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[Hank Chinaski]

Originally Posted by Adder

Translation: "Hank 8,8763, Rest of World 0." Or, "having nothing else to say, I will retreat to one of my most tired tropes."

Let's review (yes, I left out the less fruitful bits of the exchange):

Ty: Here's Delong saying some stuff about the stimulus effects of infrastructure spending.

Sebby: Ah hah! Summers [sic] admits that stimulus necessarily fades as soon as the project's over.

Ty: Um, actually, he basically said the opposite.

Me: Delong actually gave two numbers, one of which fades when the project is done but the other one persists.

Sebby: You're always focusing on the finite and can't see the aggregate big picture you academic twit!.

Me: I'm just explaining to you why Delong did not admit what you said he admitted, and here's a stylized example to think about.

Sebby: I can partially undermine your stylized example by focusing on the finite and ignoring the aggregate, while at the same time conceding the basic point.

If you had set out to, I don't think you could have achieved a better self-parody.

I should probably stop there, but you know that I can't.

So, yeah, useful infrastructure has some stimulus effect for the useful life of the infrastructure. For an individual bridge, it might be quite small, and no, of course no business is going to open a new location just because the bridge is there. But, again, assuming it's a useful bridge, it reduces someone's cost of doing business and/or consumption. It's faster and cheaper to get goods and people to locations on either side of the bridge.

And Delong wasn't talking about one bridge, he was talking about $500 billion in infrastructure spending, and yes, he was talking about it in an abstract, modeled way. There are real world challenges that mean his numbers might be wrong. That would have been a fair response to his argument. But it isn't the one you made.

I want to be judged by the number of times I've had my writing published, added to the number of times I won themoth.org.

Can we settle this fight between you and Sebby on those grounds or would it be a tie?