love ya hilzoy, write more.

Pesky Objectivists all over the place; worse than the communists hiding under the bed.

I can forgive a man a great deal who knows the word 'saltative', and can use it correctly.

A great deal -- but not everything.

If Obama really is a fan of behavioral economics, he'd think more outside the box on his stimulus packages, recognizing Keynesianism is also grounded in neoclassical, rationalism-assuming economics.

In any case, I'd be interested to hear Wilkinson's reasons for thinking as he does.

If Wilkinson had any writing or critical thinking chops, he would have included his reasoning after making the assertion.

He's just a hit-and-run right wing tool.

it's good to know that the normative assumption about will wilkinson is sanity, because this is insane.

this is typical of the libertarian strand, who confuse metaphor with reality all the time (i'm always reminded of the classic exchange between meadow and tony in the final episode of the sopranos where she mentions something about the power of the state to crush the individual and tony, incredulous, responds "new jersey?").

ultimately, this line of thought leads to the Treasury View: yes, sooner or later the market clears after much more wealth destruction and potentially a significant level of social unrest that could call certain societies' stability into question, or alternatively, we expand G now to ameliorate and invest for the future (i saw a very interesting comment in barron's today regarding the risk of increased federal deficit spending "crowding out" corporate borrowing: corporations aren't borrowing and aren't planning on borrowing for a while, and so the contraction in the corporate market reduces any risk of crowding out taking place).

Not me. I read that post and wondered why I ever put Will on my blogroll. Then I deleted him from my blogroll.

Maybe he's making the inference from Obama's planned big-bang reforms (health care and energy).

Frankly, I don't see anything in the proposals floated so far that indicates Obama is expecting big-bang technological or process innovation as a cornerstone of either policy. Just that the changed, um, climate, will enable a whole bunch of innovations big and small to kick in.

He is, after all, known to be a fan of behavioral economics, with its many tiny tweaks, and his whole history as a Senator is full of small legislative improvements of the sort that no one who cared only for game-changing leaps would have bothered with.

He is, after all, known to be a fan of behavioral economics, with its many tiny tweaks, and his whole history as a Senator is full of small legislative improvements of the sort with which no one who cared only for game-changing leaps would have bothered.

Maybe he meant RANDian? Would that even work?

I think he was probably referring to the Superman comics "Bizarro world" in which everything is the opposite of what it is in our world. So a "Bizarro world Randian" would be a naive and gushing socialist. Or something like that.

Of course this is the usual MO of the Republicans, projection, under which for example it was the Dems, not they, who were motivated by anger in the past decade. So since the Republicans have been touting Rand lately, it's obviously the Democrats who are engaged in foolish adolescent mooning for a simplistic theory that can supposedly fix all our social and economic ills.

"To be fair, Wilkinson does not seem to mean that Obama is a closet Objectivist."

Well, yeah. For those not comic-book savvy but whom have at least seen Superman The Movie: on Bizarro Krypton, when the Bizarro Kryptonians discovered that their planet was going to explode, they threw a planet-wide party, and Bizarro Jor-El put his infant son into a rocket -- which he promptly fired into the center of the planet, so the lucky sprat could be the first to die.

Hence the Bizarro Ayn Rand would favor not the individual genius but the corporate R&D program, as does Barack Obama, as evidenced by handing GE a godzillion dollars in the hopes that they will save the environment with it.

So another way of phrasing the sentence would be "Obama is causing a lot of Rand fans to completely flip their lids in part because he is the logical negation of Randian."

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WHO IS HENRY GALT???

WHO IS HENRY GALT???

WHO IS HENRY GALT???
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"Libertarians are anarchists who want police protection from their own slaves."

Kim Stanley Robinson

I pushed Will on this question, and he said specifically that he meant Obama's proposal to spend $150 billion over ten years on subsidizing alternative energy research. (And he acknowledged that he had confused the issue by linking an article on cap and trade instead of one on the direct subsidy.) This, he said, depended on finding a big innovation rather than a lot of little ones.

I'm still pretty unconvinced. For one thing, I'd expect cap and trade to lead to little innovations, by forcing everyone to adjust to the new higher price of carbon. Which means Obama has a two-pronged approach, and you'd figure cap and trade would have a bigger impact than the $15b/year, which is really not that much. For another thing, I don't see why the $15b/yr wouldn't produce a lot of little innovations; something like the NIH doesn't rely on the big breakthrough.

@Davis X. Machina: I thought the adjective was saltatory.

@DevilDog: The word is, in fact, saltatory. No such word as saltative.

If Repubs are touting Rand, then they are now showing us how adolescent they really are.

I'm betting on Obama being a grown-up.

'Saltatory' is, I would argue, no better nor worse an adjective than 'saltative'. The latter seems to be a term of art in evolutionary biology -- perhaps that's where Wilkenson picked it up.

Curiously, both saltō and saliō exist, without a lot of difference in their meanings, yet we have a common derivative -- salient -- from the latter, and not much from the former.

Yeah, rounding up loose nukes, what a boring, obvious thing to do. Putting everyone's earmarks online so you know who asked for what, so incremental, anyone could have done that. Get more than 50% of the vote, piece of cake. Taking every reasonable view into consideration, what a loser.

That Obama guy, such an incrementalist. And we are all frogs swimming around in a soon to boil melting pot.

George Bush basically did nothing for eight years, he never seemed in a rush to get anything done when he didn't have to do anything, but he did scare the hell out of congress to act quickly, probably so he could go back to doing nothing more quickly.

