EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

i'm still pro-hayes but having his twitter go from links to stuff in the nation etc to promoting his show and the coinciding change in tone(?) is like a less horrifying version of when donald glover's twitter feed went from 'behind the scenes lols at community' to 'ATLANTA - CHILDISH GAMBINO TONIGHT twitpic'.

yeah hayes seems pretty earnest and otm

Yeah Hayes' endless earnest excitable grad student who just loves to have the conversation thing is actually pretty adorable & heartening from my POV.

His book, like I wrote elsewhere last week, is an excellent master's thesis.

slightly suspicious of him as a guy i must admit, even tho i agree w/what hes saying, feel like he might just be jumping on the inequality bandwagon

― lag∞n, Tuesday, November 20, 2012 7:50 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

my sources tell me he started out as a labor beat reporter in chicago, so, i don't think so!

yeah its maybe not that he doesnt believe it but twilight of the elites has some aspirational meme creation vibes

his book's thesis is v otm but I have no desire to actually read it

what is the thesis

“We overestimate the the advantage of meritocracy and under-appreciate the costs, because we don't think hard enough about the consequences of the inequality it produces.”

punkd http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/12/18/chamber_pots_in_brooklyn_artisanal_poo_is_a_bad_substitute_for_housing_supply.html

read hayes' book, it's totally inessential

i have to say that i was a lil hard on hayes upthread i v much appreciate that hes a dude on tv whos really hammering inequality issues, hes just sort of bad at tv, msnbc needs to provide some coaching or something

Ezra Klein ‏@ezraklein
Pretty excited that the West Wing is streaming on Netflix now

About 5 years ago Hayes wrote something for the Nation I disagreed with (in part) so I wrote him a brief & somewhat unfriendly email telling him as much. He replied with about a thousand words thoughtfully explaining himself to me when he had no obligation to do so, and he did as if he were having a conversation with one of his colleagues or someone he respected and not some random butthurt internet dude. Our politics are basically the same but I would be Team Hayes even if they weren't.

http://i.imgur.com/o4bOC.png

Awww.

Meanwhile neo-con Mickey Kaus is after Ezra for saying years ago that digitizing hospital records would cut healthcare expenses, while a new report now says that this has not been the case.

http://dailycaller.com/2013/01/18/the-mystery-of-ezra-klein/

sort of feel bad for ezra sometimes, hes kind of like an extremely precocious eleven year old and politics is like girls http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/today-in-well-duh

lol krugs sonned him read that this morning

mike murphy ‏@murphymike

Yes RT @mattyglesias @murphymike So yr view is that if Obama agreed to all-cuts deal today, he could build trust, get balanced deal later?

the recent profile of ezra in some publication i've since forgotten (TNR? i think it was TNR) wasn't very flattering

when i read that first article and was like wow he's being awful credulous about this. sort of nice to see he was quickly disabused of it.

whenever he appears in front of a camera he looks like Rick Moranis ogling Sigourney Weaver.

omg alfred

TNR? i think it was TNR

It was:
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/112366/ezra-klein-profile-wonkblogs-wise-boy-cannot-be-stopped

lol all his old blogging pals launching subliminals

lol at krugman saying "man up"

@ezraklein
Is the NYT article that Don Draper picks up at the end of the Mad Men season premier online anywhere?

I feel like both of these people get a pass on their inferior analysis due to being pretty-smart-for-one-of-those-nu-generation-hipster-blogger-types

it's so sad, you can just feel Klein's publicist shoe-horning him into appearances on Maddow etc and Klein just looks so DESPERATE to be a media star--and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen...I really revel in this, but I'm an awful person

otm. He's Chuck Todd after yoga classes

its totally working tho klein is really popular

klein's a media star in his own way, he has more pundit legitimacy than anyone on tv

and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen - this makes no sense to me

its totally working tho klein is really popular

― lag∞n, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:33 PM (6 minutes ago)

brunch at Cokie's?

also "Moneybox" is a really, really dumb name, but that's probably not Yglesias's fault

it precedes him

i still don't know what to think about yg turning himself into an economist. like, can you really do that

well, I grew a beard two years ago

'actual economists' link to him all the time, so I guess you can

the world doesn't really need another general politics daily grind internet liberal, but otoh, exactly how am i to value matthew yglesias' snap judgment on jc penney or w/e

xp yeah i see dudes like tyler cowen and scott sumner taking him seriously so who knows

yglesias has the economists talent for being really shockingly stupid about obvious common sense stuff

and the Beltway talent too.

and he just reads so much more "Beltway" than Hayes or Kornacki that it's never gonna happen - this makes no sense to me
― balls, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:39 PM (14 minutes ago)

Centrist/center-right like the political punditry he aspires to, as opposed to the "progressive" demo that Hayes-Kornacki cater to...

its totally working tho klein is really popular
― lag∞n, Tuesday, April 9, 2013 3:33 PM (6 minutes ago)
brunch at Cokie's?
― the little prince of inane false binary hype (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

exactly

yeah its always seemed like klein just ran to the borg going "assimilate me! assimilate ME! i'm making myself an "expert" on healthcare."

i have read yglesias like 4 times since he went to slate, so i don't know what he's doing anymore really.

having his mind blown by walgreens

isn't that David Brooks? No, wait, sorry -- David Brooks had his mind blown by Coldstone.

http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2013/04/obama_s_2014_budget_obama_wants_to_soak_the_rich_to_help_the_poor_republicans.html

This is simplistic and not completely accurate if you ask me. He's got false equivalence issues and he doesn't mention that O's request for more tax revenue is less than O's earlier such requests; there's no mention of how the tax code has changed over the last 50 years and how taxes are lower now

"Obama’s vision of America really is one in which many people will see their living standards rise thanks to better government benefits rather than higher market wages."

I mean "Moneybox." It's like calling a dining column "Dinner Plate."

x-post-- who knew Yglesias was a Romney supporter? "better government benefits" --those luckie duckies.