My friend Stan Collender, who knows more about the budget process than anybody else I can think of, says my wife is wonderful but takes me to task for my remarks on the length of the fiscal stimulus bill. (Paul Krugman, quite unappeased by my accusing Republicans of hypocrisy on the point, congratulates him on a "fine takedown".)
What Clive seems to be saying is that, at 1400 pages, the bill could not possibly have been reviewed in detail by many members of Congress before they voted for it given the rush to get it done. What he doesn't say is that most representatives and senators generally only review the parts of any bill that are important to them for some reason...
[C]iting the number of pages as a reason to think legislation is bad is ridiculous. That's on a par with football commentators talking about the number of minutes one team has had the ball compared to the other or the greater number of plays one team has run.
Stan, please, read what I wrote:
[F]ailing to read the law you are voting for is standard working method in Congress. But that doesn't invalidate the criticism, certainly not in the eyes of the public. Not every unread piece of legislation costs taxpayers $800 billion. It isn't too much to ask that the politicians voting for this law, even if they had to make an exception, had read it first.
Well, is that too much to ask? The point is not length as such, obviously, but length in relation to time for consideration. In that very post I said that, on balance, I am for this measure. So I can hardly be accused of saying that any 1,400 page law must be bad. But I cannot think that passing such an enormously expensive and complicated piece of legislation in such a frantic rush is good government--even if it is standard practice.
(Paul reminds us that "War and Peace" is both very long and very good. That made me think of the Woody Allen joke about the fellow who took a speed-reading course and then read the novel. "It's about Russia.")
(Stan also has a wonderful wife, by the way.)
Clive:
Your blog has had an effect on Krugman. Since you blogged about him, Krugman's TV appearances on PBS and Bloomberg have been scholarly. It seems that he has reserved his acidity for the simmering resentment he has for you.
At any rate, what I find ironic is that on a recent Bloomberg interview, Krugman said that the stimulus dollar amount was too small. Thus, you deride the length but agree with its dollar amount, and Krugman defends the length but criticizes its minuscule amount.
Please approve this one.
I think an important part of this argument is that most pieces of current legislation are comprised of many revisions to previous pieces of legislation. As a California voter, every initiative we vote on is printed and sent to all voters, and much of it is just red-lining existing law, and adding language to other parts of existing law. Reading the text makes no sense without the internet (or hundreds of reference books) at your disposal (and even then would be ridiculously time-consuming). If my Congress-member was spending the 24-48 hours preceding the vote sitting and reading a bunch of deletions and additions completely out of context, rather than taking a summary from his staffers who are paid to find the existing law, write the revisions, and to know what each of those revisions actually accomplishes, I would accuse him of malfeasance in office. S/he should be taking staffers at their word, and engaging in the debate and negotiations.
Your criticism is sound. And it was soudn for passage of the PAtriot act. The reason House Members hate Jeff Flake is that he'll use his time to read the bills to them and illustrate how dumb it is that they are aprroving whatever the latest travesty is.
As for Krugman, well the guy who treated epilepsy with lobotomies won a Nobel Prize for that innovation; and that was the real one, not the fake one given economists.
Well done Clive for your intervention on this subject and on the Barro - Krugman debate.
On the 1400-page stimulus bill it does srtike me as ironic that a country which prides itself on the succinctness of its constitution can routinely produce such verbose legalese in its laws. On holding economists to standards of academic rigor, I think your intervention was most opportune, as the issue is of crucial importance and the discussion had been echoed elsewhere - e.g. the discussion of Blanchard's recent column at the Economist's Free Exchange blog.
I would also direct you to two further items that may be relevant. The first is a reflection on objectivity and bias in economics by Russ Roberts the host of Econtalk at http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2009/01/roberts_and_han.html
The second is a response to Krugman's analysis of the reasons for growing income inequality in the U.S. that was recently published by Cato. It's a fine article, notable not only for its content - the causes of inequality are more complex than Krugman makes out - but also for it's style, which is respectful, open to the points where Krugman is correct and open also to the political conclusions that should be taken away from the analysis.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/wtpapers/Nostalgianomics.pdf
Eh ... maybe they should require that all future laws fit on a single page so as to allow everyone to read it before voting. Or they could condense legislation down to a single soundbite ...
I'm not sure why Krugman is so impressed with the put down. Irrespective of the merits of your initial argument, the argument that Stan uses to illustrate why your argument is untrue is, itself, untrue.
Time of possession over the first three quarters is a very important stat for predicting the fourth quarter. That's WHY all the commentators talk about it.
Besides, argument by analogy is almost always weak.
"Time of possession over the first three quarters is a very important stat for predicting the fourth quarter. That's WHY all the commentators talk about it."
Clive might benefit from some elaboration here, as this is a reference to American football. In American football, offensive squads ("offenses") generally get better the longer that they are on the field in a game. They set the pace. In contrast, defensive squads ("defenses") generally get worn down the longer they are on the field. Hence, the talk about time of possession. By the end of a game, a worn down defense is more likely to get scored on.
Good lord. The essence of the criticism is that people like Crook, in order to be viewed as balanced journalists, must equally criticize all sides in an argument, even if one side is 90% wrong. Crook does this with aplomb, which should not surprise anyone who's read the Economist for the last 15 years. Hence, the length of the stimulus plan becomes a vehicle for that. It is the written equivalence of the performance of Lindsey Graham (Drama Queen - South Carolina) on the Senate floor.