Quality of Opinion Journalism
So Dave has been somewhat out of touch - I'm kind of hurt - but the show must go on.
So a big question, I think, is the quality of punditry. Why does Friedman have such a huge audience, if he thinks the world is flat (and more importantly, if he doesn't seem to know what flatness means)? Should we put more trust in "the experts," or is their advice just as flawed? What should we expect from our pundits?
I have my own opinion on these questions, but I'll confine it to the comments section to create the illusion that we're all on equaly footing here at the Society.
[UPDATE: for an example of why Friedman is, shall we say, frustrating, see this post on Friedman's analogies.]
[ANOTHER UPDATE: a cottage industry seems to have sprung up, the entire purpose of which is to mock Friedman. Every review of The World is Flat I've read mentions his weird extrapolation from level playing fields to a flat world. So maybe I'm giving Friedman too much credit, but these seem like cheap shots to me.]
So a big question, I think, is the quality of punditry. Why does Friedman have such a huge audience, if he thinks the world is flat (and more importantly, if he doesn't seem to know what flatness means)? Should we put more trust in "the experts," or is their advice just as flawed? What should we expect from our pundits?
I have my own opinion on these questions, but I'll confine it to the comments section to create the illusion that we're all on equaly footing here at the Society.
[UPDATE: for an example of why Friedman is, shall we say, frustrating, see this post on Friedman's analogies.]
[ANOTHER UPDATE: a cottage industry seems to have sprung up, the entire purpose of which is to mock Friedman. Every review of The World is Flat I've read mentions his weird extrapolation from level playing fields to a flat world. So maybe I'm giving Friedman too much credit, but these seem like cheap shots to me.]
Labels: Leamer
posted by James at 10:30 PM
11 Comments:
So, in short, I think the difference between Leamer and Friedman is largely that they approach ideas differently.
Leamer thinks in models, while Friedman thinks in what could charitably be described as intuitions. Those intutions are expressed in cliches and mixed metaphors, but in a sense that criticism is too easy. The truth is that models are usually too abstract to give us usable policy prescriptions, so it all turns on intuition.
This defense is also too easy, though. Models may not give us answers, but they guide and discipline our thinking. Moreover, it's not just a matter of using models. It's also a commitment to data rather than anecdotes. It all might come down to intuition in the end, but we can avoid a lot of errors by withholding intuition-based judgments until they are necessary. We don't need to speculate about the effects of distance on trade, for instance, as Leamer points out. We can look at the data.
So I think Friedman would be a much better pundit if he read some economics and used some data. Now, would Leamer make a better pundit than Friedman? A lot of this turns on what you think of people like Posner and Krugman. Both of them are highly intelligent and well-respected within their fields. The quality of their punditry outside those fields is questionable.
Another way of putting this question is, do we trust a somewhat randomly chosen intelligent person to give better advice than someone like Friedman? I guess I don't have a good answer. There are plenty of well-regarded academics who have crazy opinions about the world, or who seem to be straightforward ideologues. So I guess I'm curious to hear what the rest of you think.
What makes a pundit "successful" is a hard question, both from a practical and a philosophical point of view. From a practical point of view, what got Friedman his publishing deals, column, and audience is complicated (and, yes, path-dependent). We might posit, though, that despite his abuse of metaphor he has an engaging and effective writing style, perhaps including his frequent use of argument by anecdote ("man-who statistics") -- perhaps most ordinary people think in man-who statistics rather than population means. This goes some way toward explaining why Friedman might be a better (or more successful) pundit than a randomly chosen Econ grad student (i.e., Leamer) who is both more knowledgeable and epistemically more rational in the sense that his methods for deciding what ideas about the world to adopt are more likely to result in ideas that accurately reflect the world.
(Of course, Friedman has advantages that have helped his success without necessarily making his globalization punditry good. Being a prize-winning Times reporter presumably opened channels in the publishing world and at the paper itself that helped him publish his books and columns.)
