If this is hysterical rationalization, New Iskander was right when he said my posts in his thread displayed an irrational hatred for Bush. 
The evidence is the evidence. Examine the immediate replies:
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“How many of them are employed by conservative think-tanks?”
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“Does not compute.”
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“So far we have two conservatives and an art and oyster expert. Very impressive.”
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“There are a lot of any type of experts out there, and 368 economists doesn’t mean much compared with randomized sampling and actual surveys of a group of professionals. Right, Sammy?” [Note the ad hominem.]
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“But, but, but there were 368 of them. And they signed affidavits!” [The entire post.]
Therefore, my assertion about “an immediate wave of hysterical rationalization” holds. And it did not escape my attention that these same people who poo-pooed the economists likely have cited similar petitions as evidence of the veracity of claims about global warming.
And this is hysteria? Even if it is, I think there was some very thorough analysis of the list afterward.
Petitions are not a good way to gauge opinion or prove a point. I’m not sure all petitions are created equal, however. And saying what somebody has ‘likely’ done doesn’t make their criticisms invalid.
I’m sure you do; however, you should address that to someone who made some assertion about afterward.
Or valid either, and that was rather the point. Good for the goose. Good for the gander.
Your post came after the reasoned analysis as well as the so-called hysterical rationalization and you didn’t make any distinction between the two.
I did indeed, but let me make it easier for you. Quoting myself, “But you should have known that your OP would encounter an **immediate ** wave of hysterical rationalization.”
I got that. Why didn’t you say ‘you should have known that your OP would encounter an immediate wave of hysterical rationalization, followed by a round of substantive analysis of the people who signed it?’ I understand by now that you were referring to the first posts. I don’t know why you were talking about them at all when there were dozens of posts after the hysterical deluge.
Before I answer, I want to know if that is the final resting place for your goalposts. First, you disputed that there were examples of rationalization. Then, you disputed whether I differentiated those from posts that followed. Now, you want to know why I did not give honorable mention awards to the other posts. If you think that by constantly changing the subject, you will dillute the assertion I actually made, you are mistaken.
a) Economists are like weathermen.
b) Economists apply economic theory as if it were as pure as the laws of physics.
c) Don’t trust the weathermen… 
- Jinx
a) Economists are like weathermen.
b) Economists apply economic theory as if it were as pure as the laws of physics.
c) Don’t trust the weathermen.
d) Therefore, Economists can’t be right.
I like it - I like it
Never mind the quibbling about what part of the response to Sam’s OP you were talking about: I’m curious as to why you still thought the OP was a “noble effort”, given how badly it held up against the “post-immediate-hysterical-rationalization” thorough and reasoned analysis part of the debate. It wasn’t a noble effort, it was a pretty feeble ploy.
Actually, Liberal, it was mainly the side that was naysaying global warming that relied on petitions…Look up “Oregon petition” if we want to see. (UCS did organize a counter-petition with a much more impressive list of signers…the top people in the field as opposed to anyone who claimed to be a scientist and wanted to sign on…but I don’t consider that to be the most convincing evidence for the scientific consensus on climate change.)
So, the evidence of where the science stands on global warming doesn’t come from petitions. It comes from reviews of the science by the IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the councils of the American Meteorological Society, and the American Geophysical Union, and editorials by the editors of the two most prestigious multidisciplinary science journals in the world (Science and Nature) citing the balance of the peer-reviewed work that has appeared in their journals.
So, cut it with the straw men please.
Oh, bullshit! The hell he would have.
And, you have presented no evidence to support this. (And, by the way, Kerry is no anti-free-trader. He voted for NAFTA, although hopefully he now recognizes that the infamous Chapter 11 in that agreement was a mistake.) Only people who believe that a trade agreement (and federal tax policy) isn’t perfect if it isn’t written by the multinational corporations themselves would claim that Kerry is anti-free-trade and anti-open-markets.
No, most of them had extremely strong connections. Go back and read what we wrote. These are people who had strong associations with conservative think-tanks that pushed supply-side theology and so forth. One of the twelve was the Republican House Majority Leader; another had actually served as a Republican in the Kansas legislature. Of course they are going to be critical of Kerry.
