Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Nope. You can do what you want, but it's not that frustrating for me.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I think what you are saying here is:

(1) Things are worse than other people realize, and
(2) Things are worse in some cities (e.g., Philly) than in others (e.g., SF), and when you put these together, you get
(3) Things are really going to blow in some cities (e.g., Philly).

Why would I try to argue with that?

I'm all in favor of what happens when technology comes along and takes apart old things and makes them all efficient and shiny and newfangled. But I really don't think cities will cripple the reasons why cities are cities. The opposite is true.

I just don't see cities losing from this. Philly, I'll grant you.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Sure it is. You're you. The smallness of your commentary here speaks volumes about the frustrated, overthought malexistence you cop to over at the FB.

Then again, perhaps when one is perpetually, cosmically frustrated, kerfuffles on a chat board can't cause any perceptible uptick in the condition.

(Don't look it up, Rain Man. I made the word up.)

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I've never read your book, but if it's not in there, you really should write up a list and description of all of your most hated lawyer tricks.

If you need help, I'd be happy to contribute to the one on gratuitous person attacks.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I can't not shoot the messenger with you. You're impervious to any point that isn't made with the most rote, linear use of language, and any point that asks one to think in the realm of businessman, as opposed to economist.

You couldn't even notice I was talking about multipliers in aggregate. I can't figure out for sure where you drug the public v. private argument from, but I can only conclude that, in your bizarrely narrowing view, the idea anyone would comment on them in total is just... well, Unpossible! "We must take them apart, sector by sector! Sebby has discussed them separately in the past, so I will use his point of months ago to suggest he's doing the same thing here, and Fucking Cazart! - I will then have an argument against him!"

Never mind that maybe I was asking you to think outside of your self-imposed rigid confines and run the argument to the next level. That I might assume a rational person would, in the absence of a dichotomy, conclude none was assumed! That I might have meant the temporariness of the economic impacts I was referencing addressed ALL economic impacts.

Fuck it.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

As we're in agreement on the first and last points, I'll deal with the middle one. Why do you see cities remaining necessary hubs when offices are based at home?

Ports? That's a big reason a lot of cities will always remain, on some level, population hubs. Lots of industry around that.
Factories? Not many of those in cities anymore.
Office towers? With higher energy costs, higher taxes, and lack of need, who needs those?
Stadiums? Halls? Museums? Okay. Those will always be draws for cities.
Housing? Taxes are going to skyrocket. The burbs can always kill the cities in that area.
Education? To stay in most cities, you have to send the kids to super-expensive private schools. I see this as a prime reason for suburban growth.

Cities have draws, no doubt, but I don't see any way the majority of them create adequate economic activity to remain anything but hollowed out shadows of what they once were. They grew up largely around blue collar manufacturing jobs, professional services, and retail business that grew around them. Blue collar jobs are disappearing, retail's shrinking radically, and professional services can be done from elsewhere, at a fraction of the tax burden. I wouldn't buy in one other than the exceptions I mentioned.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

This is bizarre and non-sensical. To give you one simple example, which does not mean that I am unaware of your cosmic approach to all things magically "business" about which you have deep personal insight born of experience, but what's temporary about a bridge or a broadband network? Do you see why "people will be using the bridge for commerce for years" is a direct response to your assertion that this type of stimulus fades? It's not a question of "aggregation." It's question of whether you are dismissing this effect or just ignoring it.

And if you respond that the bridge might need to be replaced in 50 years, or that the broadband network will be obsolete in five I might just have to put you on ignore after all.

Have you ever stopped to consider that maybe you don't make sense or could be wrong sometimes?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I'm nonsensical? You just argued that the multiplier on a bridge, or a broadband network, is indefinite. And this demonstrates, perfectly, that you are a hopeless fucking academic who doesn't know shit about the subject on which he pontificates on any real, practical level.

