Matt Yglesias

49 Responses to “Optimism Inversion”

1. Rob Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:16 am

   Of course the left wing and right wing serve different economic interests. And the right was hard pressed to see how bad things were when they were getting all the benefits of the growth for the past 6 years,

2. ostap Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am

   “over the past five years or so”

   Five? More like 150, minimum.

3. ed Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:20 am

   Yet another instance of people thinking they need to swear to be cool.

   Careful clutching your pearls like that, Jimbo. You don’t want to hurt them.

4. El Cid Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:22 am

   Well, I was one of the raving paranoids who wasn’t too happy at what I saw as growing instabilities and economic gathering storms during the Clinton administration (after the Reaganite nightmare), so, what are ya gonna do?

5. Andrew Fly Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:28 am

   4. Liberal commentators want to lower expectations so that if things don’t go as well as we’d like, it’d still be better than nothing.

6. Oberon Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:29 am

   Will liberals still enjoy shadenfreude over bank failures?

   Matt,

   Do you really think liberals feel this way? Maybe liberals are enjoying the comeuppance of some extremely overpaid bankers (except that the top guys are still walking away with multi-millions), but I don’t see anyone secretly happy about the banks themselves failing.

7. Jim Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:30 am

   Hey Matt,

   I really am not at all sure about (1), as I personally tend to be optimistic about things in general – though I’ve been wondering when this reckoning would hit for quite some time now (since I’ve been following Krugman since grad school). Then again, while I’d probably be put on the left wing by most people, I don’t really believe that left-right means much; I’d prefer reality based versus ideology any day.

   (2) won’t get too much argument from me, though I would argue that low information citizens are by far in the majority.

   (3) I am quite certain that the right, or those who identify with the Republicans have already shifted to blaming socialists and the new administration for everything (in fact, if I understand correctly, there was some Carter era legislation that caused this whole housing bubble. ). As for whether liberals / leftists / Democratic sympathizers will get more optimistic about bank failures, I guess I think a lot will depend on whether it’s your bank (or credit union, in my case). Just be very glad that we have an FDIC right now!

8. Brautigan Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:32 am

   I think you misunderestimate the effect of fervent idealogy.

9. Peter K. Says:
   January 7th, 2009 at 11:39 am

   In general, I see 4 groups:

   1) looney tunes rightwing, pretty much all of the right – usually blindly optimistic

   2) looney tunes leftwing, hopelessy negative about everything, pessimism incarnate

   3) leftwing who tries to be accurate and get it right, saw and remembered what happened in the 90s: Japan, Long Term Capital Managemnt and then Enron etc. will criticize own side if need be.

   4) blindly partisan Democrats who will defend, say, Clinton or Obama no matter what b/c, as Kevin Drum said if they lose it means the rightwing swamp has won.

10. James Kabala Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:43 am

    “I believe left-wing politics and pessimism are generally correlated traits.”

    I don’t think was true until the Reagan era at the earliest. Conservatism is traditionally very pessimistic.

11. Peter K. Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:46 am

    Matt,

    Do you really think liberals feel this way? Maybe liberals are enjoying the comeuppance of some extremely overpaid bankers (except that the top guys are still walking away with multi-millions), but I don’t see anyone secretly happy about the banks themselves failing.

    I am enjoying the “troskyization” as David Hanson put it of free market theory. I am loving the cognitive dissonance raging in free market ideologues heads, b/c it couldn’t have happend to a nicer group of peopel. It’s nice to be proven right, but the main pleasure is schadenfreude.

    Of course there are mixed feelings b/c of the people losing their jobs, etc. But then one is heartened by the fact Obama was elected and hopefully the Democrats will do the right thing even though there will be flakes like Diane Feinstein.

12. Scott de B. Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:47 am

    Yes, and I’m both liberal and an incurable optimist. Heck, if I weren’t an optimist, it’d be hard to be liberal.

13. Cyrus Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:56 am

    As for left-wing pessimism, I think it’s more true about economics than in general. At least, it’s more true in America’s relatively kleptocratic system; maybe the left wing in some country more socialistic than average is the more optimistic side and the free-marketeers tend to be pessimistic.

    In general, though, I’d say that being left-wing or liberal or progressive makes you more likely than not to be optimistic. Isn’t that the idea of progress, that tomorrow can be better than yesterday or something sappy like that?

    The obvious caveat is that being optimistic doesn’t preclude being angry that we aren’t there yet or whatever.

