"Just the facts, professor"

I have never had much luck with fact checkers. I remember in particular an experience about ten years ago, when a fact checker from The New Yorker called to ask me if a forthcoming article's description of me as "a young economist at Harvard" was correct.  I told him that I was indeed an economist and that I was employed by Harvard.  As for being young, I just told him my age. When the article was published, I had become just "an economist at Harvard."  I took this quite hard--remember this was a decade ago!--until someone reminded me that anyone above 30 is likely to seem "old" to a person of the average age of fact checkers at The New Yorker.

So when I got a call from a fact checker at the New York Times magazine last week who wanted to confirm, among other things, that I was not "antitrade," I did not take it as a good omen.  The answer was, "that is correct, I am not antitrade." I could have tried to explain how meaningless this characterization is: You can be anti-WTO, anti-trade agreements, anti-free trade, but anti-trade?  I don't know of a single soul who wants to move the U.S. to autarky.  But I was talking to a fact checker, and the discussion would have been pointless. She wanted to know "just the facts."

In any case, you can judge the result yourself.

Comments

[pgl]

I had to laugh at the closing paragraph as it touts the old canard that everyone wins from free trade. Maybe the next time a fact checker calls, just hang up the phone.

[pgl]

I had to laugh at the closing paragraph as it touts the old canard that everyone wins from free trade. Maybe the next time a fact checker calls, just hang up the phone.

[robertdfeinman]

Something has happened to the NY Times over the past decade. It used to be a Main Street Republican leaning publication with a dollop of leftist concern for the poor and disadvantaged. This made sense, the owners were from socially liberal NY Jewish families who had a tradition of concern for such interests, but were now economically in the wealthy capitalist class and thus allied economically with big business.

The family still controls the paper, but it is a new generation and, having grown up in wealth, they have moved more rightward on economic matters. This is most easily seen in their choices for the op-ed pundits where neo-cons predominate, as well as their installation of hard right wingers as the editors of both the Sunday Magazine and Book Review sections.

They also give too much space to libertarian economists (or play-acting economists like Ben Stein) in the business section.

So it should not be surprising that a staffer at the magazine wouldn't know enough to realize that the question was meaningless or biased and assumed a certain framing for the piece they were publishing.

Is it any wonder that the press is now held in such low regard? Judith Miller was just a symptom of a paper infected with ideology and trying to make reality fit.

[John V]

Like I said a few times before and as I'm sure you've heard from others far more qalified than me:

When thoughtful nuanced economists nit-pick at trade, you do indeed give weight to and embolden un-nuanced protectionists whose true views are very, very different from yours....people you once said were referred to as "barabarians" by a colleague of yours.

Remember Ron Paul is anti-Nafta and so are many far left poliiticians in Congress...but the reasons for that position couldn't be any more different.

National discourse is dumbed down and there's little room for detail. You shouldn't be surprised to get these kinds of questions.

You may be quibbling over means but the result is always going to be a impression by the masses that you are disputing general ends.

The general public isn't really going to grasp or care why and where you quibble with the consensus of "free traders"....or care about the nunaced difference between different kinds of free traders for that matter.

The over simplified and soundbyte-style result is going to be that you disagree with free traders and hence will be taken as validiation for the argument of protectionists.

Yes, it's not fair. But that's the way it is.

[Ken Houghton]

If everyone is benefitting from free trade, why have working-class wages declined steadily since 1981 (exception noted: they pretty much kept pace with everyone else from ca. 1995-2001).

I'm not the greatest at basic economics, but I'd give odds that the tangent of the Income-Consumption Utility curve that has a tangent at 100/95 is higher than the one tangential to 93/95. Yet Loewenstein seems to think this makes workers "better off."

Should I be returning my M.A.?

[Thomas Kang]

As Amartya Sen writes in his "Development as Freedom", to be "anti-trade" is like to be against people talking to one another.