Mammonology Chez Marty

Here, Mr. Bones, is a titbit from one of those toney gentry folks who make one conclude that The New Republic would do business as The Neo-Republican if the staff and management thereof thought honesty in labelling mattered:

[Neocomrade N. Scheiber is] just a little uncomfortable with ... the logical chain [that] is typically something like: 1.) I've seen corrupt elites prevent governments from resolving financial crises in emerging markets. 2.) The financial crisis dogging the United States shares some features with emerging-market crises--for example, overleveraged institutions enjoyed an outsize share of corporate profits prior to imploding. 3.) Ergo, it must be the case that corrupt elites are preventing the U.S. government from resolving the crisis. Problem is, the third point doesn't necessarily follow from the second. Logically, it's like saying: 1.) Cancer patients don't get well when they're treated by witch doctors. 2.) The top oncologist at Mass General has lost a few patients lately--some of them inexplicably, under mysterious circumstances. 3.) Ergo, the top oncologist at Mass General was practicing witchcraft. Maybe, but it would be much more persuasive if you could establish causality.

"Logically" always sounds swell, and never sweller than when used, as here, to cover up egregious hormone-basing.

What's really going on is chiefly that the scribbler simply cannot imagine what he would describe to Neocomrade M. Peretz of H*rv*rd as "people like us" (the very salt of the earth -- President Summers, First Quartermaster-General Bernanke von Ludendorff, Field Marshal Geithner von Hindenburg!) as being the least bit like witch doctors or corrupt elitists.

This failure of individual imagination and class self-perception doubtless raises no question about the TNR neocomrade's subjective sincerity, but all the same, it remains only silly self-servicing to drag in "logically."

’Tis no great surprise that the voodoo that N. Scheiber is concerned to ward off should come from well outside the pale of Their Gang:

[Simon Johnson's] PhD is in economics from MIT, while his MA is from the University of Manchester and his BA is from the University of Oxford. [1]

Happy pays.

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[1] For that matter, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology is itself beyond the 02138 pale.

The Cantabrigian microgeography of Their Gang can get tricky, however, considering that a Neocomrade N. Scheiber can casually alludes to MGH as if lying within it, as in fact it does lie. Medicine is not exactly ‘technology’, it appears.

Economics of Professor Johnson's (new lefty) sort clearly is, whereas naturally economics of President Summers’ (stale old) Democratic Leadership Council sort is not by any means to be filed under 'T' for technology.

Neocomrade N. Scheiber wants to file that product under 'L' for logic, but he may just be buttering up his boss classes.