Peter Boettke has written a piece to introduce the main elements of Austrian economics in ten points.
The Science of Economics
Proposition 1: Only individuals choose.
Proposition 2: The study of the market order is fundamentally about exchange behavior and the institutions within which exchanges take place.
Proposition 3: The facts of the social sciences are what people believe and think.
Microeconomics
Proposition 4: Utility and costs are subjective.
Proposition 5: The price system economizes on the information that people need to process in making their decisions.
Proposition 6: Private property in the means of production is a necessary condition for rational economic calculation.
Proposition 7: The competitive market is a process of entrepreneurial discovery.
Macroeconomics
Proposition 8: Money is nonneutral.
Proposition 9: The capital structure consists of heterogeneous goods that have multispecific uses that must be aligned.
Proposition 10: Social institutions often are the result of human action, but not of human design.
As an aside to this, it is worth noting that the most persuasive criticism launched by friendly critics of the Austrians such as Nicholas Gruen, is the limited amount of empirical work in the school. This shortcoming is partly caused by shortage of Austrians and partly by the obsession with maintaining purity in the “dialect of the tribe” in some circles. Fortunately the deficiency is being rectified at other centres of Austrian influence such as the Mercatus Centre at the George Mason University, though of course the gains are coming off a low base. Still, it helps to recall that back to 1974 there was no identifiable Austrian school at all.
More on Peter Boettke.
I’m enthusiastic about the Austrians.
Their framework offers a superior heuristic to the neoclassical one for thinking about a lot of micro-economic problems. The focus on information and institutions makes a lot of sense.
But what I mean by the ‘Austrian approach’ is their basic ‘evolutionary’ perspective which Hayek presents himself as deriving from Smith. Hayek showed me how much ‘Austrian’ there really is in Smith.
On the other hand a lot of the Austrian’s methodological shibboleths and preoccupations in political economy are hangovers from the socialist calculation debate and these days pretty much for the birds. Eclecticism is the order of the day given the yawning chasm of our ignorance.
And I share Milton Friedman’s view that their macro-economics is mostly the stuff of cranks – and that, sadly, includes Hayek. The overwhelming fact that stares you in the face about macro-economic matters is the presence of positive (destabilising) feedback. But the Austrian school is an orchestrated conspiracy to ignore it.
Whilst the lack of empiricism is a huge problem, I think the tendency to descend into puritan debates is the worse problem.
And non-coincidently both of these are shared by many non-neoclassical schools.
The purity debates contribute to the empiricism problem to a certain extent. I think it prevents people from accepting a “good enough” model that can be tested rather than one that can withstand circularities of arguments about natural rates of interest or capital quantification.
My honours thesis was supervised by an Austrian and a Post-Keynesian, and I have high regard for insights from both schools. But I do wish they’d venture a bit out of the academic ghettos they’re in.
Also, in the Austrian case specifically, there is alot of working towards a desired outcome that satiates libertarian values. This isn’t necessarily a problem if the reasoning is still good; and post war (Hayek II) reasoning on microeconomics and critiques of central planning etc. are very insightful, even if I would not conclude as strongly as they do. I admire that the pre-war stuff was abandoned because it didn’t work.
Unfortunately I can’t see the same in the macro reasoning. It’s still a morality play in search of a reality. Which is sad, because I know they can do better, particularly if they reach out of the ghetto.
Hi.
My main bone to pick is with proposition 6: “Private property in the means of production is a necessary condition for rational economic calculation.”
This would be true only if entrepreneurial and economizing behaviour required the profit motive. However, I would argue that that is increasingly not the case.
Check out my Radio National Perspective talk entitled Should the financial crisis prompt another look at social ownership?. Here is the podcast and transcript.
See also Economics of Social Ownership for a more extensive treatment.
At the moment we have a discussion on social ownership over at Strange Times.
I’ve long believed the Marxist paradigm must evolve down the path taken by the Strange Times crew if it is to avoid “withering away”. Good to see some apparently intelligent people are working on it. Good luck guys.
But back to the subject of ossified fossils: thanks for yet another Austrian post, Rafe.
Nicholas, would you be good enough to elaborate a little?
Richard, your comment “Its still a morality play in search of a reality” suggests you’re of one mind with Nicholas on this so any further thoughts from you would be appreciated as well.
