Richard A. Posner's Ethical Lapses
8/28/09 6:09 PM
Grasping Reality with Both Hands The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist Brad DeLong: A Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and More than Two-Handed Look at the World J. Bradford DeLong, Department of Economics, U.C. Berkeley #3880, Berkeley, CA 94720-3880; 925 708 0467; delong@econ.berkeley.edu. Weblog Home Page Weblog Archives Econ 115: 20th Century Economic History Econ 211: Economic History Seminar Economics Should-Reads Political Economy Should-Reads Politics and Elections Should-Reads Hot on Google Blogsearch Hot on Google Brad DeLong's Egregious Moderation August 19, 2009
Richard A. Posner's Ethical Lapses Richard Posner writes dishonestly about the Obama stimulus package. I count at least seven major ethical lapses in his piece. They start with: Richard A. Posner: [Council of Economic Advisers Chair Christina] Romer argues in her talk that by the end of the second quarter of this year, $100 billion of stimulus money had been spent. That is a suspiciously round number, and it is unclear how it was arrived at... But consider Mark Zandi: Mark Zandi was one of John McCain's most senior economic advisors last fall. Mark Zandi's estimates of stimulus spend-out are that it amounted to $89 billion as of the end of June--$2 billion in February, $7 billion in March, $13 billion in April, $32 billion in May, and $35 billion in June; with (so far) about 60% of the spend-out coming in the form of tax cuts and about 40% in the form of aid to states (with a trivial amount in direct federal government spending):
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Source: Mark Zandi, http:/www.economy.com The number is "suspiciously round" because Christina Romer is rounding it: this is a talk, whereby the audience is supposed to take in information through its ears, and rounding things to one significant figure is something you do to make your talks informative. Posner's snide and sneering implication that Christina Romer is bulls---ing her audience is false-unless, of course he wants readers to also believe that long-time Republican Mark Zandi and many others as well are corrupt and in the pay of the Obama administration. If I were Richard Posner, I would under no circumstances publish this piece in Great Britain. Just saying. It gets worse. Posner goes on, demonstrating nothing either his lack of facility with arithmetic or his willingness to play intellectual three-card-monte: [Christina Romer] then argues that this small expenditure [of $100 billion]--about two-thirds of one percent of the Gross Domestic Product--is responsible for the fact that the decline in GDP fell (on an annualized basis) from 6.2 percent in the first quarter of the year to 1 percent in the second quarter (though the latter figure is likely to be readjusted upwards)... Posner is trying to get his readers to compare the number 5 (the percentage-point swing in the growth rate between the first and the second quarter of 2009) to the number 2/3 (the percentage share of second-quarter stimulus expenditures to annual GDP). He hopes that they will conclude that Christina Romer's claims are wrong because the effect is disproportionate to the cause: $1 of stimulus could not reasonably be expected to produce $7.5 of boost within the same quarter. But the stimulus money spent in the second quarter was spent in one quarter, so the right yardstick to use to evaluate it is not annual but rather quarterly GDP--stimulus spending in the second quarter was not 2/3 of one percent but 2.6% percent. And the level of production in the economy in the first quarter was not 6% but rather 1.5% below its level in the fourth quarter--the 6% number is not the decline from one quarter to the next but rather the rate of decline, how much the decline would be after a http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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from one quarter to the next but rather the rate of decline, how much the decline would be after a year were it to go on for four quarters. So the right comparison is 1.5% to 2.6%[1]. Posner is off by a factor of 16. That is hard to do if all you are doing is the arithmetic: subtraction and division. But it is easy to do if making an apples-to-oranges comparison is not a bug but a feature you are striving for. I would say that it gets worse, but it doesn't. It merely passes from the libelous and the wrong into the incoherent: No one has the faintest idea what effect the stimulus has had. My guess is that it has had some positive effect... some of the $100 billiion--though no one seems to know how much--has been spent rather than saved. But it is impossible to determine the net impact of the stimulus on GDP or employment because so much else has been happening.... Some people have had to dissave.... Some people have had to replace durables.... And the government has been doing a lot to stimulate recovery besides the stimulus.... Disentangling the various factors that are responsible for the reduction in the rate of decline of output in the second quarter is probably impossible, but in any event has not, to my knowledge, been attempted... If it is "impossible" to attempt--Posner does say "probably impossible"--then why has Republican economic advisor and macroeconomic forecaster Mark Zandi attempted it?
