On Funny Punditry (or The Allure of Instant Fame)

Recently I and Ujang talked about the making of Indonesian "funny" pundits that we observed in the last of couple of years-- thanks to widespread of so-called social media and free press.

If you care enough to look at it carefully, there has been a glint of intellectual dishonesty out of this kind of punditry. The obvious one is the habit of setting up a strawman. The less obvious one is to promote something deemed as "new" or "groundbreaking", whereas, in fact, the ideas have been around for years, if not decades, in particular discpline or profession.

Surely, branding something as "groundbreaking" always attracts ones who are not trained on the subject --thus the blame are not theirs. But those funny pundits are, supposedly, aware that the claim might not be as spectacular as it may sound.

Yet, for them, the incentive to commit in such dishonesty is indeed rather high. There are always gullible cheerleaders (and media) out there, eager to celebrate anything labeled as trendy, new, or revolutionary, under the pressure to appear, in our popular lingo, "eksis". Fame, for these faux pundits, is therefore imminent.

Now, in the free-market of ideas, where are the competing forces for such funny punditry? Those well-equipped with training or analytical rigor that can not be easily persuaded with snake-oil jargons and populism.

Here is the Catch-22: most of them are already very busy and occupied with their jobs in the universities, in private sector, and in public sector. They spent great deal of their time pursuing professional objectives -- perhaps, admittedly, for their own different definition of fame or power. In short: they lack of incentive to counter popular fame-inspired pundits in popular (social) media. For many of them the pay-off for engaging in many times repetitive debates doesn't add up with the time they need to allocate for properly analysing the issue.

Moreover, they are also not trained and used to engage in an exchange in which the opposite side are those with "palu gada" attitude (Read: "apa lu mau, gue ada"; or in plain English, the "anything-goes").

Do I believe in wisdom of the crowd then? Yes. Sooner or later, the crowd will know what/who is lemon and what's not. Think of Roy Suryo, if you want.

In the meantime, I believe many people with knowledge, in their limited spare time, look at such funny punditry with amusement (and, perhaps, as source of entertaining gossip over coffee or lunch).

There Are Many (Much) Better Reasons to Hate Economics

Emmanuel Subangun wrote in Kompas 2/27/10 op-ed:

As recognized by anyone who ever attended university and had economics course, economics suffers from two plagues. First, to support the claim of economics as a science, the limitation has to be clear. In economics lingo, economics has to be separated from other social facts -- boldly called as, from Latin, ceteris paribus. From this point, economic model is born and, alas, all economic policies are based on models generated this way. The second plague, economics(sic!) is not willing to be registered as social science, so that (sic!) it self-regards as a star (science) that has best understanding on social issues. This creates a superiority complex.

Geez!

Those who ever took econ courses (and elementary research methodology) seriously would understand that ceteris paribus doesn't mean a separation from the so-called economic and social facts. Ceteris paribus (or all else being held constant) means that when you try to explain the effect of a change of variable, you assume that other variables are constant.

Let me repeat this clearly: This has nothing to do with separating the facts, let alone between economic and non-economic facts.

It is about how to tell the effect of, say, proper Econ 101 education, on ability to write a well-informed op-ed. In your observation, you can not really tell it if you do not hold other variables (e.g overall educational level, writing skills, exposures to relevant readings, political bias, the number of economist friends, etc) constant.

Moreover, who said that economists do not consider non-economic facts in their analysis ? Mr. Subangun probably needs to read a whole series on non-economic factors in economics at the diskusiekonomi blog.

On his second claim that economics refused to be categorized as a social science, well, it surely has different methodology than, say, sociology, but it is a social science. Suppose it weren't a social science, does it mean that now we have social sciences, natural sciences, and economics?

Then Mr. Subangun also thinks that Boediono and SMI represent scientific economics, while Pansus common sense. The former fails to convince the latter, hence political communication dysfunction.

Common sense makes you think that the sun revolves around the earth.

Beside, Pansus does not use common sense, but play ill-informed politics. They just either, like Mr. Subangun, don't get the economics right, or, worse yet, for whatever reason, refuse to take well-founded economic arguments for bailout.

Additional flaw: From the quote, Mr. Subangun argues that economists want to separate non economic social facts; but at the same time he suggests that they claim to have best understanding on social issues. Alas, this argument is a contradictio in terminis.

Wanted: Positive Political Analysis

Can anyone tell me what national interest means? I have been trying to translate it into a kind of operative utility function to which politician might want to maximize as suggested by our numerous political pundits in their so-called analysis of Indonesian election campaign. And it goes nowhere.

The more workable proposition is to take that politicians are self interested or partisan, that is, trying to maximize social welfare function for disproportionate benefit of particular group in society (Persson and Tabellini, 2000). With that, your positive analysis for social calculus could fly better. Of course after you carefully set up the payoff, constraints, political market structure, as well as sufficiently address the problem of time consistency in your analysis.

Otherwise, you'd end up with empty boring statement like politician must put national before individual interest to make everyone happy; or politician running for this year's election must follow the example of (fill in the name of your favorite dead politicians from 1950s) who was a genuine defender of national interest. Yadda yadda yadda.

Minister of Protectionism

Do you know what kind of vision that our Minister of Research and Technology has in mind? I'll give you one. It is called "M16 produces 16M". The former refers to a type of killing machine, the latter market for 16 million (of what? IDR, USD, people? I don't know).

And he wrote in today's Kompas op-ed:

With this fighting spirit, we will see more main weaponry system tools, electronic communication devices, tactical and war vehicles, speed patrol ships, war ships, surveillance airplanes, cargo planes, organic weapons for military and police, armored vehicles, defense and security infrastructure; than imported product."

I kid you not.

Mr. Minister, I'd rather to have inexpensive imported non military stuff any given day, than seeing more of our own made inefficient killing machines around. Does he ever think that import and globalization means you can get cheap product in global market (including even those weapons), in exchange to your competitive export?

That the Minister of Research and Technology turns out just a plain protectionist is disheartening. His job is to make our product technologically competitive in global market, not asking for protection. It's a lame excuse, Minister.