J. Bradford DeLong's Blog, page 236

Should I say that I actually wanted to give a slightly mo...

Should I say that I actually wanted to give a slightly more nuanced take? Or should I just accept my karma, for Twitter is not for nuance? "Essentially" does too much work here: Propane Jane: On Twitter: "Here���s why economist Brad DeLong believes libertarianism is essentially a form of White supremacy.... Cody Fenwick: Here���s Why Economist Brad Delong Believes Libertarianism Is Essentially a Form of White Supremacy: 'Libertarianism "is a Frankenstein���s monster" that got its power from resistance to the Civil Rights Movement...

...[DeLong] continued:

Dismantling the New Deal and rolling back the social insurance state were not ideas that had much potential political-economy juice back in the 1950s and 1960s. But if the economic libertarian cause of dismantling the New Deal could be harnessed to the cause of white supremacy���if one of the key liberties that libertarians were fighting to defend was the liberty to discriminate against and oppress the Negroes���than all of a sudden you could have a political movement that might get somewhere. And so James Buchanan and the other libertarians to the right of Milton Friedman made the freedom to discriminate���or perhaps the power to discriminate?���a key one of the liberties that they were fighting for in their fight against BIG GOVERNMENT. And this has poisoned American libertarianism ever since...

And, of course, while the Old Libertarians thought that they had locked the White Supremacists ion with them, actually they had locked themselves in with the white Supremacists...

#noted

The learned and much-worth-listening-to Eric Alterman has...

The learned and much-worth-listening-to Eric Alterman has darkened my day. I do, however, think it is time for everyone whose career was boosted by making the Faustian bargain of catering to Marty Peretz's bigotries, prejudices, and envies to exit the public sphere, quietly. Perhaps I should make an exception for Peter Beinart, who has done some atonement: Martin Peretz (2007): Tyran-a-Soros: "GEORGE SOROS LUNCHED with some reporters on Saturday at Davos. He talked about spending $600 million on civil society projects during the 1990s, then trying to cut back to $300 million, and how this year it will be between $450 and $500 million. His new projects aim, in Floyd Norris���s words, to promote a 'common European foreign policy' (read: an anti-American foreign policy) and also to study the integration (or so he thinks) of Muslims in eleven European cities...

...He included among his dicta a little slight at Bill and Melinda Gates, who ���have chosen public health, which is like apple pie.��� And then, after saying the United States was now recognizing the errors it made in Iraq, he added this comment, as reported by Norris in The New York Times��� online ���Davos Diary���: ���To what extent it recognizes the mistake will determine its future.��� Soros said Turkey and Japan were still hurt by a reluctance to admit to dark parts of their history and contrasted that reluctance to Germany���s rejection of its Nazi-era past. ���America needs to follow the policies it has introduced in Germany. We have to go through a certain deNazification process.���

No, you are not seeing things. He said de-Nazification. He is not saying, in the traditional manner of liberal alarmists, that the United States is now where Weimar Germany was. He is saying that the United States is now where Germany after Weimar was. Even for Davos, this was stupid. Actually, worse than stupid. There is a historical analysis, a moral claim, in Soros���s word. He believes that the United States is now a Nazi country. Why else would we have to go through a ���certain de-Nazification process���? I defy anybody to interpret the remark differently.

The analogy between Bush���s America and Hitler���s Germany is not fleshed out, and one is left wondering how far he would take it. Is Bush like Hitler? If it is ���de-Nazification��� that we need, then in some sense Bush must be like Hitler. Was the invasion of Iraq like the invasion of Poland? Perhaps. The more one lingers over Soros���s word, the more one���s eyes pop from one���s head. In the old days, the Amerika view of America was propagated by angry kids on their painful way to adulthood; now, it is propagated by the Maecenas of the Democratic Party.

But nobody seems to have noticed. I did not see Soros���s canard reported in other places, and on the Times��� website on the day I saw it there were only four comments. Imagine the outcry if a Republican moneybags���say, Richard Mellon Scaife���had declared that Hillary Clinton is a communist or that Bill Clinton���s America had been in need of a certain de-Stalinization process. But I hear no outcry from Soros���s congregation. People who were repelled by Bush���s rather plausible notion of the ���axis of evil��� seem untroubled by Soros���s imputation of even worse evil to Bush. Because Bush really is a fascist, isn���t he? And Cheney, too; and Donald Rumsfeld, and Antonin Scalia, and even Joe Lieberman, right? Or so I fear too many liberals now believe. There seems to be a renaissance among liberals of the view that there are no enemies to the left. I hear no Democrats expressing embarrassment, or revulsion, at Soros���s comment. Whether this silence is owed to their agreement or to their greed, it is outrageous.

