Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jnordwick | Hacker News Reader

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Keep reading. It goes so far as to hold Card up as some master of this new data-oriented movement - the guy massages it better than the girl offering you a happy ending. And it goes on to highlight other orthodox turned radical anti-capitalists.

Anybody skilled enough can take a sample of data and play with it enough - fill in holes with other data - exclude some points - until they get the story they want. To some extent there needs to be a mechanism (beside "people are stupid") to tie things together. And this has been the general MO of left-wing economists. They lost ideas and theory so they moved to numbers. The numbers tend to not be predictive because they are so overly played with, so obviously everybody is just being irrational - the world is wrong not their theory because they proved it right with the data.

It is Vox after all - a self proclaimed socialist website that has given page space to the the Jacobins on how Democratic Socialism isn't social democracy - it is only a starting point for pure socialism.

Card doesn't rely on irrational firms. He showed with data that labor demand is inelastic at minimum wage in the region studied. When this is true, the benefits of increasing minimum wage outweigh the costs.

On that infamous study he used phone calls that had very strange results like doubling number of employees or going to entirely fulltime. When the study was redone with payroll reports, the results reversed - back to the start minimum wage effect.

So then they republished and it was like "well if we only look at this group and we take out these and adjust this number" they were able to recover their results but the data hacking was pretty terrible.

If you ate going to write a study like that, relying on phone data screams bias (and these were two economists that couldn't claim they didn't know better).

Citation, please? Card's matching analysis has been repeated many times (e.g., Dube, et al), and each time, they have found little demand elasticity for labor at the extremely low end.

Which I don't think will hold over the long term.

What do you mean by that? Do you mean that many jobs will eventually be lost, or do you mean that if you raise the minimum wage high enough, there will be lost jobs. The first claim has no supporting evidence, and nobody is arguing against the second claim.

Dude, you have no idea what socialism is. The vox article did briefly mention someone close to socialism, but in a pretty dismissive way. You sound like a straight up ass backwards libertarian. We could big data our way to socialism, maybe, but we could also big data our way to worse outcomes than currently. Technocratic solutions are pretty conservative at this point. Either you are ok with capitalism alienating and exploiting the vast majority of the world or you are not ok with it.

Vox's founders are straight socialists. The class seems to be run by a left wing economist with the intent to show off left wing economics. It will be used under the guise of scientific data, but really just an excuse to push newer students in a predetermined direction.

You are mixing up socialism (nationalizing the means of production) with the social democratic philosophy (leaving the means of production private but shifting tax burden to the wealthy to provide more social programs to benefit the poor). The Vox founders are not socialists, despite what the kooky Mises Institute might tell you.

Go read Jacobin. They published a big article in Vox too where the whole point was to say that social democracy (eg Scandinavian countries) is not democratic socialism. They explicitly said that there is no difference between their socialism (and communism) except for the starting point: at the ballot box not a revolution. The point of that article (explicitly) was to say that the Scandinavian countries don't go far enough. They don't believe you can push capitalism to a point where it melts down anymore, but still believe in the same changes, but it needs to start in the political sphere.

Klein literally says "I'm a socialist" or "I write for a socialist magazine" (Jacobin). Yglesias is also part of that Jacobin group. They aren't social democracy supporters, but explicitly democratic socialists.

I'm pretty well read on my socialists and anarchists, because I used to be one (I worked in am opposition campaign against the democratic Berkeley mayor because she wasn't liberal enough when I was in college).

Sunkara (of Jacobin) is not a founder of Vox.

> Klein literally says "I'm a socialist" or "I write for a socialist magazine" (Jacobin).

If you're referring to https://m.facebook.com/ezraklein/posts/10156608843688410, he's quoting Meagan Day.

> Yglesias is also part of that Jacobin group.

In what way? He has never even written an article for Jacobin. The closest thing is a Jacobin article interviewing him and other pundits for some analysis of the Democratic primaries.

Never said sunkara was and iirc the article I'm referring to was written by Day, just pointing out those with jacobin are strict socialists, not some watered down social democrats.

The second quote was to that, not the first. He seems to quote it though as self descriptive.

Ive been reading yglesias and Klein since before dailykos started and they had a name.

And ygeslesias has beam interviewed by them, sat on panels with them, written in other places with those from jacobin and mother Jones. You can't seriously be claiming he isn't in that intellectual cohort. That rich.

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