>Brad replies to Michael P.:
>
>Re:
>
>>"As if he were a school marm correcting wayward children"
>
>Michael. Look what I'm dealing with here:
>
>>... repeated smart-ass intrusions... deigns... self-delusion
>>...confirmation of prejudice... disciplinary
>>culture of condescension... "brilliant" economist... disgusting
>>Schleifer... countries about which he knows very little
>>...red-baiting ...preposterous assertions ... produce to order
>>analyses "showing" public bad, private good ...how it can enrich me
>>personally ...criminal enterprise...
>
>=====
>
>Of these, most were directed at the economics _profession_
Oh, God. Not again.
For the record: Bullshit. Total bullshit. I count eight directed at
me--personally--and four directed at the economics profession in
general (but also at me as a member of it).
>BTW, you take offense at my imputing self-enrichment motives to Schleifer.
>Surely that's a legitimate assumption.
No it isn't. Finance economists who want to become rich went to work
on Wall Street either full-time or part-time. Finance economists who
wanted to make the world a better place got involved in the morass of
Russian reform.
>If it were clear to me that your contributions here were intended to be
>constructive, if you were not so routinely dismissive of points that are
>somehow exogenized from the "economic" viewpoint, if you were less inclined
>to reproduce standard Cold War liberal interpretations of historical events,
>then I would not, could not, use such terms as "deign", "preposterous",
>"smart-ass".
As I wrote to Michael:
>=====
>
>You don't enforce the minimal--minimal!--requirements of politeness
>required for any functioning discourse community that wants to be
>anything more than an echo chamber for its dominant tendency.
See what I mean?
>That
>leaves me with a problem. How do you suggest that I deal with it?
>
>=====
This is a very big problem. People like Michael Keaney--people with
no social skills whatsoever, who never learned how to behave in any
company, polite or not--ruined USENET as a forum. In my view,
the--unfortunate--prevalence of such <censoreds> makes an unmoderated
email list unsustainable and non-viable in the long run.
The only strategy I have found that works in the short-run is
tit-for-tat. The only strategy I think will work in the long run is
to adopt the rules of propriety that legislatures typically adopt.
Think about it: speech on the floor of the U.S. Congress is--in many
ways--the freeest anywhere. Legislators are not to be called to
account "in any other place" for what they say on the floor. But
within their chamber they are held to strict rules of politeness and
propriety--so much so that Tip O'Neill once landed in a big mess for
saying a very weak version of what he thought of Newt Gingrich. All
statements are notionally addressed not to other members but to the
Chair. Forms of reference to other members are tightly controlled.
All of these rhetorical rules exist for good reasons. Unless forums
like this adopt analogous rules, I fear that they are doomed.
Brad DeLong
Brad DeLong