But if Soros lives in a Nazi state, what does that make him? I still recall Karl Jaspers���s devastating point, in The Question of German Guilt in 1947, that every German shares in the guilt of Hitlerism. Such guilt was not, in Jaspers���s mind, an abstraction or a purely political matter. But Soros does not appear to accept any responsibility for the Nazi-like crimes he ascribes to the United States. Perhaps he thinks that, having contributed $18 million to elect John Kerry in 2004, he was an American hero, a dissident, a resistance fighter, the Grill Room���s representative of the White Rose. And if, in 2008, Soros���s gang comes to power, how will de-Nazification work? Whom shall we send to prison? Perhaps we should prevent everybody who voted or argued for the war from running for office. At the very least, the neocons must be brought to justice. (Maybe Ramsey Clark can represent them.)

WHAT MAKES SOROS���S remark even more twisted is that he himself experienced something of Nazism. He was 14 when the Nazis entered Budapest. On December 20, 1998, there appeared this exchange between Soros and Steve Kroft on ���60 Minutes���:

Kroft: ���You���re a Hungarian Jew ...���

Soros: ���Mm-hmm.���

Kroft: ���... who escaped the Holocaust ...���

Soros: ���Mm-hmm.���

Kroft: ���... by posing as a Christian.���

Soros: ���Right.���

Kroft: ���And you watched lots of people get shipped off to the death camps.���

Soros: ���Right. I was 14 years old. And I would say that that���s when my character was made.���

Kroft: ���In what way?���

Soros: ���That one should think ahead. One should understand that���and anticipate events and when, when one is threatened. It was a tremendous threat of evil. I mean, it was a��� a very personal threat of evil.���

Kroft: ���My understanding is that you went ... went out, in fact, and helped in the confiscation of property from the Jews.���

Soros: ���Yes, that���s right. Yes.���

Kroft: ���I mean, that���s���that sounds like an experience that would send lots of people to the psychiatric couch for many, many years. Was it difficult?���

Soros: ���Not, not at all. Not at all. Maybe as a child you don���t... you don���t see the connection. But it was���it created no���no problem at all.���

Kroft: ���No feeling of guilt?���

Soros: ���No.���

Kroft: ���For example, that, ���I���m Jewish, and here I am, watching these people go. I could just as easily be these, I should be there.��� None of that?���

Soros: ���Well, of course... I could be on the other side or I could be the one from whom the thing is being taken away. But there was no sense that I shouldn���t be there, because that was���well, actually, in a funny way, it���s just like in the markets���that is I weren���t there���of course, I wasn���t doing it, but somebody else would���would���would be taking it away anyhow. And it was the���whether I was there or not, I was only a spectator, the property was being taken away. So the���I had no role in taking away that property. So I had no sense of guilt.���

So this is the psychodrama that has been visited on American liberalism. We learn Soros never has nightmares. Had he been tried in a de-Nazification process for having been a young cog in the Hitlerite wheel, he would have felt that, since other people would have confiscated the same Jewish property and delivered the same deportation notices to the same doomed Jews, it was as if he hadn���t done it himself. He sleeps well, while we sleep in Nazi America.

SOROS IS OSTENTATIOUSLY indifferent to his own Jewishness. He is not a believer. He has no Jewish communal ties. He certainly isn���t a Zionist. He told Connie Bruck in The New Yorker���testily, she recounted���that ���I don���t deny the Jews their right to a national existence���but I don���t want to be part of it.��� But he has involved himself in the founding of an anti-AIPAC, more dovish Israel lobby. Suddenly, he wants to influence the character of a Jewish state about which he loudly cares nothing. Once again, he bears no responsibility. Perhaps his sense of his own purity also underwrites his heartlessness in business. As a big currency player in the world markets, Soros was at least partially responsible for the decline in the British pound.

Forget my differences with Soros���s Jewishness. Call it shul politics. But the characterization of the United States under Bush as Nazi is much bigger, and more grave, than shul politics. It casts a shadow over U.S. politics. In the same conversation at Davos, Soros announced that he is supporting Senator Barack Obama, though he would also support Senator Hillary Clinton. So my question to both of those progressives is this: How, without any explanation or apology from him, will you take this man���s money?.

#noted #orangehariedbaboons #journamalism

Note to Self: Monday, February 11, 2019 from 4:00 PM to 6...