Thx Ingolf,
I can’t claim to have read a lot of Austrian stuff on macro-economics, but whenever I do they seem to studiously ignore what stares me in the face – that in times of macro-economic crisis there’s a huge collective action problem because everybody’s second guessing what others will do. If other businesses go on investing, there isn’t a problem, if they don’t then businesses other than the ones making the decision not to invest have a problem.
This seems to me to be central to any discussion of macro-economics. But the Austrians turn it all into a morality play about capital market booms leading to overinvestment (even when there’s little evidence of over-investment in capital goods) and liquidation then becomes the logical consequence.
Recall Lionel Robbins recanting of his liquidationist views about the great depression.
It’s (in part) the idea that the recession is a necessary curative follow up to the boom. A painful reallocation of capital to fix the misallocation.
We pay for our sins, or at least the dole queues do. Very carthartic.
A hangover after the binge. But this hangover is felt by people who weren’t drinking, nor were even at the party, or even when there was no drinking by anyone as far as we can tell.
There is no good reason why all industries must have sympathetic hangovers from the few that got on the booze, but that’s what happens in the recession co-ordination problem.
In fact, I guess it’s a deeper problem of an assumption of causality. Bust follows boom, ergo boom caused bust. But broken legs aren’t the necessary follow up to painting the roof, just an argument for safety harnesses. What we observe seems to indicate it’s the confidence and second guessing due to the end of the boom/bubble that causes the recession, and not the boom/bubble.
Nicholas and Richard, many thanks for the clarifications.
If I’m reading your comments correctly, both of you dislike the language Austrians sometimes use and, more importantly, are unconvinced that crises such as our current one represent anything real that needs to be corrected.
I certainly sympathise with the former. It doesn’t bother me as much as it clearly does both of you but I also sometimes find the moralistic tone grating (and counterproductive).
As for the second, issues in economics probably don’t come much bigger than this. You’ve both spent many years studying these matters so no passing discussion here is likely to change your minds. Richard, your last paragraph in particular suggests a gulf between our understandings of how the economic world works that I’m not even going to try to bridge here. It would almost certainly be a much longer (and quite likely more fruitless) discussion than either of us would wish for. If you do have any interest in how I see things, these two posts about the unfolding crisis lay it out fairly clearly. Also, Nicholas and I had quite a long exchange on these sorts of broad macro-economic matters last year.
Nicholas, well, I guess we’ll just have to agree to disagree. My request for clarification was to see if your current comment might have different implications from those raised in our earlier exchanges. I don’t think it really does so it probably also makes sense for us to avoid getting bogged down in a repeat.
FWIW, this quote from Mises (from Human Action, Chapter XXIX (1)) seems to me to go to the heart of these issues:
Ingolf,
There’s so much (possibly) implied in Mises’ passage that it’s hard to know where to start or stop.
The passage has a elephantine ‘excluded middle’. Saying the government isn’t like a normal market player isn’t the same as saying it’s godlike.
I’d say the govt is not outside the system, but it’s the biggest ugliest risk bearer and so is the appropriate risk bearer of last resort. It’s also the market designer (although a lot of that is simply ratifying various evolutions in the market. And it’s the ringmaster.
I detect full Ricardian equivalence for instance. Are you up for that? And does Mises broadside rule out monetary expansion to deal with a downturn?
And by the way, where is Rafe. I’m getting annoyed at this idea that you just start up debates about things that people go to some trouble to try to understand and then just walk away. This is roughly the way various commentators run greenhouse denialism – jump in, make some provocative claims and then retreat saying ‘you can read all about it, I’ve covered all this in my former papers’ – when you go there you find it isn’t all there.
The curious thing about Hayekian cycle theory is its influence on the pre-Keynesian socialists at LSE: Evan Durbin and (to a degree) Hugh Dalton. They saw overinvestment as demonstrating the failure of capitalism compared to a socialist economy.
Isn’t the traditional Austrian view that malinvestments pile up due to mispriced (cheap) capital resulting from monetary expansion, eventually that unwinds creating a down turn? Which doesn’t sound too out there when you look at the US housing market and the Fed interest rate and so forth. Once you have the wide spread problems you will get the knock to confidence that is the driver of the recession.
But identifying a cause is not the same thing as prescribing a cure and the liquidationist view is in fact the literal opposite of taking medicine.