Source: Mark Zandi, http:/www.economy.com As Mark writes: It is not feasible to identify and count each job that results from the stimulus; economic impacts are estimated... [from] a statistical representation of the U.S. economy based on historical http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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are estimated... [from] a statistical representation of the U.S. economy based on historical relationships... the Moody's Economy.com model, which is used regularly for forecasting, scenario building and policy analysis. The Obama administration has derived its estimates of the stimulus' impact using a similar approach. To date, most of the benefits from the stimulus plan have gone to state and local governments to pay for Medicaid and educational programs and expanded unemployment insurance benefits. This stimulus is defensive--it helps forestall draconian cuts in government services or tax increases that would have otherwise occurred. In the nomenclature of the debate surrounding the merits of the stimulus, this preserves jobs... We do know that the stimulus money has been credited to the states, and we do know that the states have by and large used this money not to cut taxes (which would also be a stimulus, albeit a less effective one) but rather to fend off some of the spending cuts that their own internal budget procedures were forcing them to make. And why does Posner say that "disentanging the various factors" "has not, to my knowledge, been attempted"? Does he not have Google on his computer? And is he not reading Christina Romer (2009), "Is It Working?: An Assessment of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act at the Five-Month Mark"? Two pieces of disentangling evidence in her talk stood out at me: the fact that those states that--by historical accidents of state-level socialinsurance system design--are receiving a relatively small share of the stimulus money are doing relatively poorly:
and the fact that around the globe countries that have over the past six months responded to the crisis with large stimulus packages appear on average to be doing better than it was expected they would six months ago:
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And worst of all is Posner's claim that: As an academic, Christina Romer was a respected student of the business cycle, and actually expressed skepticism, no longer in evidence, about the efficacy of stimulus programs in arresting economic downturns... As an academic, Christina Romer: strongly expressed a preference for using expansionary monetary rather fiscal policy to arrest economic downturns in normal times when expansionary monetary policy can push short-term interest rates down and so stimulate the economy; these aren't normal times--short term interest rates are now zero and cannot be pushed any lower--and so it is appropriate to resort to tools that in normal times are second and third best. argued that during the 1930s New Deal government spending was too small and too often offset by tax increases to play a material role in recovery from the depths of the Great Depression. I don't think Posner has read Christina Romer's academic work on fiscal and monetary policy, or he would not make such a claim. In his conclusion, Posner: raises the question of the ethical responsibility of academic economists, such as Romer (and Krugman, and Lawrence Summers, and many others), who write for the media or join the government, either to adhere to academic standards in their nonacademic work or to make clear to the public that they are on holiday from those standards and that what they say in their public-intellectual or governmental careers should not be thought identical to their academic views... I don't see daylight between Christina Romer (2009), "Is It Working?: An Assessment of the American Reinvestment and Recovery Act at the Five-Month Mark" and Christina Romer and Jared Bernstein (2009), "The Job Impact of the Americn Recovery and Reinvestment Plan" writing for the Obama administration and Christina Romer lecturing here at Berkeley. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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I do see a much more serious ethical question here: Richard Posner: has not read (or has not understood) Romer (2009) or Romer and Bernstein (2009); has not listened to Christina Romer lecture; has not read (or has not understood) her academic work; has not used Google to ascertain that a number of attempts have now been made to ascertain the effectivenss of the stimulus package; has not used Google to determine the use that state governments have made of their secondquarter stimulus money; has not taken the courses in or studied the subject of econometrics in the amount necessary to acquire a view of how one can tease conclusions out of imperfect and confused economic data-or he would not dismiss as "impossible" things that economic forecasters do