14. Thomas Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    The economy was in trouble due to the collapse of the housing bubble, but things didn’t really get bad until Obama destroyed the confidence of the American consumer by convincing them that they were going to lose their jobs. Now they really are losing their jobs. I’m saddened to discover that Obama’s plan to deal with the crisis he helped create is to bail out his friends and let everyone else drown.

15. Aaron S. Veenstra Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Your #1 ought to be modified such that extremity on the left-right scale is correlated with pessimism. People out on the wings rarely get what they want in politics, and they know it. Those closer to the center have reason to be optimistic when their guy is in charge.

16. Bahrad Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:06 pm

    whoa, whoa, whoa… okay, this is really a weird distillation of points.

    As many commenters have pointed out, there is no correlation between right/left and optimism/pessimism except in the past several years in which opinions have differed on economic prospects. Conservatives have a rich history of pessimism (”barbarians at the gates”) pre and post-dating Reagan.

    It’s really not so complicated. The real reasons behind the difference of opinions is two-fold:

    1. In particular since the 2000-2002 dotcom crash/post-911 recession (though this arguably really dates back to the post-82 recovery from the 70s stagflation), wage growth and poverty levels have failed to keep up with other metrics of economic growth. The left has been sensitive to this because they are sensitive to economic status of the poor and middle class, while the right is more focused on how large businesses and the wealthy are doing, or more charitably, “the economy as a whole”. The left has been pessimistic about the economy because they saw the credit boom as being artificial and driving any gains to the wealthy few, while the larger middle class and poor were making any gains by either bubble employment in construction or by borrowing against inflated house prices to sustain spending.

    2. The left wing believed that the Bush tax cuts were a mistake that would lead to economic consequences down the road, opposed Greenspan-Bernanke fiscal policy, and thought the Iraq War would be a drag on the economy. This I guess aligns with Yglesias’s point #3, but it’s simpler than how it’s stated – if you think an administration’s policy is wrong, the reason for that is that you think there will be negative future consequences. We think deregulating Wall Street is a bad idea not because we don’t like Bush or because the left wing manual tells us that “deregulation is bad, regulation is good” but because we believe that regulation is necessary to avoid the kind of crisis that we’re experiencing today!

    There’s a really important point here – Yglesias in this post and many “pundits” in general make a contrast between ideology and pragmatism that is false. In part, we subscribe to particular ideologies because we believe they will have the most practical benefits. Yes, there is a part of ideology that has to do with “intangibles”, like fairness, freedom of action, etc. But a large part of it has to do with whether a particular set of policies derived from an ideological view will be practically successful and/or avoid actual negative consequences. This is why “post-partisanship” makes sense as a branding strategy – because “partisanship” and “ideology” have been set up as antonyms of pragmatism. Krugman doesn’t get this, because he’s an idealist and doesn’t understand how the media/opinion-makers have led us to this point.

17. Richard Steven Hack Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:23 pm

    Matt: “I’m genuinely uncertain about this.”

    I’m genuinely unconcerned how the left and the right get everything wrong every time. Here’s a news flash: the sun rises in the East.

    The one thing we can be confident about is that the wrong decisions will be made by whoever is in power and eventually the economy WILL melt down. Whether it’s this year or twenty years from now isn’t all that relevant to the basic situation.

    Anybody who thinks the United States is the “Thousand Year Reich” needs to get a clue.

18. Joe Strummer Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:34 pm

    Matt’s hypothesis might be tested, but not proved. In other words, things are going to get really, really bad in 2009 and 2010, with plus 12 percent unemployment. We won’t start seeing a rebound until 2011 or 2012, and it will be slowwwwwwwwwww. We’re talking about some really bad times ahead of us with real hardship.

    So even if left-wingers acknowledge how bad things are, it wouldn’t prove they are able to escape ideological blindspots. It would just show they are able to see what’s in front of them.

    Now, if left-wingers claim that the next year or two are good, when they are not, then they’d just be insane.

19. Joe Strummer Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    Richard Hack has it about right. Things are going to get really really bad. Matt can inveigh all he wants against neo-Hooverism and there’s something of a point there. But we’re well beyond normal questions of budgeting. We’re in a situation where this government has made enormous promises to people – everything from defense to medicare – and has really screwed up the financial markets to such an extent that a reckoning will come in the next 20-30 years.

    You can blame it all on Bush, but that would be a mistake. Bush is only the latest, ugliest, most incompetent example of really shitty governance we’ve had for most of the century.

20. j Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 12:40 pm

    With regard to economists’ forecasts, there is only one reason:

    Most ‘left-wing’ economic commentators were using sound theories, for which there is ample historical evidence and predictive value; most ‘right-wing’ commentators were using unsound theories for which there is little historical evidence, and that have shown to have no predictive value at all.