Nicholas, I think Mises’ intent in this quote was a simple reminder that the only resources the government has to draw on are those it acquires, directly or indirectly, from its citizens. Whether in any given situation it might do a better job of deploying them is a separate question. For you, that point obviously didn’t need to be made.
This simple equation is complicated somewhat by the issue of confidence; since individuals’ actions are in part determined by their mood and there’s no doubt governments can affect that mood, it would be foolish to deny the role they can play in fostering (or destroying) confidence. Especially at moments like these. I don’t imagine Mises would argue with that.
The central point, though, as Pedro notes, is that all too often crises are in large part the result of long term interventions which encourage misallocation of capital, as well as at times overconsumption or even overinvestment when a government aggressively pursues mercantilist policies (like China, for example). The Austrian approach doesn’t prescribe tough love for moral reasons (although some individual Austrian economists almost certainly do) but because they see fresh interventions intended to allay the negative consequences of previous ones is no solution at all in the long term. They’re more likely to merely perpetuate the squandering of scarce capital.
Not being an economist, I had to look up full Ricardian equivalence (thanks for the link). It seems a bit of a scholastic type argument to me. I certainly don’t think people are rational enough to figure out and compensate for different forms of government funding in any detail, so whether a government funds itself through taxation, borrowing or money creation will almost certainly produce different results (particularly of course if it’s the latter).
I think in a way you may be misunderstanding Mises, Nicholas. Given our dire circumstances, I don’t know that he would necessarily rule out monetary expansion; I’d guess his intent would be to diagnose the likely consequences of any such action and try to find the best way to return to a soundly based, sustainable monetary system. He would, of course, have been implacably opposed to the policies that over generations brought us to this unenviable place.
Boettke’s credibilty goes out the window, with this ignorant statement, presented by way of explanation for the always-dubious-sounding Proposition 4:
You’d only need the most passing knowledge of Marshall’s cost doctrine to know that this characterisation is wrong.
Hayek knew shit about improvising to meet the payroll of a small business locked into a local community during bad times and Mises would sound off quite different now if he was on the board of GM. Or Google.
Some people constantly fondle a small, clean, paperweight version of how the world should work – especially mildly uncomfortable in their skins white anglo males who feel they never got their just desserts – and so assume if you tweak a macro lever here and poke a micro button there it should all come good eventually for them…and maybe others.
Fuggedaboutit. The sheer whacky charm and eternal perversity of human nature will always see:
“The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men, Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!”
Austrian trade cycle theory is not a topic that I claim to understand well enough to expound in detail or to defend, and there are differences between Austrians and quasi-Austrians like Tyler Cowen who got into trouble for claiming that the theory was based on the notion of excessive investment duing the boom phase. He was told that it was not a problem of over-investment but investment in the wrong places, due to the corruption of price signals in the market by inflation and political interference.
The US housing boom would be a case in point, where there was excessive investment in housing, driven by political factors and interference of various kinds, including the expectation of the ultimate intervention – the bailout! Prevention is better than cure, so the Austrians might suggest that if you get a stable (predictable) regulatory and fiscal environment and get the micro factors right then the macro will look after itself. The likeihood of the subprime collapse was clearly signalled in 1999 but the game went on regardless.
Currently the level of intervention has been ramped up but the rules of the game appear to be essentially political and out of sight, which results in huge uncertainty in the business community about who will be winners and losers from the next political decisions. Recall the issue of “rules vs orders” for policy making and regulation.
As a historical aside, it is amusing to note that when Mises was heavily involved in advising the Austian government on a daily basis circa 1920 he had to face agonizing decisions about applying his own theories or keeping the printing presses running so there would be money available in the next week to meet the government payroll. He opted to meet the payroll to avert immediate disaster but at the same time he did everything he could to get the other policy elements heading in the right direction. One of the biggest problems was trade protection by Germany and other nations that crippled some sectors of the Austrian economy so there was no cash flow to balance the budget. The point was that the situation had deteriorated to a point where the normal policy was just not appropriate, in the way that you would put your furniture and floorboards in the fire to keep warm if there is no other way. I hope we have not reached that point now!
Boettkes credibilty goes out the window
Sure.
I certainly hope the following quote was running through Mises head circa 1920.
“All theory, dear friend, is gray, but the golden tree of life springs ever green.”
I can’t get past proposition 1. Collectives do make choices. Firms, Councils, religious groups make economic choices individuals could not make.
