By James Kwak
After my post on Corey Robin’s new book, a friend recommended Albert O. Hirschman’s Rhetoric of Reaction. As the title suggests, the book is about the rhetorical style of conservative thought dating back to Burke. Hirschman identifies three common tropes: perversity (that great-sounding progressive idea you have will have the opposite of its intended effect), futility (that great-sounding progressive idea won’t change anything, because you don’t understand the fundamental laws of the world), and jeopardy (that great-sounding progressive idea will destroy some other thing that we all agree is valuable, making everyone worse off in the end). Hirschman doesn’t dwell on this specific point, but it’s obvious that, similar to the argument Robin makes, these rhetorical devices can only exist in opposition to some progressive reform movement.
I thought the description of the contemporary form of the perversity thesis (e.g., welfare programs create poverty) was especially good. “Here the failure of foresight of ordinary human actors is well-nigh total as their actions are shown to produce precisely the opposite of what was intended; the social scientists analyzing the perverse effect, on the other hand, experience a great feeling of superiority—and revel in it” (Belknap Press, 1991, p. 36). This seems to me an accurate description of why the Economics 101 ideology is so powerful. People get a sense of superiority from owning counter-intuitive theoretical insights—even if those insights are wrong.
What Did the SEC Really Do in 2004?
By James Kwak
Andrew Lo’s review of twenty-one financial crisis books has been getting a fair amount of attention, including a recent mention in The Economist. Simply reading twenty-one books about the financial crisis is a demonstration of stamina that exceeds mine. I should also say at this point that I have no arguments with Lo’s description of 13 Bankers.
Lo’s main point, which he makes near the end of his article, is that it is important to get the facts straight. Too often people accept and repeat other people’s assertions—especially when they are published in reputable sources, and especially especially when those assertions back up their preexisting beliefs. This is a sentiment with which I could not agree more. One of the things I was struck by when writing 13 Bankers was learning that nonfiction books are not routinely fact-checked (Simon and I hire and pay for fact-checkers ourselves). As technology and the Internet produce a vast increase in the amount of writing on any particular subject, the base of actual facts on which all that writing rests remains the same (or even diminishes, as newspapers cut back on their staffs of journalists).
I’m not entirely convinced by Lo’s example, however. He focuses on a 2004 rule change by the SEC. According to Lo, in 2008, Lee Pickard claimed that “a rule change by the SEC in 2004 allowed broker-dealers to greatly increase their leverage, contributing to the financial crisis” (p. 33). That is Lo’s summary, not Pickard’s original. This claim was picked up by other outlets, notably The New York Times, and combined with the observation that investment bank leverage ratios increased from 2004 to 2007, leading to the belief that the SEC’s rule change was a crucial factor behind the fragility of the financial system and hence the crisis.
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Tagged economics, financial crisis, SEC