Obama is nothing like this. Just the fact that he and the First Lady visit the various agencies and thank the federal employees for their valuable service. That is not a small change.

I tried to leave a comment at Will's, on the followup post, but it seems to have vanished. He cited Obama's energy program as evidence. I tried to say: yeah, but what Obama says is that he thinks that a given catalyst -- making renewable energy more affordable -- will have a given result -- enabling us to get a lot more energy from renewables.

But he does not say whether the process that gets us from that catalyst to that endpoint will proceed via great big discoveries, or via small incremental improvements. As I see it, it could go either way. So I still don't see his point -- unless he's mixing up big government action with technological process via big new discoveries.

He clearly means Obama is the opposite of a Randian. You've misinterpreted him and should correct.

Ann Rand...the queen of philosophical masturbation. Now there's a subject she knew something about.

That's a great quote. I had to reread it a few times to make sure I wasn't tripping. Mr. Wilkinson obviously was. But you have to give Obama credit, who else can be both a Communist and a Randian at the same time?

Let's see -- space flight, mapping the genome, the "intertubes," various AIDS drugs -- all things invented with US government funding, some by scientists employed by the government others by scientists in industry or education.

You know what's funny? Scientists invented ARPANet, the precursor to the "intertubes," and now the "intertubes" is viewed as a tool for transparency, communication, alternative media -- kind of like a Bizarro World of Randian state control, the antithesis of tyrannical government.

I've heard -- mind you this is just hearsay -- that in some countries people actually think they get good value for the taxes they pay. In some countries they even believe government spending stimulates the economy.

God I hope I'm wrong, but what if I'm not? Can I still attend the Ayn Rand Institute conference this summer if I voted for Obama?

There could be no better investment in America than to invest in America becoming energy independent! We need to utilize everything in out power to reduce our dependence on foreign oil including using our own natural resources.Create cheap clean energy, new badly needed green jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil.The high cost of fuel this past year seriously damaged our economy and society. The cost of fuel effects every facet of consumer goods from production to shipping costs. After a brief reprieve gas is inching back up.OPEC will continue to cut production until they achieve their desired 80-100. per barrel.If all gasoline cars, trucks, and SUV's instead had plug-in electric drive trainsthe amount of electricity needed to replace gasoline is about equal to the estimated wind energy potential of the state of North Dakota.We have so much avzilable to us such as wind and solar. Let's spend some of those bail out billions and get busy harnessing this energy. Create cheap clean energy, badly needed new jobs and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. What a win-win situation that would be for our nation at large! There is a really good new book out by Jeff Wilson called The Manhattan Project of 2009 Energy Independence Now. http://www.themanhattanprojectof2009.com

There are always structural costs of moving to a new technology. In the short run, the monopoly/regulatory/investment cost barriers may be too great to allow new technology to gain a foothold against established interests with deep pockets that can use pricing and market share to force the new technology off the market. Microsoft practices this all the time as does Big Oil.

Sometimes government investment is necessary to get over the barriers to help establish a new technology and its lower costs and benefits. A prime example is the internet, which was a government supported project until it could get on its feet. Alternative energy is no different.

Good Lord, this is the first time I've seen a bunch of liberals misinterpret a quote as badly as conservatives usually do. Reread Forrest's comment, please. Wilkinson claims that Obama's administration is the exact OPPOSITE of Rand's ridiculous vision. He's wrong about that too, but he simply isn't associating Obama with Rand, he's using Rand as a foil in order to paint Obama as a wacky extremist. Seriously people, brush up on your Superman.

puggins, Forrest: Will explicitly says that his criticism of Obama is that Obama is looking for one big innovation rather than lots of little ones. (As I've said, his evidence for this is extremely weak.) And he says this is Rand's view of the entrepreneur as opposed to Hayek's. And hilzoy says exactly that in her post. So who's supposed to be misreading Wilkinson?

Please brush up your own reading comprehension before criticizing others'. (And, I'm not a big Superman fan, but it's my understanding that Bizarro World characters aren't completely unlike the character in every way -- otherwise Bizarro Superman would be a powerless schlub. So if you think Rand means "heroic revolutionary innovations created by lone private genius" it makes sense to say that Bizarro Rand means "heroic revolutionary innovations created by government.")

No libertarian should ever use the word 'adolescent' to describe a rival political philosophy. Libertarianism is adolescence itself, distilled into a political program.

At this point I am really fed up with the extent to which a fourth-rate writer and thinker like Rand is having any impact whatsoever on the discussion.

"...small legislative improvements..." says it all!

I, too, am a Randian. James "The Amazing" Randi, that is.

''So if you think Rand means "heroic revolutionary innovations created by lone private genius" it makes sense to say that Bizarro Rand means "heroic revolutionary innovations created by government."''

As by giving GE $646 billion in the hopes of gaining a "Big Thing" as seen in Rand's science-fiction, as opposed to spreading the R&D money widely in the hopes of "The Next Thousand Little Things", yes. So, not so much "the one and only time anyone will ever call Barack Obama a Randian" as "the first time someone called Barack Obama a Bizarro Randian."

Would "two sides of the same coin" have done?

I'm sorry, my brain broke trying to hold the concepts of "Bizarro World" and "Randians" in one conceptual space at the same time. He may have thought it clever writing; it was not.

Given how confused and vague the treatment of Bizarro World in the Superman universe has been, it's probably a bad idea to use it as an analogy when trying to make a case about subtle ideas. Of course, anyone referencing Rand isn't actually talking about subtle ideas either, I guess, but in a totally different way.

I'll pay attention when he can phrase his point without cutesie pop-culturism.