At the end of a blistering attack on Paul Krugman’s latest New York Times op-ed (and Krugman’s subsequent defenses of portions thereof), Donald Luskin says:

At the end of the day, what is most striking to me about this whole affair is what it says about the so-called “science” of economics, aside from what it says about Krugman. It shows that highly credentialed (but politically biased) economists can use their reputations as scientists to offer to the public egregious errors-cum-lies. And then they can defend themselves, when caught at it, by twisting the infinitely elastic theories of their “science” into whatever shape is required to justify the lie after the fact. In terms of its long-range impact on human well-being, the “science” of economics may well be the most dangerous fraud ever perpetrated.

John Lott’s critics have said much the same thing about his use of econometrics (via Tim Lambert).

Now, I’m not going to pronounce either way on these issues. But I will say that I’m glad my little corner of academe has absolutely no bearing on the real world, Perestroika movement be damned.

Ok, it’s a slight exaggeration. But nobody’s going to be arguing the merits of a federal tax plan or the Second Amendment or anything else that’s particularly important based on my research, at least until I have tenure. And at least they’re economists… I don’t have to claim them as my own.

Holy Mini-Instalanche, Batman!

Apparently inspired by CalPundit’s idea to “out” anti-gay Republicans, Matthew Yglesias is speculating on the prospects of a right-to-privacy bill or amendment. Matthew speculates on why such an amendment has not been proposed in the past:

The existence (and scope) of a right to privacy in the constitution is a matter of some controversy, and proposing a constitutional privacy amendment might be seen as an admission on the part of privacy advocates that such a right does not exist in the un-amended constitution.

This argument goes back to the days of the Federalist Papers; one of the reasons why the Constitution didn’t originally include a Bill of Rights was the fear that enumerating rights would imply that those not enumerated did not exist (this is the reason the 9th Amendment was added to the Constitution, as part of the compromise Bill of Rights that the Federalists proposed to get the Constitution ratified—Radley Balko gives the expanded explanation here), based on the understanding that Congress’s enumerated powers were narrowly-drawn. Alexander Hamilton makes this argument in Federalist 84:

I go further, and affirm that bills of rights, in the sense and to the extent in which they are contended for, are not only unnecessary in the proposed Constitution, but would even be dangerous. They would contain various exceptions to powers not granted; and, on this very account, would afford a colorable pretext to claim more than were granted. For why declare that things shall not be done which there is no power to do? Why, for instance, should it be said that the liberty of the press shall not be restrained, when no power is given by which restrictions may be imposed? I will not contend that such a provision would confer a regulating power; but it is evident that it would furnish, to men disposed to usurp, a plausible pretense for claiming that power. They might urge with a semblance of reason, that the Constitution ought not to be charged with the absurdity of providing against the abuse of an authority which was not given, and that the provision against restraining the liberty of the press afforded a clear implication, that a power to prescribe proper regulations concerning it was intended to be vested in the national government. This may serve as a specimen of the numerous handles which would be given to the doctrine of constructive powers, by the indulgence of an injudicious zeal for bills of rights.

James Madison, who did support a Bill of Rights in some form, makes a similar point in a letter to Thomas Jefferson, again couching it terms of limited federal powers and a fear that enumerating liberties might encourage them to be curtailed.

Having said all that, in the 215 years since the Constitution was ratified, the interpretation of Congress’s enumerated powers has greatly expanded. Unless you’re a liberal who subscribes to Lopez (a rare liberal indeed!), an enumerated powers argument in support of a right to privacy isn’t going to go anywhere—despite the fact that, at least when discussing the federal government (and state governments whose constitutions also enumerate the powers of their legislatures, a field I am admittedly inexpert on), it’s arguably the most powerful one. So necessarily the protection of unenumerated rights rests solely on the 9th Amendment, which leads to the need to enumerate them to protect them from infringement by judicial or legislative fiat unencumbered by any recognition of limited power.

My view: since both parties have basically abandoned the principle of limited government, as a practical matter a RTP amendment probably wouldn’t be a bad thing in this day and age, as the 9th is a very shaky foundation to found fundamental freedoms, including some conception of a right to personal privacy, on. However, I’m not quite ready to abandon that principle myself, so from a philosophical standpoint a privacy amendment would likely be another nail in the coffin of the 9th.

Edited add a link to Radley’s 9th Amendment discussion, which I read and linked a day or two ago (a similar discussion been a part of my 101 lecture on the Constitution for a few years); Jeremy Scharlack has a good roundup of links on the 9th too. More Santorum discussion in the Santorarium.

The phenomenon of “fisking” has obviously reached the mainstream: it’s been employed successfully on page A8 of today’s edition of The Globe and Mail. The fisk-ee? None other than Toronto mayor Mel Lastman, apparently upset about Toronto’s role as the North American SARS capital.

That—in an interview with CNN’s bumbling Aaron Brown, perhaps better known as “ratings poison” or “the poor man’s Charlie Rose,” no less—Lastman came out the lesser is yet another strike against this walking argument against municipal consolidation (and for the Peter Principle).

Via Alec Saunders.

Glenn Reynolds today links to three articles in the Stanford Law Review that argue over John Lott’s More Guns, Less Crime thesis. Normally in these disputes it’s hard to say much of anything without having the data at hand; thankfully, Ian Ayres and John J. Donohue III have posted their data (warning—ZIP file) at Ayres’ website, so hopefully someone—who has more time on their hands than me and isn’t supposed to be writing a dissertation on a completely different topic at the moment, mind you—can make heads or tails of what’s going on.

My preliminary assessment (as a political scientist who plays an econometrician on TV and spends most of his time running limited dependent variable models): without knowing any of the authors’ statistical training, I’d be very reluctant to draw any conclusions from their writing alone, but Ayres and Donahue appear to be onto something. However, analyzing statistical models with fixed effects can be nasty business, particularly since theoretically the asymptotics that regression analysis relies on aren’t fulfilled (the number of independent variables in a fixed effects model increases as a function of the number of observations, rather than being constant) and throwing lots of atheoretical dummy variables into a model runs the risk of soaking up variance that really ought to be attributed to a substantive effect—but that applies equally to both sides in this debate.

I’m not quite sure why Ayres and Donahue use areg instead of xtreg in Stata to estimate fixed effects, but it shouldn’t make a substantive difference (it just makes the specification a bit harder); more generally, I’d be more comfortable if everyone involved used some sort of vaguely modern time-series analysis (ARIMA, VAR, cointegration—even Box-Jenkins!), but maybe I’m just weird that way. I assume the dependent variables are logged since economists log everything for some odd reason (perhaps just to make the regressions harder to interpret). It’s not entirely clear how any of the authors treat missing data.

Anyway, someone else will have to take over from here… this is far too much thought for a debate I have absolutely nothing invested in.

Julian Sanchez writes on this issue as well; I agree that this problem with his research (if borne out by the evidence) bothers me much more than the basically silly “Mary Rosh” business or other complaints (some of which seem to be based more on his political views on issues other than gun control).

Also, to clarify for the hardcore econometricians in the audience, by “time-series” I meant cross-sectional time-series or panel analysis. (Political scientists don’t get particularly worked up about the CSTS versus panel distinction in general, mainly because we tend to deal with much more of the latter; this data is closer to CSTS but has properties of both—large number of units, but also a fairly large number of time-points.)

Scott Johnson, whose Feedster is one of my favorite blog resources, has a good essay entitled “Why You Shouldn’t Watch CNN Any More.” It’s about a week old, but I just ran across it now.