beyond the times

UPDATE: I originally posted the only lightly edited email from which this post originated. Later, I decided to tighten it up and post it to Medium. That edited version now appears below. 

One of the more bizarre responses to the ongoing Reinhart-Rogoff controversy is this one by sociologist Peter Frase, who takes the opportunity to “use it as a cudgel against the pernicious rise of the ‘policy wonk’ as a model for journalism.” In other words, this whole thing is kind of Ezra Klein’s fault. Here’s the gist:

the wonk is a new iteration of American journalism’s obsession with “objectivity”, in this case filtered through the predilections of the “technocrat, obsessed with policy details, bereft of politics, earnestly searching for solutions to the world’s problems through the dialectic of an Excel spreadsheet.” The Reinhart-Rogoff revelations do more than just reveal the folly of relying on the wrong spreadsheets—they expose the shallowness and dishonesty that pervades much of the wonk-journalist milieu.

Though I don’t cover policy, the merits of wonk journalism are a favorite topic of mine. So I feel compelled to defend it. The easy reply to the critique is, “Fine, but what’s the alternative? Oh, that’s right. Better wonk journalism.”

But it’s worth getting a bit more specific to highlight why this line of argument is misguided. I read Frase as having two basic complaints:

1. Wonk journalists hide their ideologies
2. Wonk journalists don’t know as much as they let on, and so end up appealing a lot to expertise

Those two criticisms blend together in the piece, as Frase sort of seems to think that acknowledging one’s ideology lets you solve #2 by just admitting you don’t know what you’re talking about and falling back on first principles.He cites Matt Yglesias of Slate admiringly for doing as much:

In contrast to the wonky preoccupation with empirical studies and pretty graphs, Yglesias has argued that “evidence is overrated”, and he often offers positions based on his own ideological predilections and reasoning from first principles.)

But that’s not really what Yglesias is saying, as he clarified in a post about R-R and evidence. His point is more nuanced, that empirical evidence has to be weighed in light of other evidence, and in light of relevant theory:

In the absence of a plausible account of why a high debt:GDP ratio would cause slow real growth even in the absence of high interest rates, you would want to see overwhelming empirical evidence for the existence of such an effect before you believed it.

This doesn’t have much if anything to do with ideology. It’s simply a thoughtful point (that Ezra endorsed) about the weighting of evidence.

To the extent that ‘evidence is overrated’, it’s theory, not ideology, that’s underrated. And so I think Frase is wrong to conflate his concerns about wonk ideology with wonk expertise. Instead, let’s consider them in turn.

Wonk Ideology

I don’t know Ezra or most of the other wonk journalists in question. And those I do know, I’ve not asked about their moral philosophies. And yet I really don’t think this is that hard.

Here’s my guess: Yes, Ezra has an ideology in the sense that you have to have one to reason about politics. Fine, but boring. As I’ve written, that no one can be free of philosophy doesn’t mean people are all equally ideological. That post of mine gets into it in more detail, but you can sum it up like this:

The wonk class holds a conception of the good that is agnostic about the optimal size of government and which does not weight negative liberty higher than positive liberty. Done. If Frase thinks every Ezra post needs to come with some kind of technocrat disclaimer, or that he and others need to be more careful when they makes claims about “what the data say” then OK, fine. But it doesn’t really bother me.

Wonk Expertise

As for the critique that wonk journalists don’t know as much about the topics they cover as would be ideal, true! I and every other journalist can sympathize. But these folks clearly know much more than many beltway journalists who prefer not to wade into the stuff. Would you rather have a he-said/she-said insider type cover, say, the stimulus? Or would you prefer to read the wonk journalist? For me, the answer is clear.

Here we should pause and note some realities about media.

1. Journalists have always been overstretched and unable to be true experts in their fields. We work around that because…
2. You can think of the public sphere like a stack, with academics filtering info on to policy analysts, filtering info on to journalists, filtering info on to the public. Is some signal lost in that transmission process? Yes. But it works OK, and besides, what’s the alternative?
3. Before answering that, remember: the public will NEVER read academic work directly with any regularity.

And so if Frase thinks the Ezra’s of the world need to know more, fine. But acknowledge that they know more than many, and answer the questions of a) what’s the business model? and b) how will you attract significant interest for this new uber-wonkiness from the public?

(I’ll note quickly that I think Frase underweights deference to expertise. But I’m familiar enough with the work of people like Philip Tetlock to recognize that topic deserves its own post.)

Conclusion

That an Excel error in an academic economics paper has gotten so much attention in the (digital) pages of outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, Slate, and others seems to me like a great point in defense of wonk journalism.

Is it perfect? No. But it’s worlds better than the alternative.

In closing, I’d urge everyone to read this Matt O’Brien post at The Atlantic before criticizing the wonk journalists’ role in the R-R controversy. Talk about not taking experts at face value; he ran his own regressions to question the idea of a debt tipping point. Pretty solid for a journalist.

I’ve been following a very interesting back and forth kicked off by legal scholar and author Tim Wu in The New Yorker on the merits of open vs. closed, and countered by author John Gruber. To catch you up…

Wu: 

Accuse me of overreading, but I propose a revision of the old adage: closed can beat open, but you have to be genius. Under normal conditions, in an unpredictable industry, and given regular levels of human error, open still beats closed. Stated a different way, a firm gets to be closed in exact proportion to its vision and design talent.