Proposition 3. The facts of social science are what people think but there is structure which is not explained by atomised individuals. Look about the democratic world (where people are pretty free to think what they want) and see a pattern. Call it left and right or whatever you will and add a few dribs and drabs but it is a very, very limited range considering it is made of billions of individuals. There is a higher order there that is driving economics (and all social life).
Proposition 4. Utility is subjective however there is hypocrisy here. On the one hand they claim it is subjective but then in every practical expression or discussion assume, but do not say, (a) that money is the only utility and (b) that everyone wants more of it. When did you see a game theory experiment that offered rewards of esteem? Or of social acceptance? They offer money only and they never justify it.
That’s enough. The Austrian economics might have been a great insight for people fighting a Methodenstreit with the Kaiser’s economists (I read that somewhere) but it is an impoverished view of economic exchange.
Mike
I think the point of proposition 1 is that only people have brains so a company or collective has decisions made by the individuals that manage it. As compared to suggesting that every decision is made by a single person acting alone. The point being that all decisions are affected by the subjectivity of the individuals who make them.
Prop 3 address the same concept. People make decisions based on what they think or believe. They are not guided by a higher force or ruled by mathematics. Austrians are bid on subjectivity as compared to rationality, I think.
Prop 4 is the same theme also. All values are subjective, that includes the valuation of opportunity costs. The hard cost of a factor of production to me is underpinned by subjective elements forming the market for that factor. I don’t think it would be fair to typify austrians with game theory design.
The Mises quote is also intended to make you realise that people set digging and filling in holes are less available for productive use by an other employer.
Rafe says:
“The likeihood of the subprime collapse was clearly signalled in 1999 but the game went on regardless.”
You can point us in the direction of all those posts you did in 1999 warning us about this “clearly signalled” impending crisis?
This doesn’t necessarily follow. When there is only one factor of production, as in Smith’s deer and beaver example, subjective valuation is irrelevant to opportunity cost. When there are more factors of production, the relative prices of goods depend on factor prices, which in turn depends on the supply of those factors. That’s when
which was more-or-less what Marshall himself said.
But this is not say that technical coefficients don’t enter the story. Does anyone seriously suggest that they don’t?
In standard modern value theory, which is essentially a marriage of Marshall, the early Austrians and Walras, relative prices depend on utility functions and technical coefficients.
There is no modern ‘Austrian’ theory that presents a viable alternative to standard price theory, and which somehow by-passes technical factors. That such a thing exists is just one of the conceits of the ‘Austrian’ autodidacts that populate the internet.
I don’t know if there is any separate austrian price theory and I think that the values are subjective point is a simplification to show the underlying truth that subjectivity comes in at all levels.
James if you are I are cavemen then the price in deer hides we agree on a flint axe I make is still a subjective assessment on my part and yours. No prices are determined in the absense of subjective value judgements by buyer and seller. But that is not to deny that sellers take costs of production into account and so on.
Pedro
I am not sure what you are saying in the first case. Why is a collective decision taken by the leaders acting as individuals? If the collective has a vote the leaders would be doing as bidden – and it is likely a decision which no individual could make. If you took individual shopkeepers (say) they would have all sorts of ideas and hard to predict. But the Chamber of Commerce, of which they are the members, will take very predictable positions. That is an illustration of the usefulness of the higher order analysis.
People are not guided by a higher force? They must be. How else do you explain the astonishingly limited range of economic / political positions around the world? Certainly people (and collectives) decide based on belief. But for their beliefs people choose from a very short prix fix menu, not a la carte. You can have left or you can have right, each being a collection of dishes that go together – you are not allowed to mix dishes across the two menus. Is “allowed” the right word? SOMETHING is putting a remarkably restricted order into the world of beliefs.
If game theorists aren’t Austrians they are pretty close. What I said stands: they (Austrian, rat choicer, or free marketeer – don’t need to get into the quibbles between sects) SAY sanctimoniously that utility is purely subjective and they ASSUME cynically that more money is the only utility.
It’s unlike you to traffic in such simple stereotypes, Nabokov. Besides, amongst schools of economics, I would have thought Austrians the least deserving target; their cornerstone belief is after all the ultimately mysterious individuality of man. To quote Mises yet again:
At the risk of overgeneralising, the perception of Austrian economics has probably been quite badly damaged by those more interested in using it as a weapon in politics than in the study of economics itself.