    That is a simpler hypothesis, and its assumptions are easier to check.

21. tomemos Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 1:07 pm

    Oberon: “I don’t see anyone secretly happy about the banks themselves failing.”

    Well, I agree with you, based on the word “secretly.” Atrios has been completely open about how thrilled he is to see the economy melt down. He’s the same way with violence in Iraq. It’s part of why I stopped reading him.

    And yes, I know his point is that the economy and Iraq are not awesome, and we told you so, but the fact that he can’t summon an emotional/moral response beyond sarcastic clapping is pretty telling.

22. eric k Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 1:35 pm

    Thomas,

    that is by far the most assinine post you’ve made. All these companies are laying people off because Obama told the truth about the ecoonomy?

    Nice job proving Matt’s 2nd point though:-)

23. eric k Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 1:37 pm

    Joe Strummer nails it, the Chickens for our economic policies dating to The Reagan admin are coming home to Roost

24. SFHawkguy Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 1:54 pm

    Of course it’s natural to feel a little bit of emotion (pride?, shaudenfraude?, etc.) when one’s predictions come true. There are a few Cassandras that were absolutely correct and showed an amazing level of intellectual acuity and brilliance when they correctly predicted the biggest financial event maybe in human history. I, for one, was aware of these people only because of blogs and was reading people like Mish (globaleconomicanalysis.blogspot.com) during a time when the politicians and media were almost unanimous in their disagreement with these Cassandras.

    So, like the smug supply-sider (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LfascZSTU4o) turning his nose up at these silly Cassandras when the whole World agreed that Republican debt-fuelled supply-side corporatism was the best thing ever–it is only natural for the Cassandras to feel a little pride in their analytical skills now that they’ve been proved correct.

    Similarly, check out Art Laffer on Bill Maher’s show from the fall. He is a man beaten and laid bare for the fool he is. He wears his intellectual shame on his puppy dog face that just screams that he knows his own intellectual corruption and failure. He is clearly backpedalling and trying to minimize his role in the foolish Republican supply-side policies of the last 25 years.

    So emotion is going to happen on both sides with such a monumental economic upheaval. Most did not see it coming and chose the safety of the herd and did not want to listen to the Cassandras. And some Cassandras displayed brilliance–speaking truth to power when they were in a small minority and openly mocked by the established powers.

    Focusing on the emotion is just another way to avoid a final reckoning. Some are more worried about limiting the display of scaudenfraude rather than figuring out what caused them to follow the herd over the cliff.

25. Peter K. Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 2:10 pm

    Yes, and I’m both liberal and an incurable optimist. Heck, if I weren’t an optimist, it’d be hard to be liberal.

    And yet most peaceniks are incurably pessimistic about Iraq’s chance for democracy and stability…. I think this has more to do with their irrational hatred for Bush than any objective conditions in Iraq, something which is sort of selfish, it’s more about them and Bush than about the Iraqis.

    http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07election.html?_r=1&ref=world

26. Seth Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 2:30 pm

    There’s a bit of Wall Street folklore to the effect that “the bear case is always better”. People who are inclined to formulated detailed, logical arguments based on carefully gathered evidence will notice risks and give them some prominence in their thinking. By contrast, naive optimists will just expect the best without taking much trouble over data.

    But given the long-run pattern of growth, the optimists are right as often as the pessimists. This goes some way to explain why intellectuals are so often disparaged in our culture — they are seen to be taking lot of trouble for nothing

27. rapier Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 3:22 pm

    The entire Paulson Bernanke bailout regime is a series of large to gigantic mistakes which will make things much worse on the way down and much slower on the upside. So far the core of Obama’s policies are evidently more of the same. This will be a political disaster of the highest order.

    I mean his policies besides the ’stimulus’ package. The stupendous alphabet soup of programs running into the trillions with no oversight and now the Fed intent to monetize untold hundreds of billions, every penny going into the failed financial sector and not one penny into a citizens pockets, is apparantly going to go untouched and unquestioned.

    Policy wise and politics wise he should take a hangman’s noose out of his pocket at his inaugural and promise to string up the crooks, conmen, grifters and geeks who lead us down this path.

    The ’stimulus’, is bound to fail because it can’t possibly provide a significant boost to economic growth. It is however the only partisan game in town, as the big stuff mentioned above is off the radar. The bickering about the plan is the equivalent of fiddling while Rome burns. The GOP and the entrenched elites will suffer little blowback for the failures of their financial bailout model in the intermediate term anyway, yet Obama will be eviscerated for the failure of his non plan stimulus plan.

