Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

Comment by RodericDay | Hacker News Reader

> James Bessen of Boston University has provided suggestive evidence that rent-seeking behavior has been increasing. In a 2016 paper Bessen demonstrates that, since 2000, “political factors” account for a substantial part of the increase in corporate profits. This occurs through expanded regulation that favors incumbent firms. Similarly, economists Jeffrey Brown and Jiekun Huang of the University of Illinois have found that companies that have executives with close ties to key policy makers have abnormally high stock returns.

I honestly don't understand the point of reporting such "phenomena" in such stilted, euphemistic, academic terms. Every time I read such a milquetoast description of corruption, I'm reminded of this essay discussing the ways in which well-meaning "discoveries" in economics and political science serve mostly as a prophylactic against the immediacy, urgent, and valid claims made in other epistemic registers.

It really feels like some people just don't want to "give credit" to the angry mob for realizing something that eluded them for so long, so they come up with these strange parallel constructions that quantify, and "prove", what was already obvious to everyone else, but in slightly different/more mathy ways, to make it seem like fresh knowledge. However, in doing so, they de-legitimize the ways that other people used to arrive to such conclusions, such as a cursory reading of Marxist literature.

It's such a weird dance.

https://clrjames.blogspot.ca/2014/04/ideas-whose-time-has-be...

It's reported in "stilted, academic terms" because it's academic work. The authors might be filled with anger, who knows, but there's value in detached academic research.

There is a quantitative craze in academia that is producing ever more ridiculous scholarship. Political science journals are full of studies running regressions on preposterous data sets, usually to justify some predetermined qualitative analysis.

There did seem to be quite a bit of dancing to keep the phrasing and identification of actors as vague and inoffensive as possible.

It's more than a little conspicuous that an article regarding rent-seeking and the growth of unproductive enterprise over the last three decades fails to once mention banking or the stratospheric growth of financial engineering over that same period.

And the part that the harvard MBA culture plays in all of that financial engineering.

Hasn't this always been the case in every scientific field? It seems like every other week there's a new study that proves something everyone intuitively knew. The point of doing the research is to gain actual scientific data (e.g. mathy stuff, as you put it) via the scientific method that will add to a preexisting body of knowledge.

> It seems like every other week there's a new study that proves something everyone intuitively knew.

Beware of hindsight bias!! http://lesswrong.com/lw/im/hindsight_devalues_science/

> This occurs through expanded regulation that favors incumbent firms

> such as a cursory reading of Marxist literature.

I never knew Marx was so anti-regulation

You should read "Marx's Inferno" then.

http://www.panarchy.org/engels/freetrade.html

"But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade."

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