of his counsellors will study his own advantage, and the Prince will be unable to detect or correct them. Nor could it well be otherwise, for men will always grow rogues on your hands unless they find themselves under a necessity to be honest. Hence it follows that good counsels, whencesoever they come, have their origin in the prudence of the Prince, and not the prudence of the Prince in wise counsels.
The question is a relevant one. I was somewhat impressed by the group that Bush put together in 2001 (with the exception, of course, of John Ashcroft), and I never suspected, at least on the foreign policy front, that the administration would become the disaster that now confronts us. The inability of the administration to competently formulate or carry out policy began to become clear even before September 11th, with the concentration on missile defense at the expense of all else, as well as the bullying and bluster associated with the capture of a recon aircraft by the Chinese. There is much blame to go around, but W. himself deserves the lion’s share.
In his second excellent post, Brad destroys the latest hack work coming out of the National Review:
A correspondent writes that National Review is attacking the New York Times’s David Cay Johnston for calculating real income numbers by adjusting for inflation. I did not believe it, but there it is in black and white.
The clear answer–given by all economists, left or right, up or down, above or below, libertarian or Marxist, Friedmanite or Keynesian, Austrian or Swedish–is that we are interested in the second, inflation-adjusted, real income number. We use money as a measuring rod, yes. But we do not want to confuse changes in the size of the measuring rod with changes in the real economic quantities that we are measuring.
Is there nobody in National Review’s offices who has any degree of economic literacy whatsoever? Is everybody so shortsighted as to have no idea what printing this kind of tripe does to the remains of National Review’s already well-shredded reputation?
One point to quibble; did the National Review ever have a reputation as anything but tripe-ridden hack work?