    If you like Obama then you should hate with a white hot burning hatred everything about his economic policies and team at this moment. Don’t defend them at all. The thing is he knows not what he does.

    He should rip off FDR’s inaugural

    “Primarily, this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failures and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men.

    “True, they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit, they have proposed only the lending of more money.

    Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored conditions. They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers.

    They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish.”

28. Doug Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 3:31 pm

    Republicans are still optimistic, arguing that the economy will rebound and Obama will take credit for the natural cycle of the economy or Bush’s brilliant long-term economic vision.

29. Thomas Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 3:53 pm

    eric, it’s the truth–that’s what happened. Obama could have led–he could have reassured people in a time of crisis. But he thought he needed the crisis to make sure he was elected, and he and his allies overshot. They wanted a little financial crisis, and they got something more. People got scared, and rather than reassure them and save the economy, Obama decided that he wanted them to stay scared. Trouble is, it’s going to be much harder to rebuild the confidence he destroyed than anyone expected.

    DTM, I don’t think that’s right. Obama says he has a plan to create 3 million jobs. But unemployment will be higher in 4 years than it is today. Obama wants to run up $3 or $4 trillion in new debt over his first term, and for that will leave things worse than he found them.

30. rapier Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 5:29 pm

    “. In particular since the 2000-2002 dotcom crash/post-911 recession (though this arguably really dates back to the post-82 recovery from the 70s stagflation), wage growth and poverty levels have failed to keep up with other metrics of economic growth.”

    First a caveat. Median US personal income is 500% higher than the rest of the worlds. Sure about equal to others in the developed world but then there are the billion with nothing and the next two billion with almost nothing.

    The income growth of the top, post 70’s, the Reagan revolution, was phony. Most all coming from the trading profits that accrued from asset inflation which in turn was fueled by credit.

    Carter hit the nail exactly on the head. There are limits. We rejected limits and borrowed our way to prosperity. Prosperity based upon mindless wasteful consumption which among other things has brought global warming.

    It is the wrong metric to compare the lower 80% to the top 20% and conclude the bottom got screwed. Americans nor the developed worlds incomes cannot and should not be so astoundingly higher than half the worlds people. Median income Amricans still had it pretty darn good during the post 70’s era, except they abandoned savings for speculating in stocks and housing, which they were force to do because of too low interest rates, and they took on too much debt. The thing that was out of whack was the incomes at the top and it was out of whack because it was a Ponzi scheme. So too many of the metrics of economic growth.

    Now the Treasury is being bankrupt in order to try and reflate the assets which make the rich so stinking rich and which are centered totally in the gigantic banking and financial corporations. A fools errand.

    If the Treasury and the Fed and the government were to put XX trillion dollars into the bread and butter economy through absolutely guaranteeing and subsidizing regional and small banks who did you cause this mess like their Wall Street brethren we would be well on our way to building a more fair and sustainable economy.

    But they won’t. Our political economy is too corrupt. Oh, and I despised Clinton’s economic policies which institutionalized the Wall Street paradigm of Market Fundamentalism and abandoned the last vestiges of New Deal common sense. The difference between the parties on these issues is nil, at the top. In a few back benches and out in the real world the party differences are great. At the top, same.

31. eric k Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 6:19 pm

    Thomas your just proving even more how correct Matt’s 2nd point is.

    So now your using the Peter Pan argument, if we all just believe the economy is strong it will be.

    There is a reason whenever you clowns get in power you fuck things up so bad.

32. mim Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 6:39 pm

    Shadenfreude! Matthew, Matthew, learn to spell!

33. Thomas Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 6:52 pm

    eric, a nice woman I work with, down the hall, does well in our profession, drives that Porsche SUV, tells me she isn’t spending any money. Knows it’s irrational, but can’t help herself. No, wishing the economy were strong wouldn’t make it strong. But believing that a financial crisis is the same thing as a depression pretty much makes it so, as we’re seeing.

    (Dems understood this as recently as 2001, when they accused Bush of “talking down the economy.” There’s a reason whenever you clowns get in power you fuck things up so bad.)

34. eric k Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 7:30 pm

    Thomas 700K people didn’t lose their jobs in December because they think the economy is bad.

    The housing Buuble didn’t pop becasue people think the eocnomy is bad.

35. JonF Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 8:57 pm

    Re: But unemployment will be higher in 4 years than it is today.

    That’s a pretty extraordinary prediction. Unemployment began increasing over a year ago. Has there ever been a five year period of ever-increasing unemployment? Not even the Great Depression produced that long a stretch.

