Some Chicago Boyz know each other from student days at the University of Chicago. Others are Chicago boys in spirit. The blog name is also intended as a good-humored gesture of admiration for distinguished Chicago School economists and fellow travelers.
Unintentional self-parody from the NYT:
The clueless Bloomberg reporterette interviewing Goldman Sachs chairman Lloyd Blankfein was like one of those MSM reporters who do man-on-the-street interviews in totalitarian countries: “So, Mr. Garcia, what do you think of President Castro’s new program?” Of course Blankfein gave vague answers and was careful to cite approvingly the great knowledge and wisdom of his Congressional masters. What did anyone expect him to say?
Meanwhile, Senator Levin thinks that a firm such as Goldman that is engaged in the business of making markets is doing something immoral because it is “betting against its customers”. This makes Senator Levin a fool or a demagogue or both. Maybe he will now try to ban all trade, since the fact that each party to a voluntary transaction thinks it is getting the better part of the deal must mean someone is getting ripped off.
As someone else said around here, the country is in the very best of hands.
Joe Kernan asked John Harwood how many times Harwood had interviewed President Obama — three? four?
I don’t remember Harwood’s exact response but he beamed. He was obviously proud.
Maybe he wasn’t considering how he came across to viewers. Or maybe: a) he doesn’t care, b) he cares phenhome mostly about beating out competing journalists or c) he cares mostly about the opinions of people who share his opinions. I mean, given how Obama’s people treat the media, and especially given how they treat people who disagree with them, what does it say about a journalist that he is invited to interview the President three or four times?
Posted today in Freeorder News
Sharyl Attkisson, CBS, investigates and reports the fraud of swine flu hype and hysteria. This kind of journalism is at the foundation of a free society. When you listen to, or read this, please remember that the President of the United States declared a National Emergency based on things that were not true. Sharyl, thank you. You are a real journalist, and I hope you will inspire others to pick up the old torch. And thank you Dr. Joseph Mercola for your interview with Attkisson and for posting it for our illumination.
One of my academic advisors used to say that any argument without numbers is a religious one. And we all know how productive they are.
Being a numbers jock and P-Chemist, that statement resonated with me. It still does.
But then I went into business, and for a while my job involved the quantitative prediction of consumer behavior. Entering into the social sciences like that, where there is no ideological bias, just a financial incentive to get the model right, was good for me. It trained me to look at the instrument that was used to derive the numbers. To ask if the questioner was asking the right questions.
So my brain perked up when I saw this article on the decline of newspapers:
Big whoop. After several statistical triple back-flips, we now know that 96 percent of newspaper reading is done in the printed product. That’s like talking about modern transportation by pointing out that 96 percent of buggy drivers use buggy whips. Hello? We switched to cars 100 years ago.
Writing on the Nieman Journalism Lab Web site, Martin Langveld made some valid statistical conclusions about newspaper readership. The problem is that he was asking the wrong questions. It isn’t about newspapers; it’s about news.