Note to Self: Monday, February 11, 2019 from 4:00 PM to 6:00 PM (PST). IRLE. 2521 Channing Way. Berkeley, CA 94720: Kim Clausing: Open: The Progressive Case for Free Trade, Immigration, and Global Capital https://books.google.com/books?isbn=0674919335: "With the winds of trade war blowing as they have not done in decades and Left and Right flirting with protectionism, Kimberly Clausing shows how a free, open economy is still the best way to advance the interests of working Americans. She offers strategies to train workers, improve tax policy, and establish a partnership between labor and business...

#noted #globalization #books

Tom Scocca*Author*: Can a Journalist as Important as Jill...

Tom Scocca*Author*: Can a Journalist as Important as Jill Abramson Be a Plagiarist?: "Here���s one part of one set of Moynihan���s examples: 'In December 2006, Mojica and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn���t be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary Christmas in Darfur' . 'In December 2006 he and two friends traveled to Chad with a camera to explore why Darfur couldn���t be saved. The result was the 2008 documentary Christmas in Darfur'. That���s a string of 29 words... and a string identically presenting 28 of the same words, published in Abramson���s book as Abramson���s writing. The one-word difference is that Abramson swapped out the subject���s name for a pronoun. Abramson���s passage was plagiarized. Jill Abramson is a plagiarist...

...Like most plagiarists, she���s also arrogant and dishonest about it. ���I don���t think it���s an issue at all,��� she told a Fox News host last night.... [She] lashed out, Trump-wise, at the motives of the people who���d caught her doing wrong: "The attacks on my book from some @vicenews reflect their unhappiness with what I consider a balanced portrayal..."

#noted

Please Help Me Out Here!

The Charge of the Brexit Brigade: ���Forward, the Brexit Brigade!���

Was there a man dismayed?

Not though the soldier knew

Someone had blundered.

Theirs not to make reply,

Theirs not to reason why,

Theirs but to do and die.

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

White papers to right of them,

Pollsters to left of them,

Presslords in front of them

Volleyed and thundered...

#acrossthewidemissouri #globalization #orangehairedbaboons

One problem with this from Tim Harford is that a broad, c...

One problem with this from Tim Harford is that a broad, constructive, win-win deal that Theresa May can sell as a win to her coalition may not be in everybody's interest. The people of the EU have a short-run material interest in avoiding the economic pain of a disorderly Brexit. But the governance of the EU also has a short-run ideal interest that may be a long-run material, ideal, and existential interest in demonstrating that leaving the EU turns your country into a desperately dorky clown show. the governance of Ireland certainly believes that its material interest in avoiding disorderly Brexit is less important than its material interact in not endorsing and not allowing the EU to endorse border controls in Ireland.

Tim Harford���and Theresa May���may think that Britain is playing chicken with the EU. But it looks much more to me like Theresa May is reenacting the charge of the light brigade, having cast the EU as the bemused Russian cannoneers:

Tim Harford: Brexit as a Game of Chicken : "A second insight from Schelling: the difference between deterrence and what he called ���compellence���. Deterrence dissuades action, but compellence means persuading or threatening someone so that they do act...

... In his 1984 book Choice and Consequence, Schelling pointed out that deterrence is easier. A deterred person does nothing, so need not admit that the deterrence worked, but a compelled person must visibly acquiesce. Unfortunately, the process specified under Article 50 leaves the UK in the awkward position of trying to achieve compellence. The default option is the car crash, a disorderly fracture with the EU. Anything else requires all 28 countries involved to take prompt constructive action. May and her chancellor Philip Hammond have made some (faintly) threatening noises about how the EU should play along, but such threats can only work if they compel an energetic and active response. That���s far from certain���compellence is hard.

Of course, a broad, constructive agreement is in everyone���s interest...

#noted

Ed Luce: Only the UK Leads America in Its Rush to Kakisto...

Ed Luce: Only the UK Leads America in Its Rush to Kakistocracy: "Democrats talk[ing] about being 'socialists'... mean the kinds of things centre-right governments support in Europe... universal health coverage, tough regulation of monopolies and sharply progressive taxation. They do not mean Venezuela. That contrast alone is enough to give hope about the relative health of US democracy. But it is no reason to crow. If Britain is the only big democracy that is screwing up worse than you, it is best to keep calm and change the subject...

#noted

It Is Saturday Morning, and Joe Weisenthal Is Trying to Start a... Symposium... on Twitter

It is Saturday morning, and Joe Weisenthal is trying to start a... symposium... on Twitter.