When a bridge is completed, the construction people are done. Finished. One off project, and then it's Over. The suppliers are done, the GCs, done, subs done, the vendors, everybody - done. And done quickly. That removes 80% of the economic activity that project creates. It is true, as you note, that there is residual activity accruing from future maintenance of the bridge, and the economic activity that might spring up around it (stores, gas stations, etc.), and some new business done because of the new connection. But the lion's share of the impact? Unquestionably temporary. And in a time of huge economic uncertainty, and decreasing access to credit, the chances of substantial business impact appearing around the bridge, just because, "Hey! It's a new bridge!" is all the less likely. Do you think guys putting up big box stores do so solely because a new bridge is built? It is a factor. But hardly the most important. They look at demographics, they look at the consumer market broadly. The developers first have to land an anchor tenant (you know what that is, yes?), and the anchor is usually some national retailer. National retailers make decisions in large part based on their stock prices ("Can we afford to expand and still meet expectations for next quarter?"). Those beancounters look at stimulus as welfare - a temporary fix that cures the symptom, not the problem. In this climate, "But there's a new bridge nearby!" alone isn't going to bring Costco. You are grossly overestimating the impact of infrastructure spending. And this is not shocking - you have looked at the thing in the most simplistic, business illiterate, but academically sound fashion one could.

Broadband? Brilliant. The govt needs to build up more broadband... Where do I start? This will enhance what? Do you think development follows broadband? You surely realize that broadband does zilch for retailers other than Amazon, and is a pipeline of communication enhancement that actually decreases development (fewer office towers and corporate parks for workers who telecommute, to cite one example).

Did you ever stop to think you sound like a gunner in Econ 101?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Translation: You're right, but I'm too big a dick to admit it.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I'll let my (half) namesake take it from here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YlVDGmjz7eM

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Is this not engaging, or did I miss something?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I'll trust you.

I like my crazies better than your crazies.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

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.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

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?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

The bridge, the broadband, the highway, the airport... whatever you're referring to, in aggregate, I can dismantle. Your last point, the only useful one - is that this is an argument of degree. I admitted as much (recall I nevertheless support stimulus spending). I was merely noting that the bang for the buck is fleeting. You came up with shit examples. I shot them down.

You characterize the exchange however you like. The fact remains, I'll crush you over and over and over on this point. Why? Because a rubber-meets-the-road example trumps esoteric, theoretical projection every time.

Want to talk aggregate? Who's been right on the economy for years, and who hasn't? You're out of your depth. And that's pathetic, because I'm anything but an expert.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Only because you have undue confidence in your own predictive powers. Your broadband response is a case in point. You think you can project all the effects of broadband investment, and therefore are confident that they aren't stimulative. I think its silly to confidently project all of the effect, and I think, like your analysis of cities, you are merely repeating decades-old predictions of doom that haven't done very well over those decades. Better broadband access for an urban area may well attract new businesses that wish to take advantage of it (the better question is whether this is growth or merely displacement from elsewhere).

People have been predicting a future world of isolated telecommuting since at least the mid-90s. Guess how many people are telecommuting all the time? Not many. Why? Well, maybe the technology isn't there yet. Or maybe people are social animals and prefer not to be in one place at least part of the time.

But whatever the reason, looking at a world in which technology may reduce costs by easing transportation and concluding that this will leave the world poorer is strange indeed. I and just about everyone who thinks about these things think that's backward. It's the mercantilist thinking of the past.

I know, you have a strong streak of Less's overpopulation fear in you, believing that there are just lots of people that can't do anything in the modern world that's less labor intensive. Strangely for you, I think that is incredibly lacking creativity.

Well, I've not seen any rioting or any of your more extreme projections come to pass (yet anyway), but dismissing those are primarily hyperbole, yes, your projections from the last few years look pretty good right now.

But remember that our primarily disagreement is about why we are here and whether it's inevitable. Which is weird because we mostly agree on what should be done about it.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Well, I don't think very many people are going to work out of their houses. Some people have done that, and information technology makes it more possible to do that, but it's just not a lot of people. My SIL has been doing it for several years, but she has seen many people try it and fail. She has had to work extra hard to maintain her position at her company without the face time in the office, and most people can't pull that off.

So you totally get that the economy is changing and that many industries which were responsible for lots of jobs in some places have dried up, causing a lot of dislocation. There are specific cities that grew up around ports and factories which have shut down, and now there is less reason for people to live there. But there's also lots of reason for people to live and work near other, and I don't think these reasons are going away. E.g., cities are transportation hubs which make it more economical to locate there despite higher rents. Many jobs creates the need for other jobs, which then are more efficiently located nearby. Housing and job density supports certain kinds of services -- opticians, Ethiopian restaurants, private schools -- which then add reasons for others to want to live nearby.

