For a good example of Brad DeLong making a complete ass out of himself, see this thread on ThinkMarkets. The post takes issue with something that DeLong said on his own blog to the effect that for stimulus spending, “government spending is as good as anybody else’s.” Of course, it isn’t, as any economist will tell you, because government spending is more independent of market reality than other kinds of spending. That, in fact, is one of the major reasons one hears advanced in favor of various spending programs: that government takes care of needs that the market won’t on its own, etc.
DeLong, apparently embarassed to be caught making this kind of elementary economic mistake, has the first comment on the thread, claiming that they’ve deliberately taken him out of context, apparently to smear him. But if you read the post they’re quoting, it’s clear that they haven’t taken him out of context at all. DeLong gives a list of examples of stimulus spending and concludes that government spending is as good as anybody else’s. That’s an actual quote. IN fact, here is the passage in question:
Spending – whether by the United States government during World War II, following the Reagan tax cuts of 1981, by Silicon Valley during the late 1990’s, or by home buyers in America’s south and on its coasts in the 2000’s – boosts employment and reduces unemployment. And government spending is as good as anybody else’s.
Sorry, Brad, but that’s the context, and you DID say what they say you said.
Now, maybe he really does understand that private market spending is more efficient than government spending for employment creation. In a later comment on the same post, he argues that he does understand that, and that furthermore the authors should know that he does because he had an article in the Economist making that very point in December.
Here’s DeLong:
If that is indeed your point, that’s my point–and I was there first. As I wrote last December 18 in the *Economist*…
How very childish. The mature thing to say here is “oh, I see how you got your impression - I guess I could’ve been clearer. No worries - in fact I understand the point well, as my December 18 article in The Economist shows.” But instead he opts for “don’t read any of my blogposts EVER unless you’re familiar with the entire body of my work and are willing to do all the crossreferencing it takes to make sure I come out looking intelligent.”
Um, no. If you’re a blogger, it’s up to you to be clear about what you meant. Your careless writing is not our problem. And the point you’re making there, by the way, is not an idea that you came up with, so there’s no sense in which you were “there first.” It’s an idea that Economists have been entertaining for a very long time now - before you were born, in fact.
Any daily reader of DeLong’s blog knows what an ass he is, actually, so I guess there’s not much point to pointing it out today. But somehow those comments really rubbed me the wrong way.