prospectively and retropectively every day; has not checked his arithmetic to correct howling errors of a factor of 16. In my view, anyone holding themself out as a public intellectual has one duty: to be smart. Being smart involves (a) checking your arithmetic, (b) building up your intellectual tools, (c) using Google, (d) reading works until you understand them, and (e) not writing things where you have absolutely no clue about what you are talking about. Does Richard Posner think that he is behaving ethically here? In my view, he has failed to satisfactporily perform any item of that checklist. Does the Atlantic Monthly think that it is behaving ethically here in publishing Posner? At the very least whoever in the Atlantic offices is looking at Posner should have caught the factor-of-16 arithmetic error, not to mention a bunch of the other howlers should have raised red flags and caused the piece to be bounced back for quality control. Inquiring minds would really like to know... [1] A very reasonable number for a within-quarter multiplier: second-quarter spending will have effects on production and demand now and next quarter and into the future as well, as people who had jobs in the second quarter because of the stimulus spend some of their incomes in the third quarter, and so forth. rated 4.46 by you and 54 others [?] You loved this post (
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Bruce Bartlett misstates the problem (Paul Krugman) Krugman vs. Bartlett: A Tale of Two Charts (Seeking Alpha) 2 more recommended posts Âť Brad DeLong on August 19, 2009 at 10:25 AM in Economics, Economics: Fiscal Policy, Moral Responsibility, Obama Administration, Utter Stupidity | Permalink TrackBack TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.typepad.com/services/trackback/6a00e551f0800388340120a504fc1c970b http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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Richard A. Posner's Ethical Lapses
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Comments You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post. The Atlantic publishes Mcardle. Posted by: elliottg | August 19, 2009 at 11:13 AM How do you find the time to write such cogent material so quickly? This is a beautiful capsule version - and you even managed to include the rest of the world's stimulus efforts. Posted by: jonathan | August 19, 2009 at 11:14 AM "How do you find the time to write such cogent material so quickly?" Just a guess, but Posner's errors are very obvious and tediously common. In this era of copy&paste, such drivel can be responded to quickly and highly cogently by a decent writer who understands the material and has a library of related responses to draw on. Posted by: Robert Johnston | August 19, 2009 at 11:53 AM jonathan, You asked him how he finds the time to do something quickly... Posted by: Drew F | August 19, 2009 at 11:54 AM The factor of 16 error is common on Wall Street. We saw it with the Bush rebate checks too. Specialists often assume that there is actually nothing to their specialty, that "anyone" would know what they know. But specialist training is actually important, and that Posner does not have it in economics fully explains his mistake. Why he chooses and is allowed to write on economics is a separate matter. Posted by: Gerard | August 19, 2009 at 12:05 PM This is the written equivalent of debating Orly Taitz--logic, reason, evidence all mean nothing in the face of a closely held delusion. They don't have to produce convincing arguments because all their followers need is a sheaf of paper, with words, any words, on them. They wave them and say, "SEE!!! I HAVE EVIDENCE!!!" Who are you gonna believe, me or your lying facts... Posted by: Neal | August 19, 2009 at 12:13 PM Oh and remind me again about judicial temperament and discretion again, Mr. Posner.. Posted by: Neal | August 19, 2009 at 12:15 PM Posner makes it up on the volume. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Posner#Major_publications You can't be right all the time given production like that. Posted by: Davis X. Machina | August 19, 2009 at 12:19 PM I dunno, Brad. Ethical lapses and intellectual dishonesty are pretty strong words. For me, the important question is did he violate any of the economists' secret handshake rules? As for the "ethical responsibility of academic economists... to adhere to academic standards in their nonacademic work"(Posner), how about the following from Edward Glaeser from an op-ed in the Boston Globe a week and a half ago: "The original lump fallacy is the 'lump of labor fallacy.' This fallacy holds that there is a fixed amount of work to be done in society, so restricting working hours will reduce unemployment. Encouraged by this logic, European polities have long restricted work hours. The history of Europe’s labor markets illustrates that more regulations makes hiring less attractive and reduces the total amount of work done in a society."