The fact that people prefer to live in cities explains why housing there costs more per square foot. In some cities, things crater so badly that the whole places seems hopeless. Detroit, say. But that's not a function of it being a city, but of dependence on an industry that went away.

If computers mean there's no advantage to location, and jobs can go anywhere, then why is Silicon Valley booming? Why are all those people paying so much to live there?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Mat 7:1-5

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I don't mean to get in the way of a good fight between you and Adder, but give me a fucking break. It is beyond obvious that infrastructure spending can have huge continuing economic effects. When you turn turn roads into highways near cities, people then go and develop the land near them because all of a sudden you can get from there to somewhere else in less time, and the land is much more valuable. The same is true with bridges, railroads, airports, etc. Try to picture Pennsylvania with $500 bb less having been spent on its highways, and then try to pretend that it wouldn't have made a huge difference to the economy. It's absurd.

OK, resume trashing Adder.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Any legs to the gun running story and Holder?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Really? You think an urban single family costs more than a suburban single family in the Greater Boston Area? You may be mistaking the yuppie places lawyers hang out for the real world.

Cities are places where hordes of relatively poor people live in lousy housing because it is cheap and they have strong community networks in place, like Churches with Mass in Spanish. Most people actually prefer to live in stepford wife surburbs with above average children, which is why that housing is so much pricier than the average two-flat in Dorchester.

Oh, and cities usually have a little part at the center where a bunch of professionals like to live because there are good restaurants, good jobs, and either they don't really care about schools yet or they're sending 'em to private school anyways. But most of those people will move out to the burbs someday, too.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Sure. Darrell Issa will keep beating that horse unless it turns out there's a Republican hiding inside.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Do an apples to apples comparison per square foot. Don't compare Beacon Hill to Athol or Waban to Dorchester.

In the cities I have lived in recently, that has been changing.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

You mean that building a bridge, repairing a freeway, or expanding an airport has more economic benefit than digging a hole and filling it?

I call bullshit.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

So you think poor people don't live in cities?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I thought they already found that Bush's ATF ran a similar program.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

After a very long period of the city being mostly poor people, the trend in DC is the other way. It's a source of common complaint from long term residents about gentrification and from inner-ring suburbs (in PG County in particular) about an influx of less affluent migrants from across the border.

It's also true of Minneapolis, which the most recent census showed to be about stable in population (slight growth), but considerably more affluent than the decade prior. Meanwhile older suburbs like Brooklyn Park and Brooklyn Center are beginning to rival the city for diversity (which here, if not everywhere, correlates with poverty).

Manhattan and Brooklyn certainly feel like they have having similar trends.

As pure speculation, I would expect the trend away from massive public housing projects will feed this in other places too.

I guess none of that is necessary inconsistent with your depiction, except that I'm not sure that the rich part is really "small" and I think it's growing in a lot of places.

Maybe only one of us is asking the question rhetorically.
 

So you think poor people don't live outside cities?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I don't know much about ATF, but I do know quite a bit about another DOJ component, and from what I know it would be surprising to learn that Holder or any other AG had much idea what was going on there. Many components of DOJ largely function as their own little agencies.

The Republican consensus is wrong.
 

David Frum:

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Of course infrastructure will have huge economic impacts. The lion's share of them are, however, temporary. That was my only point.

Your hypothetical at the end of the first paragraph entirely misses my point. To repeat: I don't disagree with Summers. I think any program creating economic activity, even temporarily, at a cheap price, is worth implementing. I merely noted that we need to understand the economic activity flowing from such projects tapers, rather quickly, particularly in an environment like the one we're in. For the explanation of why those impacts taper dramatically and quickly, refer back to my previous analysis of broadband and bridge projects. And feel free to extrapolate all points I made there to any other type of project you have in mind.

The elephant in the corner here is no matter what stimulus you enact right now, the smart money is going to see through it, judge it a temporary fix, and be reluctant to make any long term investments around it or in any way dependent on it.

(Well, except perhaps Dollar General stores. I'd do big box build outs for those things, and their competitors, all day long in this economy.)