Gruber:

Allow me to start by putting forth an alternative rule of thumb for commercial success in any market: better and earlier tend to beat worse and later. That is to say, successful products and services tend to be those that are superior qualitatively and which hit the market sooner.

I liked Gruber’s response quite a bit, if only because my bias is strongly with Wu, and Gruber’s arguments were well formulated. But Wu responded today, and I think ultimately his response captures why the value of open systems can’t be underestimated:

The study of centralized and decentralized decision structures in an economic system is hardly my invention.   It goes back to classic economic debates between Oskar R. Lange and Fredrick Hayek in the 1940s.  Lange was an advocate of centralized planning, and argued that closed, state-run economies would be more efficient than open / decentralized market economies.   Hayek, responding in 1945, argued that the advantage of an open system was largely informational.  A theoretically perfect central planner would, Hayek conceded, outperform an open system, but in a reality of imperfect information, the open market system could usually be expected to perform better.   There’s been much economic thought on the issue since that time, but I’ll skip it: the bottom line is simply that open and closed systems perform differently under different conditions and have differently strengths and weaknesses.  I should add that this kind of analysis is relevant for any system and any product ecosystem, not just tech — it is really the study of institutional design.

(It’s worth noting that one of the points of Wu’s book is that often when closed systems do win, it’s at the expense of innovation.)

Zooming out like this is helpful to illustrate the relevant intellectual history; on the other hand, the case that open beats closed is strongest where the scope of he task is largest, because of the related uncertainty. Designing an economy is beyond the ability of any planner; designing a toothbrush is not.

In what follows, I’m referring to this particular formulation of “open” which Wu offers in his original piece:

First, “open” and “closed” can refer to how permissive a tech firm is, with respect to who can partner with or interconnect with its products to reach consumers. We say an operating system like Linux is “open” because anyone can design a device that runs Linux.

These questions get very complicated quickly, and “openness” not only becomes a matter of extent, but its merits will also differ layer to layer. How much control the maker of a piece of hardware exerts over what software can be run on it is separate from how much control an OS exerts over what applications can run on it is separate from how much control those applications have over what plugins can be added and which 3rd party apps can be integrated.

My intuition is that as the scope of the activity governed by the piece of the tech stack in question gets smaller, the case for (relatively more) closed technologies becomes stronger. In other words, the interoperabiltiy of an OS matters more than the interoperability of Snapchat. The complexity and uncertainty surrounding the latter should be less than in the case of the former, meaning the latter is more amenable to the closed planning model.

All of this is to say, I agree basically with Wu’s conclusion:

as Michael Arrington points out, you really can’t pretend to understand what has happened over the last twenty years without some understanding the relative advantages of open and closed systems  (or if you prefer, decentralized and centralized decision hierarchies.)

Pitchfork has an interesting post by a musician complaining about the stingy payments made by companies like Pandora and Spotify, even though in Pandora’s case, at least, those payments are rendering the company borderline unsustainable. Here’s the gist:

When I started making records, the model of economic exchange was exceedingly simple: make something, price it for more than it costs to manufacture, and sell it if you can. It was industrial capitalism, on a 7″ scale. The model now seems closer to financial speculation. Pandora and Spotify are not selling goods; they are selling access, a piece of the action.

He’s right that the two services are in the access business, but I want to make a quick but important point about the economics of content. Put simply: if you do something that people generally like to do just for fun, you’re in a lot of trouble.

The economic term here is psychic cost/benefit, which is a sort of catch-all for non-monetary changes to your quality of life. If you’re in an industry where workers mostly receive psychic benefits from your work, and if the transaction costs for amateurs to get in on the game are low, that’s a bad combination. This is especially true in areas where amateurs are only a bit worse than professionals, including areas like music and writing. People like to play music, they like to write, and lots of amateurs are pretty darn good at it. Now that it costs very little to produce music and writing and share it, the price paid to professionals naturally decreases.

I’m keenly aware of this as I’m paid to write. I’d prefer to make a lucrative career out of it, but I don’t pretend that what’s best for my career is necessarily best for consumers of news and opinion. A world in which terrific commentary is produced for free (as I’m doing in the case of this post) might be better for readers than one where the content is marginally better but significantly more expensive.

So if you have a job where you reap psychic rewards, and if the barriers to entry are low, consider whether the internet might significantly lower the market rate for your labor. If it hasn’t already.

I’m catching up on my RSS reader today and found myself on this Reddit AMA with Matt Yglesias. Here’s an abridged version of a fascinating question and answer:

localtaxpayer 15 points 9 days ago*

What, if any, solution could there possibly be to the current media and cultural environment in which there are basically two separate realities in which half of the population chooses to live?

…

[–]myglesias[S] 28 points 9 days ago

Unfortunately, I think narrowcasting is an inevitable feature of some positive technological trends. When we only had three TV stations, the smart strategy was lowest common denominator programming. Thanks to the internet, we have an infinity of distribution channels so now it makes sense to target and specialize. One of my favorite things about Slate is that we’re an old-fashioned general interest publication but it’s still true that in practice we reach a pretty specific demographic.

What I wish is that more writers and hosts would take this reality seriously. Rush Limbaugh doesn’t need to try to persuade people to vote Republican—only Republicans are listening! When he misinforms his audience, he’s not really helping the conservative cause he’s just confusing conservatives.

Everyone should realize that their audience is mostly people “on their side” and so it makes sense to subject that side to scrutiny. Swing voters aren’t listening!