Two Blogs

I just found them. Most of my extra-smart readership probably already knows them, but I was quite impressed.

Will Wilkinson has joined the Economist's blog Democracy In America, which is unsurprisingly good. I think Eric Crampton pointed me there in the last couple days. This longer essay on the causes of the Crash is very well done, and includes this wonderful half-paragraph:

In any case, I don't doubt that there are laissez-faire die-hards who cannot accept that markets sometimes fail on their own steam, but I'm quite certain neither I nor Mr Rajan is among them. Vernon Smith, one of my intellectual heroes, and a laissez-faire kind of guy, has shown in his trailblazing experimental work that bubbles arise again and again without special assistance. My own Hayek-inflected views, which put a heavy emphasis on ineradicable ignorance, straightforwardly imply the possibility of coordinated failures of economic foresight.

Also, earlier this week, I discovered (somehow) the most excellent blog Modeled Behavior. Try this brilliant Pessimist Manifesto, which perfectly 100% captures the Hayekian "ineradicable ignorance" that Will talks about above, and I wish I'd written it:

[Conservatives'] view is that if you take a responsible, measured, well-reasoned approach to the world things will work out. Failure is thus a sign that you have not done that.

My sense is that this is fundamentally crap.

...Second, even in the short term your plans almost certainly won’t work out. Most ideas are bad ideas and there are infinitely more ways to fuck something up than to get it right.

...And, most importantly it is best done with humility, knowing that in all cases that, “but for the grace of God pure heartless luck, there would go I”

Heck, I'm running out of my quotation quota...Go read the whole thing. He's full-on with Aretae's Meta-Law: Expect Errors

Two more posts support Robin Hanson and then Scott Sumner. Worth reading.