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Having researched and written two articles on the alleged lump of labor fallacy, this stuff gets rather old. The fallacy claim contains the premise that "those who propose X, believe Y," which is a claim that must be supported by evidence. Do those who support X believe Y? No. Is Y a fallacy? Yes, but that is irrelevant because the first premise is false. But the lump of labor fallacy is an economists' secret handshake so it doesn't have to adhere to academic standards, or rather academic standards, as they are practiced exempt economists' secret handshakes from scrutiny on grounds of logic or evidence. Posted by: Sandwichman | August 19, 2009 at 12:37 PM Davis: Volume is the problem. That gigantic pile of **it is a lot of noise to contend with. He can spew it far far faster than Brad DeLong and other honest brokers can show it for what it is. And media types just swallow it all in usual he-said she-said fashion. And the point is that Posner's not even trying to get it right. He's deliberately trying to mislead. I find this disdainful. It's morally and professionally bankrupt. Why O' why can't we have a better University of Chicago? Posted by: mike | August 19, 2009 at 12:42 PM Threatening him with libel tourism is ugly. Posted by: SERO | August 19, 2009 at 01:15 PM I was busy venting at Posner over at Atlantic when I decided to see if there were any new entries here and lo and behold Brad delivered a smackdown that said much of what I was trying to say, only much better. In any case here's my inferior version: "I too am concerned with the fact that academics when they become public intellectuals, leave behind their academic scruples. But I think Richard Posner needs to start by looking in the mirror. Nowhere does he admit that he doesn't know what he is talking about because his expertise is in the law, not in macroeconomics. Instead, in his role as a public intellectual, he acts like he is an expert in the field. In his discussion of macroeconomic policy, he doesn't get the basics right. For example his definition of investment in Y=C+I+G includes savings, something a principles of macroeconomics courses makes clear shouldn't be done. And later he talks about foreign demand for US goods, but didn't earlier include net exports in his original definition of output. But I suspect that this is less due to Posner having forgotten what he learned in principles of macroeconomics than the fact that he probably has never even taken it. He accuses the stimulus of being poorly designed but fails to remind people that the original design was substantially altered to appease so called centrists in the Senate (Spector, Snowe, Collins and Nelson). Large amounts of highly needed and shovel ready municipal infrastructure spending were removed in order to insert a AMT patch which prior research had demonstrated had little stimulative value. The other tax changes and transfers were in there intentionally from the beginning because although they did not have quite as good a fiscal multiplier as infrastructure, they would at least get spent more quickly, which also was a grave concern at the time (and still is). Anyone who was truly interested in the Recovery Act should have been aware of these details. The conservative economists he alludes to are by and large libertarians who don't believe in discretionary economic policy (and a majority of which are sceptical of macroeconomics in general). These are the same conservative economists who nearly universally assured the public that a major recession was an impossibility in our day and age, and now we are supposed to believe that they know how to effectively respond to it. Their argument against discretionary fiscal stimulus is largely grounded in the principle of Ricardian Equivalence, which although it is an important assumption of Neo-Classical theoretical macroeconomic models, enjoys little to no support from the vast body of empirical macroeconomic research literature. This however is of little concern to them because they are more interested in finding anecdotal evidence to support their preconceived conclusions than in the pain staking work of forming conclusions based on actual data. But this is the small cadre of economic ideologues that Posner evidently gets many of his economic talking points from. http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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evidently gets many of his economic talking points from. In his criticism of Romer's assessment of the Recovery Act he says it is unclear where the $100 billion dollar figure comes from but if one bothers to read the assessment she clearly states it includes some preliminary IRS data. He then proceeds to estimate the relative size of the stimulus in the second quarter without taking into account it was a quarter of a year and not a whole year. Thus he clearly understates its size by a factor of four. Either he has fogotten his basic arithmetic or he simply doesn't care about correctly representing the truth. He claims that Romer herself claims that all of the change in growth from the first to the second quarter were due to the stimulus. He further compounds his crime by stating that no one has the faintest idea what the effect of the stimulus was on the economy was in the second quarter, nor has anyone even tried calculate it. (He wrote: "Disentangling the various factors that are responsible for the reduction in the rate of decline of output in the second quarter is probably impossible, but in any event has not, to my knowledge, been attempted--and certainly not in Romer's