Pedro, I can only repeat: to the extent that your statement — i.e., ‘the underlying truth that subjectivity comes in at all levels’ — is correct, it’s exactly what orthodox price theory says anyway. If you think there is some profound insight there that’s been overlooked by generations of economic theorists, then you’ve gotten the wrong end of the stick.
As for your second point, this is what Smith says:
Where is the subjective element?
Just for Mel (dated 19990;
James, I didn’t think there was any profound insight. I just misunderstood you to be suggesting that some values/costs are not in any way subjective.
Re the deer and beaver, the story suggests would would be the purely rational position, but it is not evidence of real life. For example, the guy with the two deer might think beaver tastes like crap. Or the beaver guy might have had a good hunt and now has a surplus of beaver threatening to rot. Also, the story contains an assumption that is an obvious fallacy, things are rarely so comparable.
James M. Buchanan has a very nice little book Cost and Choice that deal with these issue. Chapters 2 and 3 go to the heart of the discussion here. Some choice quotes from Chapter Two.
Taking up Mel’s point (20), the warning on the sub-prime collapse did not appear on any blog in 1999, it appeared in a more useful location, namely the New York Times.
On methodological individualism (18, 19, 22, 23) the assertion is that individuals, not collectives, have minds, feelings and intentions. It is a rejoinder to the mystical notion of group minds, Spirits of the Age and the idea that society is a big person that can be blamed for things and shouted at.
MI does not deny the existence of groups, collectives and societies, nor does it ingore the existence of shared ideas and feelings. However when you talk about the decision of a board or a committee (or indeed an election), it is based on rules of procedure (which may call for a simple majority, more than a simple majority or consensus) and the outcome is achieved by counting the votes of the individuals, not tapping into some group mind.
Ingolf (24). “At the risk of overgeneralising, the perception of Austrian economics has probably been quite badly damaged by those more interested in using it as a weapon in politics than in the study of economics itself.”
This is being debated among the Austrians at present and I think the point is conceded that doctrinaire libertarians have damaged the perception of Austrian economics as Ingolf suggests. However one of the elements of Austrianism (not listed in the 10 points) is the notion of “value freedom”, so scientists can pursue the truth without immediate regard to values, even though as citizens and responsible moral agents they will consider the desirability of actions and policies.
For example the aim of Austrian critiques of State interventions is to find whether specific interventions can achieve the stated intentions (leaving aside for the moment whether the intention is desirable). It has also been noted that deregulation and the retreat from intervention is a kind of intervention (an action by the Government) and this calls for the same kind of analysis in terms of intentions and outcomes.
My old sparring partner James Farrell has taken a dig at Peter Boettke (13) and also at “the conceits of the Austrian autodidacts that populate the internet” (21).
Peter Boettke can speak for himself and I will put in a word for the autodicacts. Of course I am not sufficienty paranoid to think that James had me in mind when he wrote that comment and in fairness to critics of autodidacts, there is a tendency for the self-taught to (a) be over-impressed by their favorite person, (b) to have massive gaps in their reading, and (c) mispronounce a lot of foreign names and technical terms because they have never heard anyone say them out loud. So it is easy to mock your friendly neighbourhood autodidact but be tolerent, persuade him to broaden his scope of reading and fill in some gaps, you might make a friend and improve the contribution of an independent scholar!
James, please feel free to post your website address here so we can compare your list of publications and cv with that of Peter Boettke.
Right Rafe, so while the impending subprime crisis was as obvious as an erection on a doberman as far back as 1999, you admit you didn’t actually see it coming yourself. Thanks.
I never claimed to see it coming myself, I was not following US financial affairs at the time. The point is that anyone in the US who was interested or even just read the New York Times should have realised what was happening. Community groups like ACORN had a mission to launch actions against banks that were not issuing enough bad loans and one of the legal advisors to ACORN was a young lawyer and community orgniser called Barack Obama.
“Community groups like ACORN had a mission to launch actions against banks that were not issuing enough bad loans… ”
Evidence please …
Rafe, I’m not taking a ‘dig’ at Boettke, I’m saying that he’s wrong. I note that neither you nor Sinclair have attempted to defend the proposition itself. Showing me his CV is brazenly an argument from authority, and not good enough. At least Pedro, who doesn’t even qualify as an autodidact, had a go — even if he was floundering.
