I’m a huge fan of Brad DeLong’s “Grasping Reality with Both Hands” blog. Like Brad, I’m a pro-stimulus Krugmanite (or at least “Krugmanite-ish”) with a special interest in economic history, particularly the whole “European Miracle” thing. Unfortunately, I part company with Brad on global warming. My position is, yeah, it’s getting warmer, and it’s definitely anthropogenic (or, again, anthropogenic-ish), but, unlike Brad, I don’t expect the seas to start boiling. Rather than suffer a haircut of $100 billion a year in reduced economic growth, compounded annually for the next hundred years or so, I’d rather crank up the AC.
And that creates a problem when I advance this position via comments on Brad’s page. Because Brad, you see, has a comments policy: “Comments that add to the post and discussion will be retained; comments that detract from the post and discussion will be deleted.”
What are “comments that detract from the post”? Well, apparently, they’re comments that disagree with it. A few days back, Brad ran a smackdown of Ross Douthat, whom I’d just smacked down myself, albeit on other grounds. Brad, of course, was ticked off on climatic issues, causing me to post a breezy response—something about preferring human beings to polar bears—which generated a few snide responses of its own. Well, you can still read those, but this “Vanneman” guy, he’s missing. I guess Brad can’t deal with, you know, logic.
Why, oh why can’t we get better Berkeley economics professors?
Afterwords
I responded to the responses (naturally, that got tossed as well), listing some postings by Jim Manzi at the New Republic that I found basically dispositive. You can check them out here. Jim is affiliated with both the National Review and the Manhattan Institute, neither of which is on my fave raves list, but truth is where you find it, I guess.