talk".) But in her talk Romer did not claim that all of the change in growth was caused by the stimulus, and in fact Romer listed the work of three private forecasting firms (economy.com, Macroeconomic Advisors and Goldman Sachs) who on average estimated that the stimulus added about 2.5% to GDP growth in the second quarter at an annual rate. So either he has not actually read Romer's talk or he is simply lying. He suggests that Romer's current position on the stimulus package differs from what is in her academic work. He does not (and cannot) support that claim. However I suspect that the claim is grounded in such gross missinterpretations of her research as done by such other highly ethically challenged public intellectuals as for example Gregory Mankiw. In Mankiw's "Economic View" column of January 11, 2009 he associated Romer with the proposition that the tax multiplier is twice the spending multiplier. Romer, in fact believes in a tax multiplier no larger than the spending multiplier, and she certainly does not believe that a balanced-budget equivalent reduction in taxes and spending provides any stimulus at all. Such missconceptions are easily corrected if one only actually reads her research instead of depending on rabid ideologues the likes of Mankiw to missinterpret it for you. Before Posner starts hurling accusations of intellectual dishonesty and compromised ethics he had better step out of the hypocritical glass house that he has so obliviously constructed around himself. He can start by admitting that his understanding of macroeconomics is limited at best." Posted by: Mark | August 19, 2009 at 01:32 PM Mark's got the right idea, but in order to get a response from Judge (?) Posner, Dr. DeLong ought to consider a letter to the editor of The Atlantic. I love reading similar readers' letters and the efforts of the original authors to respond. I'd be interested in the Judge's response, as an honest broker, purple cow jurist-economist, respected analyst of the political economy (even if the folks on the right never seem to use the p-e term anymore - not magically markety enough, I guess). Posted by: MaryCh | August 19, 2009 at 01:46 PM Just to clarify, Mark Zandi may have advised McCain, but he's a registered Democrat. http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/02/AR2009020202971.html Posted by: Dave | August 19, 2009 at 02:07 PM I don't think that Brad knows enough about legal academia. They have a very different definition of "smart" than the rest of academia. Posner is VERY quick on his feet and facile. He's really really good at winging it. Legal academics value this kind of facility. Posner grew up in a culture where swotting the facts was drudge-work for law students. The result, from Posner, is a huge amount of interesting half-baked thought, and a fair amount of worthless halfbaked thought. None of it is scholarship, although some of it is interesting. When I was in law school, the Ph.D. law students would often giggle at what many of our professors thought was scholarly work. Too much riffing; not enough sitzfleisch. The riffing was often good, but scholarship ain't jazz music. Or maybe it is. You might not need credentials, but there is no substitute for boring practice, practice, practice. Having ripped Posner and legal academia, let me conclude by stating that Brad is unfair to Posner's integrity.
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[I would say that "integrity" means either (a) learning enough about arithmetic to know to divide by 16 when dividing by 16 is appropriate, or (b) remaining silent when one is out of one's depth.] I don't think that it has ever been in question. He's not a shill for the Republicans, although he does have a strong set of semi-libertarian priors. Posted by: Joe S. | August 19, 2009 at 02:47 PM All this reinforces my priors that law professors as a group have the lowest intellectual standards in academia, even if you include feminist literary theory and phys ed. Posted by: hackenkaus | August 19, 2009 at 03:32 PM I think that Brad is confusing integrity with other things, like wisdom. The way I usually hear the word used, integrity is a matter of intent. "Integrity" is one of those nuclear words that hinges on bad intent, like "racist" or "fraud." I never disparage another's integrity without very very good evidence that precludes all alternatives: sloppiness, stupidity, misinformation, or the like. Being a Movement Republican may be sufficient evidence, but Posner is not a Movement Republican. Failure to divide by 16 is attributable to excessive glibness, of which Posner shows considerable evidence. Until Brad can preclude this hypothesis in this case, I won't accept an integrity impairment. Posted by: Joe S. | August 19, 2009 at 03:46 PM "In my view, anyone holding themself out as a public intellectual has one duty: to be smart." Being smart in insufficient. George Will is smart. He's also an ideologue who never allows truth to get in the way of the conclusions he starts with. A public intellectual has at a minimum an ethical obligation to also be honest and fair. Also, I think Joe S. has a good point. We have no shortage of things for which to revile Posner in any event. We could start with an arrogance which, smart though he is, far outruns his competence. Posted by: Reader | August 19, 2009 at 04:08 PM Joe S. Wrote: "He's not a shill for the Republicans, although he does have a strong set of semi-libertarian priors." "Failure to divide by 16 is attributable to excessive glibness, of which Posner shows considerable evidence." Reader wrote: "He's also an ideologue who never allows truth to