I have no problem with autodidacts getting involved in discussions — that’s what we’re all doing here. But I lose patience when thr autodidacts pontificate on issues way out of their depth, dismiss as incompetent anyone whose conclusions they dislike (whether or not they understand how these were reached), and pour scorn on eminent writers whose work they aren’t even up to reading.
I, too, will have a go at Rafe – referring to No 30.
Scoffing and insults like “mystical group mind” indicate a lack of sound argument.
The discussion is not methodological individualism. It is about Boettke’s propositions. Nothing wrong with MI. As you say it is individuals who have opinions and who vote for the collective resolution.
The point, though (if you wish to consider it), is that the resolution is (or may be) not one that any individual could make. Analysis at the level of the level of the individual does not suffice. The resolution reflects the minds of those who make it and of the past – the traditions. Collective resolutions, and thus their economic consequences, are moderately predictable. A survey of the members’ minds will be a very poor, or hopeless, predictor of collective decisions.
In other words, a collective such as a party or religion or a firm has an existence – a life – that transcends its individual members.
With reference to the prix fix at No 23, how do YOU account for the limited menu?
James do you mean to suggest that this is not a dig at Boettke?
“Boettkes credibilty goes out the window, with this ignorant statement…”
That looks like a claim that he is ignorant and lacks credibility.
I am too busy to debate the fine detail, citing his cv is not an argument from authority, merely an argument from track record.
If you think that something of importance can be resolved from further discussion of this point I will consider going on with it.
BTW I am interested in your track record, just out of curiosity, but I appreciate that it proves nothing much, one way or the other.
One thing at a time Mel. What do you think of the New York Times piece?
Mike, I am fumbling to find where we disagree if you accept MI in the limited methodological sense. “As you say it is individuals who have opinions and who vote for the collective resolution.”
“The discussion is not methodological individualism. It is about Boettkes propositions. Nothing wrong with MI.”
But MI is Boettke’s first proposition. I can see there is a sense in which collectives and traditions (and objective knowledge in Popper’s “world 3” sense) transcend individuals. That is a very interesting conceptual and practical matter which means that MI has to put into a context of Situational Analysis where the situation contains elements that do transcend the individual.
On the topic of the limited range of ideological positions:
This is a topic dear to my heart because I think that the left/right option is far too limited. Hayek identified a position that is neither conservative nor radical which he called an Old Whig stance. I am inclined to call it classical liberalism. I think there is scope for a larger menu than the right/left options. Must think about it some more.
Rafe, re: 34, Barry Ritholz had an amusing comment about the efforts in some quarters to pin the blame for the subprime mortgage crisis on various government efforts to lend to minorities:
No doubt some bad loans were made as a consequence of the CRA (Community Reinvestment Act) and other initiatives, but they were marginal in the overall scheme of things. Robert Gordon wrote about these matters back in April this year. The whole article’s worth a read but let me just quote his last paragraph:
No, too far out of your depth. As usual.
Methodological individualism is for Barbie and Ken dolls.
Rafe, You say “But MI is Boettkes first proposition.”
Beg to differ. Boettke’s proposition is: “Only individuals choose.” I say that is individualist.
Methodological individualism is a social science approach to the study of human affairs. It does not imply individualism for an MI approach can deliver information on collectives. A non-MI approach would be to, say, collect records of what a certain institution has done in certain circumstances (and maybe predict its behaviour).
Boettke is a social scientist and I expect he does take an MI approach. However his proposition 1 is a statement of conclusion, not approach. The “only” makes it, well, dogma. It makes the statement individualist (and tells us something about Boettke).
Leave off the “only” and apply MI. Individuals choose. Yes, they may choose to adopt a collective decision. Already MI has brought us away from individualism. Nobody knows what the collective will choose but all involved individuals choose to surrender their choice. The decision will become known after the vote or whatever – a collective choice. Thus an MI approach can show that collectives can choose.
Rafe says:
“One thing at a time Mel. What do you think of the New York Times piece?”
You always pull the same stunt, don’t you Rafe. You make some mendacious claim then go off on some tangent when you can’t back it up. It’s downright ungentlemanly behaviour on your part and certainly not in keeping with the spiffing traditions of this fine old blog.
As to the NYT piece, here’s my counter-google that trumps it: http://www.prospect.org/cs/articles?article=did_liberals_cause_the_subprime_crisis
Floundering James? First it’s beaver and deer and now you throw in fish. It’s hard to keep track.
Well yes, Rafe does seem to be floundering.