Make mine Professor Cornelius Ampleforth���s navy-strength bathtub gin:

Joe Weisenthal: @TheStalwart: "Should I do a tweetstorm on what I think mainstream Keynesians like @paulkrugman @Nouriel and @ObsoleteDogma get wrong about Bitcoin?... I think most Keynesian types see Bitcoin as a horribly inefficient medium of exchange, whose loudest advocates include many scammers, charlatans, misanthropes, and Austrian economics adherents. And tbh, this is basically all true. But...

...If you can look past all this (and I know that's asking a lot) at its core, Bitcoin is attempting to introduce the concept of "cash" to the digital realm. And by "cash", I mean something with a very specific property: money that Person A can hand off to Person B without Person C telling them they're not allowed. Now most people probably don't have much use for "cash" tbh, but it should be obvious that there's all kinds of people who would like money that has this property to it. Examples of people who might want to use cash include political dissidents, drug dealers, sex workers, free speech zealouts, enemies of oppressive state regimes and so on.

So the first thing people should ask themselves is whether they can understand why some people might want private money (cash) and then secondly they should ask whether they think a world in which private transactions simply cease to exist is desirable. And if you do think that cash is an important component of a free society, then you should answer what's a superior way to get there. Because it's obviously a very difficult problem. Because to create cash requires a difficult problem for computers (which tend to be good at destroying data scarcity, not enforcing it) and it also requires a cultural solution so that people coalesce around something neutral as a medium of exchange.

This last part is why evangelism is part and parcel to Bitcoin's culture. The meme isn't going to propagate itself. People need to bang the drum. And anytime there's something totally new, the first people who will be open to it will be the cranks and the crazies. So while the shortcomings of the currency are easy to point out, and the arguments of many True Believers are easily debunked, there's still a strong case for why people value it and promote it that's not inconsistent with the priors of "normal" people.

And if you strip away all the Austrian rhetoric-which IMO is not at all essential to the case for the existence of digital cash-then there's nothing inconsistent at all between Bitcoin and a Keynesian worldview....

Brad DeLong: We have cash: Kruegerrands, each one currently worth $1315. Perhaps 15 years ago there was some hope for a better, electronic "cash". But I think the last 15 years have been a fairly conclusive demonstration that power consumption, programming difficulties, and social engineering make it overwhelmingly unlikely that Dunning-Kruegerrands will ever be a better cash than Kruegerrands. Maybe there are people currently working on the better-cash-as-an-ingredient-in-a-robust-and-strong-civil-society dream. But if there are any such people in the BitCoin-cryptocurrency space, they are not obvious to me. Instead, as you said, it is now all "scammers, charlatans, misanthropes, and Austrian economics adherents"���a sinister carnival of grifters, griftees, griftees who think they are grifters, etc...

Adam Ozimek @ModeledBehavior: LOL Dunning-Kruegerrands

Brad DeLong: @cstross denies responsibility for creating the word "Dunning-Kruegerrands". But it is not clear who else the creator might have been.

Jodi Beggs: @jodiecongirl: In other words, roll your eyes all you want but cryptocurrencies are trying to solve a really interesting and relevant problem.

Brad DeLong: But he's wrong! Maybe 15 years ago cryptocurrency researchers were trying to solve an interesting better-cash-payments-for-a-robust-civil-society problem. But that was long ago. In another country. And the program has crashed.

Jodi Beggs: think (know) those people are still out there, they just kind of get drowned out by the others. Hell, I am one of those people (paging @KarlMuth)

Brad DeLong: So why is Niall Ferguson and not you on the "advisory board" of Ampleforth? Enough said...

Karl T. Muth: Those of us who are involved in the crypto space because we enjoy thinking about its interesting economic or technical sets of problems tend to be quiet. And I'm fine with that. Crypto isn't an "industry" or "sector," or even a product or a feature... it's just a technology. The space is still purging itself of people with little or no technical expertise, half-baked philosophy ranging from low-commitment libertarianism to Galt's-Gulch-but-online fantasies, and "projects" that will never become companies. I suggest putting those people on "mute." And I think "innovations in cash" gets said but is really not what anyone is talking about. People are talking about innovations in transactional systems, transfers of value, and payments/settlement. Those are three species of a genus that does not necessarily include cash. Well if @TheStalwart (@business) wants to chat about it, I'd love to. Some people (@TheSmokingTire, @AlexRoy144) have accused me of being a not-boring podcast interviewee...