36. Thomas Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 9:11 pm

    JonF, shall we bet? I’ll vote for Obama if unemployment is lower than the current rate in October 2012, if you’ll vote for the Republican if it’s higher. Headline unemployment rate is the marker.

    eric, no, lots of those folks lost their jobs because other people think the economy is bad. Where I live we never had a housing bubble–no shortage of supply, no growth limits, etc., so no extraordinary valuation increases–and folks like Krugman noted that. And yet housing here is off, as far as I can tell, more than 10% from 2005 levels, and are essentially flat for the last 6 years. Why? Fear, pushed by those with an interest in there being more fear. As I said, they overshot.

37. Thomas Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 10:25 pm

    DTM, can you really not distinguish between the financial crisis and the broader economic distress that we’re now seeing? The reason that folks stopped spending money isn’t that Lehman went down. Nice article in the WSJ a couple days ago, providing lots of examples of the paradox of thrift. People were frightened out of their usual habits, and not because LIBOR rates shot up.

38. bbartlog Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:21 pm

    left-of-center commentators to be more pessimistic about the economic outlook than right-of-center commentators have been

    Over the past eight years I suppose this has been true, mostly thanks to factor 3) that you mention. Still I have to say that in the fringey right-wing circles I follow (Austrian economists, miscellaneous gold bugs, survivalists, and Ron Paul) there has been a great deal of well-justified pessimism. But I suppose that this is not really the right-of-center folks you are talking about – people like Limbaugh, Coulter, Phil Gramm and Ben Stein are good examples of stupid right-wing optimism.

39. eric k Says:
    January 7th, 2009 at 11:35 pm

    DTM,

    I think your first insstinct was the correct one, discussing economics with people who believe in Supply side nonesense and think Reagan is the bestest president ever is pointless.

    We’re wasting our time.

40. Thomas Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 1:59 am

    DTM, the Fed’s intervention wasn’t to keep people’s ATMs working. But that is the sort of hyperbole we saw from Democrats. It isn’t taking notice of it that’s the issue–people noticed. The question was, what does it mean? And Obama and other Dems persuaded people that it meant they should be elected because the country faced a depression.

    People deferring consumption is what causes a deflationary scenario as well–we didn’t find ourselves in a deflationary scenario until people were scared to death. In fact, just a few months ago the problem was, we were told, inflation. What changed?

    eric, unfortunately there’s no better use for your time.

41. JonF Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 6:22 am

    Thomas, I am not looking to make bets; I am just wondering why you think unemployment would higher in four years than now. I don’t think forecasts that long in the future are even possible.

42. Thomas Says:
    January 8th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    JonF, employment and unemployment typically lag, so that unemployment rates peak after growth has restarted. If growth begins in early 2010, for example, then we could expect unemployment to peak in late 2010 or perhaps early 2011. Unemployment can fall relatively rapidly and still be higher than today four years from now. It depends on the peak, when growth begins again, and how strong the recovery is, particularly in the early stage.

    DTM, no, not at all. Banks taken over by regulators typically continue to provide uninterrupted access to deposits for those within the insurance coverages. So for the average person–the sort of accountholder who uses an ATM card–there was never any risk that the ATM card was going to stop working. (Businesses with significant cash positions are in a different position, and they’ve taken steps to make sure they’re protected. Those steps aren’t difficult, but they can destabilize banks that had relied on access to large depositors. But that doesn’t make a bank run.)

    You say that we’ve been in a “deflationary recession” since December of 2007. The NBER says we’ve been in a recession since then, but I haven’t seen any evidence that it was a deflationary one until very late in the presidential campaign. Gosh, in February of last year, Krugman was worrying about stagflation, which, again, isn’t nearly the same thing. Krugman was worried about stagflation because we had inflation, not deflation. Inflation was a concern all through last summer, as fuel and commmodity price increases rippled through the economy. (Krugman wrote a good column in June on a related topic, where he argued that the Fed was right to be more focused on the risks related to the financial crisis than about inflation–not because inflation wasn’t real, but because the risk was self-limiting and less dangerous than the risk posed by the financial crisis.)

    I’m entirely opposed to efforts to deceive the American people about the economy or anything else. That’s not what was needed, not what is needed now. Leadership is what was needed, and what has been lacking. Bush couldn’t provide it, McCain tried to and was attacked for it, and Obama provided just the wrong sort. Leadership isn’t staying calm while encouraging others to panic.

43. John Says:
    January 9th, 2009 at 12:39 pm

    2. Left-of-center commentators are generally smarter than right-of-center ones and pessimism was the correct position.

    I can’t tell, is this satire or are you really this arrogant.

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