The philosophical question of what makes a good pundit is tough to answer (with any precision, anyway) because it's hard to balance the importance of accuracy against that of accessibility. But as an additional warning, perhaps Posner's critique of public intellectuals is apposite: academics recruited as pundits inevitably have to pundificate outside their areas of expertise, where they're underqualified but over-trusted because of their credentials.
PS Friedman has a kid named ORLY
That last link is hilarious. I haven't read The World is Flat but now I know for sure I won't.
James is right about how it's mostly "intuition", which is a nicer of saying he's talking out of his ass. It seems like he has one or two halfway-decent ideas, and then has some convoluted interpretation of every single political, social, and technological phenomena to make it fit that framework.
Dave: "pundificate", nice. It's true that many public intellectuals have to talk about things outside their areas of expertise, but some of them (like my favorite popular scientists) actually have expertise. What does Friedman have expertise in? He's the Malcolm Gladwell of politics without the style.
> Dave: "pundificate", nice.
In case it's at all ambiguous, I did that on purpose.
So, thanks.
Yes, I'm aware. I thought it was clever.
Incidentally, there are some potentially good books related to this topic. I already mentioned Posner's "public intellectuals" book (of course, a Posner book is in many ways not a book but a provocative sketch, like an inaccurate caricature of a politician who nonetheless has it coming).
The other one I have in mind is Tetlock's "Expert Political Judgment," which is built around a study of the predictions made by talking heads but sounds like a fascinating synthesis with a good argument. Louis Menand wrote about it in the New Yorker.
(quoth wikipedia: "A graduate of Pomona College, Menand attended Harvard Law School for one year (1973-1974) before he received his Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1980.")
I don't think the problem with Friedman is his reliance on anecdotal reportage. There are many excellent analysts who work predominantly with eyewitness testimony rather than reams of data or sophisticated models and still produce insightful punditry. In fact, there are probably certain questions that are better handled by this sort of personal reportage. I'm sure Homage to Catalonia conveys an understanding of the Spanish Civil War that a history written in, say, the Annales style could not. So I don't think its a question of whether or not we want pundits to adopt a more data-driven or big-picture style over anecdote and intuition. In many cases, both styles are needed. They capture different facets of situations that are both, to me at least, interesting and important. So as far as punditry goes, I'm a pluralist.
But I think it's very important for pundits to realize the limitations of their particular styles of analysis. And I think this is where Friedman fucks up. He wants to draw big-picture conclusions from anecdotal evidence, and this is a category error. There's a really important role for personal reportage in this debate. The triumphalism over the numbers coming from India and China could be seriously challenged by a reporter who looked past the numbers and travelled to, say, cotton farms in Maharashtra or Tibetan villages. There are important stories there that aren't accessible to big-picture analysis. Playing golf with Nandan Nilekhani and then drastically misinterpreting him is not one of them. So basically what I'm saying is, it's not the intuitive or anecdotal style of reportage that's to blame. In the hands of a skilled practitioner, it could be quite insightful. The real problem is that Friedman is an idiot.
It's true that many public intellectuals have to talk about things outside their areas of expertise, but some of them (like my favorite popular scientists) actually have expertise. What does Friedman have expertise in?
Maybe I'm misinterpreting you here, but are you saying that pundits talking outside their area of expertise is more palatable if they're actually experts in something? Why is that?
I guess I can sort of see two reasons, but neither is very convincing to me: a) They've proved that they're smart. b) They're trained in rigorous thinking or data analysis or something, and these skills are applicable to a wide variety of problems.
I don't know if Dawkins is one of your favorite popular scientists. He's certainly one of mine. But I skimmed his God Delusion book and it is awful. Not the best advertisement for scientists speaking outside their fields of expertise.
Ooh, speaking of Malcolm Gladwell, has anyone read his new thing in the New Yorker where he basically says Enron did nothing illegal? It's here.
This is right after his dependency ratio article that James spanked here.
Its unfortunate that Gladwell's impressive ability to come up with interesting ideas isn't paired with the ability to think through their implications with any rigor. Sorry for the derail
Great blog.
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