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Not only are people still driving on the Interstate Highway System (1956) and the Brooklyn Bridge (1883), they're still driving on the Appian Way (312 BC). You seem to think the stimulus effect comes only from the money spent on the construction, and not from the fact that something useful is created and used.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

1. I do. Based on a decent track record on predictions.
2. I am not repeating decades old doom predictions that haven't come true. I'm repeating doom predictions that have been prevented with short term policy fixes and credit which are no longer available. I'll also note that for several years, the doom predictions have been aimed at the burbs, not the cities. I disagree with those fashinable doomers.
3. You can get equivalent broadband almost anywhere, and where you still can't, you soon will. And it'll be cheap. Cities offer no special draw in that regard. And never will. That's not a prediction, but a simple and irrefutable conclusion based on analysis of the product at issue.

We're becoming less and less social, and more reliant on electronic interaction. Case in point, this, here, now. And all those texts in your phone. And your Facebook pages, and... you get the point.

Recall Cowen's point about how the internet, in creating so much free entertainment, and tech, in automating so many functions, reduces economic activity? Allow his point to stand as mine in response to this comment.

As the middle man and the factory worker disappear, they are not being replaced with workers creating equivalent economic activity elsewhere. They're being replaced by tech. Yes, this creates some new jobs for people who work in tech. But nowehere near as many as are lost in the obsolete sectors.

It is. But that doesn't mean I'm wrong, or Less is wrong.

Have you been watching the news? I was just in NYC a couple weeks ago. A pack of nuts are occupying the area around Wall Street. Punch #OccupyWallSt into Twitter. Perhaps it's nothing (I think it'll ultimately fizzle), but it is a sign of desperation. And now consider Obama is stoking class warfare populism to ignite his next campaign. A lot of ugly issues are going to be at the forefront in 2012 - the kind of stuff that leads to ugly confrontations among the less civil in our society.

...Oh, and check out Challenger's most recent poll on planned layoffs. Corporations are planning more in the coming quarter than in the last four. Riots? Yes, we will see riots.

That's true. I didn't disagree with Summers. I was simply noting the majority of effects of his proposed stimulus will be temporary. I still say we should do it. It's cheap. We need it. Why not?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

The primary aim of Summers' plan is quick stimulative economic activity. What you're talking about is long horizon growth which, for the reasons I previously noted, will be even slower in coming than usual because of the adverse economic conditions impeding private sector investment. A new road is great. But we're not talking Field of Dreams , build-it-they'll-come activity here. If there's no private sector growth taking place apart from the stimulus, the road's empty.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Yes, that's why I said "yet." It could go your way, or it could not.

Interesting times indeed.

ETA: The more senior ranks of the NYPD seem determined to make you right. Although I think it's interesting that the crowd clearly is more interested getting video of this type of thing than fighting back. So far.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

If you look back at the start of this string, you will see that it started not with a Summers plan to solve the employment crisis, but with a Delong suggestion about the wisdom of government investment when bond rates are so very, very low. Set aside the employment picture for a moment. Delong's fundamental observation is that investors are so very, very afraid of other investments that they are willing to lend the government money at very, very low rates. Accordingly, he suggests that it makes sense for government to borrow money at these very, very low rates and invest it in something that has real return, i.e., infrastructure. He does the math to show that this is a rational thing for the government to do.

I understand that you don't see private investment coming back. But that's really not a response to what Delong is saying. He is saying that it's a wise use of public funds right now to issue bonds and invest in investment, given that bond rates are so very, very low. Wise on its own terms, when you look at the costs and benefits.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

This is not a rhetorical question: Is the NYPD accountable to anyone, as a practical matter?

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I appreciate and concur with that general proposition (with limitations and conditions explained below). That's subsumed in my support of infrastructure spending.

I disagree with the suggestion this sort of spending can be divorced from employment, the necessary aim of all stimulus. We can borrow cheaply at the moment, but it should be done as efficiently as possible with the goal of creating as many jobs as we can in the process. Any government expenditure made should be tailored to at least lead to, if nothing else, as large a temporary uptick in economic activity as possible. That we can borrow cheaply alone is not a reason to do anything, and can be used to justify any kind of spending. The calculation always has to be, "How can we best use the cheap money to get a mix of optimal result (stuff we need, like infrastructre) and optimal economic impact (employment and other economic activity resulting from the project)?"

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

I think the only people who disagree with that are those who argue that we should be immediately slashing spending, which will lead to economic recovery because of some unknown magic.

Re: My God, you are an idiot.
 

Someone was asking about this. I forgot that my friend Pete was the reporter covering that particular rally.