Hillary and the Dog That Didn’t Bark

Former First Lady and Senator and Secretary of State and presumptive First Woman President Hillary Clinton was barking like a dog on the campaign trail the other day, and lest you think that’s some sexist slur please understand that she was quite literally barking like a dog. The bit got a good laugh from her fans, who are so humorless they’ve kept a straight face through all her explanations about her e-mails and Benghazi and the numerous other Clinton family scandals, and it was approvingly noted by the liberal press, which is eager to show her lighter side, while the more conservative media made sport of it. Donald J. Trump, the foul-mouthed real-estate-and-gambling-and-professional-wrestling-and-reality-show carnival barker who is currently leading the Republican field, seemed to find it undignified.

We found the impression a failed but harmless attempt at humor, and hardly worth mentioning, but we wish more attention was paid to what she was barking about.

After recalling an ad that once ran on rural Arkansas radio featuring a dog that would bark whenever a candidate said something untrue, sounding very folksy as she related the story, Clinton said “I want to figure out how we can do that with Republicans. We need to get that dog to follow them around and every time they say things like ‘Oh, the great recession was caused by too much regulation, then ‘bark, bark, bark.'” The crowd roared its approval, of course, but they failed to realize the joke is on them.

Any competent lie-detecting dog would not be only barking furiously at the implied argument that the great recession was caused by too little regulation, it would be straining at its leash and salivating for blood, and Clinton surely knows this better than most. The last round of significant financial de-regulation was signed into law during the administration of her hound dog husband, former President Bill Clinton, and the subsequent Republican administration added the countless regulations of Sarbanes-Oxley and countless regulators to enforce them, and the banks didn’t make hundreds of billions of dollars of loans to people with little chance of paying them off because the Republicans had deviously repealed some rule against it but rather because Clinton’s husband’s administration coerced and cajoled and incentivized them to do so in the name of fairness. At first the policy fed a housing bubble that seemed to make the entire country richer, and those suckers with the subprime mortgages were able to stay afloat on the rising real estate tide, and Clinton successfully ran for the Senate bragging about it, but eventually it all came crashing down into a very well regulated pile.

The notion that greedy Wall Street bankers eager to get rich by making hundreds of billions of dollars of loans that were unlikely to ever be paid back were to blame, and that even more government coercion and cajoling and incentivizing were therefore required, quickly became the widely accepted story. Even Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain went along with it, and the dissenting voices with their facts and arguments and lack of any recognizable villains other than well-intentioned government servants were quickly drowned out in the boos. Now it’s just one of those things that every knows even though it’s not at all true, much like that “Bush lied, people died” theory of the Iraq War that even the current front-runner for the Republican presidential nomination is peddling, and at this point Clinton’s barking dog shtick will be very difficult to refute.

Still, we’d like to see someone in the Republican field make a stab at it, and not just by mocking the barking dog impersonation. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz is still defending the free market system, and he does some pretty convincing impersonations of characters from “The Princess Bride” and “The Simpsons,” so perhaps he’s up to the task. The boastful billionaire front-runner is more inclined to criticize Wall Street’s greed than the regulators’ good intentions, the rest of the field seems reluctant to champion that good old red-in-tooth-and-claw capitalism that doesn’t make bad loans even for fairness’ sake, and we certainly can’t expect the unfashionable truth from the self-described socialist who is currently the front-runner in the Democratic race.

All in all, it’s enough to make us barking mad.

— Bud Norman

Economics Makes You Mean

We’ve been poring over the latest economic data, and find them unsatisfactory. The number of jobs created in March was half of what was expected and the worst in 15 months, estimates for the previous two months were revised downward to bring the annual rate to the levels of two years ago, the unemployment rate stayed at a desultory 5.5 percent only because people continue joining the record of number of idled workers who are outside the labor force and are therefore not counted, retails sales fell, manufacturing activity slowed, wages declined, and the Federal Reserve Board’s revised estimate for first quarter growth is a mere 0.1 percent annualized rate. This strikes us as just awful, but perhaps that just because we’ve made an informal study of economics and are therefore greedy anti-social types who cheat, lie, steal, and hate the poor.

That’s the suspicion, at any rate, of Occidental College’s sociology professor Lisa Wade, who recently wrote that “Yep. Economics majors are more anti-social than non-econ majors. And taking econ classes also makes people more anti-social than they were before. It turns out, there’s quite a bit of research on this, nicely summarized here. Econ majors are less likely to share, less generous to the needy, and more likely to cheat, lie and steal.” We’re disinclined to take seriously any work of scholarship that begins with “yep,” especially when it ends with a such an obviously inane conclusion, but Wade is a sociology professor, and at a college where President Barack Obama once matriculated, and there is a certain circular logic to her argument, so maybe she’s on to something and we’re just too blinded by greed to see.

As proof that people who understand economics are greedy, Wade cites an experiment by two economists, oddly enough, who found that economic majors at the University Washington were less likely than other students to contribute to a “left-leaning public interest group” and a “non-partisan group that lobbies to reduce tuition rates.” An alternative explanation for this might be that people who study economics are more likely to believe that a “left-leaning public interest group” is likely to do more harm than good for the needy, and that the supposedly non-partisan group lobbying to reduce tuition rates hopes to accomplish that by sticking taxpayers with the bill rather than kicking out all the unnecessary administrators and compliance officers and phony-baloney sociology professors who have been driving up the cost of a college education, and that their reluctance to donate is therefore motivated by altruism rather than greed, but that kind of thinking isn’t going to get a modern academic tenured. The economists also conducted experiments with students asked to play the “prisoner’s dilemma” and other role-playing games that involve a choice between the communal good and self-interest, and were unsurprised to find that those who had studied economics were more likely to choose the latter. To their credit they acknowledge the possibility that the more economically savvy understand that if everyone pursues their own self-interests it will result in a greater communal good, but of course they are too kind and selfless to countenance such crazy talk.

The rest of the “quite a bit of research” Wade cites is another sociologist who argues that economics majors simply aren’t exposed to all of the “conflicting pro-social views” being offered in political science, philosophy, and of course sociology classes. Presumably these other disciplines have found a refutation of the laws of supply and demand and the rest of soul-deadening science found in the economics classes, and once an economics major has been sufficiently indoctrinated by the rest of the faculty he will come to see that their preferred ideas work better after all.

“It’s an issue of grave seriousness,” Wade warns in her final paragraph, “as the criminal and immoral behavior of our financial leaders is exactly what triggered a Great Recession once … and could again.” She’s referring to the financial meltdown of 2008, of course, which was caused by all the bad mortgage loans that banks had extended to borrowers with bad credit histories, which was encouraged and often mandated by government policies that were supposed to bring fairness and equality and social justice and all those good things to a heartless economic system that preferred not to loan money to borrowers with bad credit histories, just as efforts to bring fairness and equality and social justice and all those good things have so often proved counter-productive, but we only say that because we have a rudimentary understanding of economics, and are therefore bad people. The kinder, gentler approach might prove disastrous, but what are results compared to good intentions?

— Bud Norman