Brad DeLong*: But do any of the people doing interesting stuff related to interesting economic or technical problems in the general area of "cash" as an aid to a robust civil society ever break through the noise to reach @TheStalwart? Or is it, from his perspective, grift all the way down?

Rebecca Spang @RebeccaSpang: Coming to this a few hours late bc I wasn't on Twitter this morning (!) and was alerted to it by @delong's blogpost https://www.bradford-delong.com/2019/02/on-twitter-i-think-most-keynesian-types-see-bitcoin-as-a-horribly-inefficient-medium-of-exchange-whose-loudest-advocates.html What my friend @TheStalwart misses in his tweet storm about #crypto is the two very DIFFERENT significances of the word "private" when it applies to money and transactions [at least I did not see it discussed] .

We might call cash "private money" because cash transactions are difficult to trace. They do not announce themselves in public. ("unmarked bills" and all that)...

BUT nearly all the cash with which we moderns are acquainted is (in its production) PUBLIC money. It is issued by governments, for the public good. [note to self, do NOT hashtag MMT this point...]

Cryptocurrencies, in contrast, are doubly private: anonymous (supposedly) AND privately issued. No governments involved!! So I conceptualize #crypto as part of the general skepticism about/critique of the state's ability/suitability for providing #public goods for the common benefit. Finis: I personally belief in #public education, roads, communication, and money. But the last has been under attack, because who IS the public for money? As my friend @MerleHazard reminds us, it's divided (Dual Mandate):

Brad DeLong So:

A. Transactions (and hence activities/networks) hidden from the gaze of the state, and thus a source of social power that can be deployed for ill or good in the regulation of the public sphere...

B. Stores-of-value (and hence the transmission of social power across time) independent of government and hence not vulnerable to government decisions to confiscate via inflation...

C. Technology to make (A) and (B) easier���they had always been possible with human effort

D. Projectors���those who want to change the world (and do well for themselves) by bringing (A), (B), and (C) together

E. Grifters: "Soon Moon! Soon Lambo!"

F. Griftees: "When Moon? When Lambo?"

G. Underlying epistemoi that make (F) highly vulnerable right now...

Does that get it? Should we get you a fellowship for a sabbatical at the Hoover Institution for War, Revolution, and Peace to study this?

Brad DeLong: Interesting thing about the name "Ampleforth" for this new attempt to mine Dunning-Kruegerrands that Stanford Hoover Institution senior fellows are signing up for. Ampleforth claims that its name comes from a character in Orwell's 1984) who "when tasked to replace the word 'God���'in a Kipling poem... refuses, not out of righteousness, or subversiveness, but rather, a simple love for language and respect for the truth. To Ampleforth, no other word makes sense in context and therefore no other word should replace it." But if you go to the text of _1984, you discover that Ampleforth kept "God" because he needed something to rhyme with "rod", and "I could not help it!... Do you realize that there are only twelve rhymes to 'rod' in the entire language? For days I had racked my brains. There was no other rhyme." To claim that you are naming your Dunning-Kruegerrand after a heroic martyr for honest thought and God smells to me like an attempt at affinity fraud. But it is a strangely incompetent one...

#noted #finance #orangehairedbaboons

Dan Goodin: Fire (and Lots of It): Berkeley Researcher on...

Dan Goodin: Fire (and Lots of It): Berkeley Researcher on the Only Way to Fix Cryptocurrency: "Nicholas Weaver says bitcoin and other digital coins recapitulate 500 years of failure... characterized bitcoin and its many follow-on digital currencies as energy-sucking leeches with no redeeming qualities. Their chief, if not only, function, he said, is to fund ransomware campaigns, online drug bazaars, and other criminal enterprises...

...Private and permissioned blockchains are an old idea���a good idea���just with a new buzzword on it. The public blockchains are grossly inefficient. The cryptocurrencies don't work to provide anything against drugs and ransoms and stuff like that. Smart contracts are an unmitigated disaster unless you like comedy gold. And the field is just recapitulating 500 years of failures. So in the end, the only winning move is not to play���unless you like playing with flamethrowers....

Cryptocurrencies make a poor substitute for the use of payment cards, checks, and old-fashioned cash.... Cryptocurrencies are deflationary.... Cryptocurrencies are hard to hold. Ask just about anyone who has stored large amounts of cryptocurrency in a 'hot walle't" that is, an Internet-connected computer. They will almost inevitably say their wallet has been stolen.... In theory, there are no central authorities that control cryptocurrencies. In practice, quasi-central authorities abound. Consider the 2016 bailout of The DAO, a crowdsourced investment fund, after hackers swindled it out of $0 million worth of Ethereum. The hack exploited a loophole in a "smart contract" that was intended to use computer code, rather than a court of law, to enforce a legal agreement. Ultimately, some members of the Ethereum community voted to void the contract in a move that was at polar opposites to the "code is law" ethos of smart contracts....

