EZRA KLEIN v MATT YGLESIAS

@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.

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/11/la_taqueria_vs_chipotle_buttito_summit_and_burrito_economics.html

i like how if you rarely read yglesias now columns like these can give the impression that his professional angle is basically to convince people about burrito insights he has a cassandra complex about

The potential one-two punch of this package would be to create background checks and records for the gun show and internet sales and stiff penalties for the people who buy guns legally and then privately sell them to folks who commit crimes with them.

lol "folks". i think he obviously got this from obama but i don't think even barry would refer to gun criminals as "folks"

just folks

crime folks

is the name of my gang

it's the fucking worst tbh. very condescending

i find it more folksy

http://www.peterfrase.com/2013/04/the-perils-of-wonkery

so many of his idle thoughts are so uniformed and stupid

http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/16/mac_profits_are_high_too_high.html

okay ths is gonna sound terrible but yglesiases ongoing economic ayalisis of game of thrones is p amazing

ha i love it too

yeah best yglesias posts in a while

proving that his best analysis requires a fantasy world

wow a $1200 mac laptop has a larger profit margin in dollars than a $500 Dell laptop, you don't say.

fuck this fuck
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/04/24/international_factory_safety.html

What a stupid and insensitive Yglesias post. There's no discussion there of this alleged choice poor Bangladeshi people can make, and of the history of wrokplace safety rules in the US, and its just cold and careless.

Yglesias linked to this article and then just basically ignored it

http://www.lawyersgunsmoneyblog.com/2013/04/holding-corporations-responsible-for-workplace-deaths

jfc, this guy

just going for the most basic tired econ challops, its evil but not even fresh evil

Great takedowns of that piece by Erik Loomis and David Atkins.

Also this which begins

Matthew Yglesias—a Norelco marketing experiment to see if a hand-drawn Sharpie beard on a peeled potato could sell men's earrings—wrote a morally and intellectually odious article at his second job yesterday. His Slate column, "Different Places Have Different Safety Rules and That's OK," addressed the deaths of 161 workers in a factory collapse in Bangladesh with the tone they so richly deserved: bored.

and gets better from there.

Atkins' response is terrific.

booming takedown

better link for Atkins one

http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2013/04/we-can-choose-that-workers-not-die-in.html

It's such a tired, econ 101 argument he's making too. There's no reason you can't place some floor on what the free market allows. Yes, that means more expensive tee shirts. But maybe tee shirts are too cheap.

Aaron Bady ‏@zunguzungu 17h
Different Places Have a Different Likelihood of Being Murdered by Robot Airplanes and That's OK