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February 2, 2005

Brushing away a fly

It has come to my attention that a certain tenured professor of economics at U. C. Berkeley -- who once described himself as "more inclined toward 'Marxism' than anybody else on the Berkeley campus," which is saying quite a bit -- has been defaming me and the Club for Growth on his website. You see, he disagrees with my economic analysis of whether Social Security's long-term solvency is improved under more rapid economic growth (as I posted here yesterday). The standard angry left response is that if you disagree with them you are a "liar" -- or in this case, I'm described as "the stupidest man alive," and am said to be making the Club more of a "laughingstock" than he thinks it already is.

Why is this particular angry left economist so angry with me? He even described me once as his "worst blogging experience." Perhaps it's because I exposed the untrue claim in his online CV that he was presently a columnist for the New York Times. Perhaps it's because I once reminded him of the economic paper he co-authored with Larry Summers, a fancy quantitative analysis of the economics of capital investment in which his whole model falls apart with the elimination of Botswana from his data. Or perhaps it's because I dredged up the facts on how his ineffective testimony for Al Gore during the contested election of 2000 helped his candidate lose.

Who knows -- maybe it's nothing personal with me. Perhaps this self-professed member of the so-called "reality based community" is just showing off for his faithful readers, helping to shore up their community-based reality.

But on the matter at hand -- whether faster economic growth can ever bail out Social Security in the long run -- he's going to have to take it up with my source: Kent Smetters, the Wharton professor who is the uncontested guru on Social Security's long-term solvency issues. For more on Smetters' view, see my posting below.

Posted by Don Luskin at February 2, 2005 1:33 PM | Print

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