Bitcoin and most other cryptocurrencies rely on a permissionless chain of hashes to verify a public ledger of all previous transactions.... The problem, Weaver said, is that these chains have existed for decades in the form of hash chains and have already been used for just about anything that could benefit from it. "For all of those who say 'blockchain will solve X,'" Weaver said, "the only thing it solves is you now know the person knows nothing about X." What's worse, Weaver said, is that public blockchains are woefully wasteful and inefficient. Contrary to what blockchain proponents say, the requirement that many computers participate in resource-intensive "proof-of-work" computations has nothing to do with securing consensus. Instead, it's required to prevent so-called Sybil attacks that subvert a peer-to-peer system by creating a large number of fake nodes. The result is that bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies waste what Weaver said is an "obscene amount of resources." A central authority that designated 10 trustworthy entities could generate the same blockchain with "10 Raspberry Pis using less power than an incandescent light bulb."...

#noted

Genius no-longer-quite-so-young whippersnapper Ezra is, I...

Genius no-longer-quite-so-young whippersnapper Ezra is, I think, massively overly polite here: As Ezra Klein say, Jill Abramson is part of a system that regards giving credit to others for the work they have done as a sign of weakness: Spend any time drinking with other reporters and ask them about New York Times journalists. You may well hear that they go out of their way to pretend that they have done work actually done by others, and have a strong positive aversion to acknowledging even the existence of other journalists. This attitude appears baked into their culture. This does not strike me as something the would be true of any group of people worth admiring. And Abramson appears to have it in spades.

I would note that Abramson���and, increasingly, the rest of the New York Times���these days appears to be doubling-down on anti-blogging: access not explainer journalism; stenography for favored sources not working for readers. I am not sure why they want to double-down on this, just as I am not sure why Jill Abramson thought she should carry here disdain for others working on the story beyond the book-publishing and academic plagiarism red lines, but it seems to be what they do���like saving 15% or more on car insurance:

Ezra Klein: @ezraklein: "I've long admired Jill Abramson, but the definition of plagiarism she gives here is a... looser one than has been true at the publications I've worked at, and I think it shows less generosity in citation than is appropriate...

...Sean Illing: A book that talks at length about journalistic ethics and praises legacy media titans like the New York Times and the Washington Post while lambasting new media companies like Vice and BuzzFeed for sloppy reporting that is, well, filled with errors and what appears to be very sloppy reporting. A couple of weeks ago, I scheduled an interview with Abramson planning to discuss the trajectory of the news business. But almost overnight, the story evolved, and our interview on Friday morning took a different turn....

Jill Abramson: There are some missing citations and errors in the footnotes of the book, and there are 70 pages of footnotes. All of the allegations that I lifted material or plagiarized���that���s not true���but I did make mistakes in the footnotes, and there are some uncited passages. Those sources are credited in other footnotes; it���s just those specific quotes are not, and that���s an error and it will be fixed pronto. I feel really terrible about it. I didn���t want there to be anything wrong in the book, and I really wanted it to be about the importance of truth and facts. I don���t think these issues should overshadow what I think is a really interesting book.... Look, I was trying to write a seamless narrative, and to keep breaking it up with ���according to��� qualifiers would have been extremely clunky. But in retrospect, I wish I���d done that....

Yeah, I can���t find that Malooley citation in the book. But it should be in there, and I can���t find it. But we will get it corrected pronto.... I mean, I have 70 pages of footnotes and I tried to credit everyone���s work as best I can. What we���re talking about here are sets of facts that I borrowed; obviously, the language is too close in some cases, but I���m not lifting original ideas. Again, I wish I had got the citation right, but it���s not an intentional theft or taking someone���s original ideas���it���s just the facts.... I teach journalism, and if this had happened at the Times and someone didn���t credit someone else, and took their words in this way, it would have to be corrected. So yeah, it���s an error. When you make a mistake, you���ve got to correct it and be honest about it. This is what I teach my students, and it���s what I believed when I was the editor at the Times.... I���m not going to get into a semantic argument about whether this fits some definition or not. I really think I���ve talked about this in full, and really would love to move on.

#noted