Well, we took a sample of 12 selected simply because they were the first 12 on the list. And, yes, we commented on some of the other ones because we couldn’t believe that they had to go down so low on the prestige list in order to come up with 350 economists willing to sign on. That to me is a surprise. I would have thought that nearly the entire faculty at University of Chicago would sign on, that’s sort of the grand temple of supply side theology (at least within academia).
Look, Sam, you were the one who claimed that this was some remarkable thing that had happened. In fact, it is totally predictable. When we quote Krugman, we don’t say “Paul Krugman criticized Bush, so Bush’s economic policies must be shitty.” The letter you gave doesn’t have any dramatic facts…Just a bunch of vague claims that we have already in large part torn apart.
Frankly, if I were you, I’d be pretty embarrassed at having started this thread.
Boy, 368, eh? I would say something snarky about self-selecting samples, but that’d probably just be shrill rationalisation at work. Personally, my objections to Kerry’s earlier trade pronouncements have been stated before. However, for those fond of something a little more scientific than a letter-writing campaign, The Economist this week has a poll of economists on a broad range of economic issues, rating Bush and Kerry on their economic plans, separately and comparatively. Neither did very well, and Bush did slightly worse. The only area in which Bush outscores Kerry is trade. It’s interesting, and a bit more so for not being constructed with explicit partisan motivations.
Personally, I don’t see many economists being too thrilled about the prospect of either candidate winning.
Just for the record, here is a link that provides more info and the list of signers. Note that they are almost all business and economics professors at top-flight business schools; no University of East Timbucktoo here. And, I am sure many of them have strong political biases but the fact that 56 tenured or emiteritus professors from Harvard Business School alone would sign on makes it seem less likely to me that you will find the sort of political orthodoxy that we found in Sam’s list.
Here is some of what they say:
Kerry’s campaign rhetoric does seem to imply a lot of increased spending, and it doesn’t seem realistic that his tax the rich policy will pay for it. But I have to discount much of the rhetoric as, well, rhetoric. I don’t doubt that he’ll increase taxes on “the rich”, and I think that’s a mistake. But Bush has done a pretty miserable job at handling fiscal issues, so it’s hard to get too worked up about Kerry’s plans. Although I don’t agree much with his overall philosophy on economics and social policy, I expect that he’ll be more responsible than Bush about not letting the budget get out of control. I just don’t see a huge difference between Kerry and Bush in terms of how they can affect the overall economy.
I think that’s a valid criticism.
Why would that be a mistake? It seems to me that people were saying the exact same thing when Clinton got into office, and we ended up with a period of unparalleled prosperity. And since Bush has cut taxes for the rich, the predicted stimulating effect does not seem to have materialized. I wonder why conservatives continue to contend that taxes should remain at lower levels for the wealthy, with dire predictions of economic failure should we reinstate the previous higher bracket for them, when the evidence doesn’t seem to bear that out.
I’ll take Sam’s 368 and **raise them by 10 Nobel Prize-winning economists**
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There. That was my own “noble effort.”
I agree with you, John (without having actually run the numbers or seen an honest attempt to run the numbers) that something is likely to have to give in Kerry’s plan, especially given the huge fiscal hole that Bush has created for us to dig out of. [I, of course, strongly disagree with you on the wisdom of repealing the tax cuts on the rich.]
But (and I am sort of restating what you said here, I suppose), the point is that this President is very unique in his complete ability to simply ignore facts and govern totally on ideology. Kerry has not shown any strong tendency to do this; In fact, Reagan didn’t even do it nearly to the degree that Bush has…As others have noted, Reagan actually reversed portions of his original tax cuts as it became clear what sort of fiscal hole he was driving us into. Bush, instead, has just dug deeper with more tax cuts for the wealthy.
Ultimately, one has to trust that the President will look at the facts and make a good judgement about what to do. The evidence from this President is overwhelmingly abundant and clear: He will simply not do that! And, I think he is singularly unique in his complete pigheadedness. And, thus we drift on toward fiscal catastrophe.
Actually, I should add that even if Kerry wanted to, I don’t see how he could given the Congress. While it is conceivable that the Senate will go narrowly Democratic, it is extremely doubtful that the House will. And, even if it does, the Democrats in Congress has never shown the sort of lock-step Delay “The Hammer” enforcement that would allow a Democratic President to govern so ideologically, at least without quite a large Democratic majority in both chambers.