get in the way of the conclusions he starts with." I think I'm beginning to see a pattern here. Posner's a ........glibertarian! Posted by: Mark | August 19, 2009 at 04:42 PM Hackenkaus, Boy, am I tempted to agree with you when you say that law professors have the lowest intellectual standards in academia. But I can't, really. Legal academics--at least at name-brand schools--are typically very smart. Maybe not smart in the Brad sense, which seems to connote a certain amount of discipline and modesty. But smart in the candlepower sense, at least verbal candlepower. If they only had the training and discipline of good humanities Ph.D.s, they would be a very impressive bunch of scholars. No matter how harsh you want to be on them, law schools are way ahead of, say, education departments by almost any meaningful criterion. Or communications departments. Feminist theory is a bit too close to law schools for comfort. But Richard Posner is a pillar of careful rectitude compared to feminist theorists. (Oddly enough, Posner has supported the careers of some feminist legal theorists, like Robin West.) And some legal scholars are real scholars, by any standard. I won't name names--my pseudonymy might be blown. (And no; I'm not an academic; I'm a legal practitioner.) Posted by: Joe S. | August 19, 2009 at 06:42 PM Epic smackdown. But for the "n" Posner's name would be highly descriptive... http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/08/richard-a-posners-ethical-lapses.html
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Posted by: Adrian Haiwei | August 19, 2009 at 06:45 PM You bet that Posner had a lapse of integrity there. He was accusing others of ethical lapses when he didn't care enough to figure out what the heck he is talking about. This was in a presumably paid article in a major magazine, not some off-the-cuff diary entry on his blog. And then he brings Sommers and Krugman in with what reason? What do these people have in common other than being well-known Democrats and economists? Posted by: jon | August 19, 2009 at 06:53 PM Thanks for the clear and entertaining smack-down. I'm not surprised The Atlantic published him. I think we need to realize that fact checking for non-technical material is virtually non-existent. This is a technical field. I don't think your average or even above average English M.F.A is gonna understand the claims Posner is making in detail. Beyond that, Posner has a reputation for being smart, despite his behavior of late. Even smart and well informed people may have lapses of their own in giving him the benefit of the doubt. Posted by: Patrick C | August 19, 2009 at 08:05 PM @ Joe S My school of education was led by an economist Dean and an economist Department Chair. My law school didn't have a single professor with graduate training in economics, unless you include an econ professor with a joint appointment. Posted by: Justin | August 19, 2009 at 08:30 PM Personally, while I found JBD's argument coherent, the tone put me off. I think it would have been far more effective to accuse Posner of being glib, or of lazy reading. "Ethical lapses?" [Yep. To accuse someone of being corrupt with arguments that rely on your own inability to divide by 16 or use Google... those are certainly ethical lapses.] Posted by: Post-partisan person | August 19, 2009 at 08:52 PM If you think anyone at The Atlantic (or anywhere else, except maybe The New Yorker if one is to believe the hype, and most of that is anal-retentive nonsense quibbling) still fact-checks anything any more, you're naive. It's all on the writer. Well, an editor will correct very obvious errors in references to contemporary pop culture and misspelled words. Posted by: DOW | August 19, 2009 at 09:09 PM Add Posner to the list of those dumping on my degree. Posted by: Spectre | August 19, 2009 at 11:03 PM Ouch. Needless to say you have not humbled Posner (can't be done) but I think you have made it very hard for anyone to honestly claim that he is a reliable public intellectual. I would really really like to hear Andrei's views on your post. I do disagree with you on one point. Posner declares that valid econometrics is impossible. You think that this demonstrates ignorance "has not taken the courses in or studied the subject of econometrics in the amount necessary to ..." I don't think you prove this claim. Economists attempt to do something which Posner asserts is impossible. However, you have not shown that he is ignorant about our efforts. It is entirely possible that he has mastered all econometric research since the dawn of time and correctly concluded that it is worthless. The fact that we attempt to "tease conclusions out of imperfect and confused economic data" does not mean that we have succeeded. Posted by: RobertWaldmann | August 20, 2009 at 06:05 AM Posner ought to return to musing about the economics of rape. His "defense" of the treasonous bushvgore edict -- which amounted to concluding that the Constitution had to be cut up to wrap xmas presents -- displayed the same intellectual and moral bankruptcy we see in this episode.
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It's high irony that he has, of late, been decrying conservatism's "intellectual vacuity." -Posted by: thedeanpeople | August 22, 2009 at 01:16 AM You have not "satisfactporily" proofread your own article, and you deleted my comment when I pointed this out. I don't side with Posner, but it's hard to take you seriously if you criticize others for sloppy work and then fail to proofread your own essay. Posted by: Dan | August 22, 2009 at 08:03 AM
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