by Eric Martin
This is more evidence that the housing crisis and financial meltdown were the result of the CRA, Fannie and Freddie and, in general, extension of home ownership to poor minorities:
Whether it is their residence, a second home or a house bought as an investment, the rich have stopped paying the mortgage at a rate that greatly exceeds the rest of the population.
More than one in seven homeowners with loans in excess of a million dollars is seriously delinquent, according to data compiled for The New York Times by the real estate analytics firm CoreLogic.
By contrast, homeowners with less lavish housing are much more likely to keep writing checks to their lender. About one in 12 mortgages below the million-dollar mark is delinquent.
Not that such facts will do much to deter Zombie Lee Atwater's quest for brains.
Nor, I suppose, will we see the same amount of moral tut-tutting from the people that were extolling the virtues of personal responsibility, and the depravity of the decision to walk away from debts unrepaid, now that it's shown that the wealthy are doing so in higher numbers.
Aw, who am I kidding. Of course we'll see the same reproaches from our elites. This inconvenient fact regarding the actual identity of the groups that are doing most of the abandoning will just be ignored, and the poor and minorities scapegoated some more.
There's a reason they're called zombies.
Wait, doesn’t this mean that it is time to work with the home owners, and work out a mutually functional arrangement?
After all, real people are starting to hurt.
Sounds to me like a good reason to cut taxes for the rich and go after the lucky duckies…
/zombie
And Freddie and Fannie purchased how many loans in excess of one million dollars to assist in their demise?
And Freddie and Fannie purchased how many loans in excess of one million dollars to assist in their demise?
Very, very few. But thanks for playing.
Insured or bought?
An economist quoted in the article:
“The rich are different, they are more ruthless.”
The rich make business decisions (like the Mafia), driven by rational circumstance (We hadda do it, he messed wit a made man; it’s just business) which are then held up as the highest good by the beast formerly known as the Republican Party and a depressing number of Ben Nelsonites on the other side.
The decisions’ of the lower middle class and the poor are held to be purely moral, a personal failing, a time for punishment (ya keep your nose clean and your mouth shut and there won’t be any trouble) and retribution from the scum mentioned above.
The poor reap the grapes of wrath. The better-off reap the grapes of math.
I’m developing my own classical economic theory from long observation of human behavior throughout history. I’ve dubbed it the “machete effect”, following long economics practice of naming a phenomenon, which seems to make everyone nod their heads sagely and fall into deep thought at the mere naming.
Cue the string quartet (how bout a little up-tempo Carmina Burana) for background atmosphere.
Imagine a chart, moving from left to right. The first line tracks the progress and subsequent exhaustion of a malign trend or meme, which seems to sustain stumbling, staggering upward movement despite internal exhaustion and the stench of death. Let’s call it the zombie line.
At some point it reaches what we call in da bidness a head and shoulders top.
Then we have a second line, trending above the first, kind of a moving average of suffering caused by the movement of the first indice. This second line tends to top and out and begin a slight movement to the downside toward the developing head and shoulders top in the first line. As the downward curve in the first line develops, it looks ever-so-much like a machete held aloft, it’s sharp edge pointing downward at the head between the shoulders, thus the name, the “Machete Effect”.
As time progresses and the momentum of the various economic forces pushing the machete line down gather force, you know you’ve reached an inflection point, a disconnect, so to speak, when the machete touches and moves through to the downside of the head and shoulders – right at the neckline of the zombie line, history shows us.
At this point, a keen observor of markets might observe, it might be time for the zombies to lighten up on their positions a bit — or, better, run like hell in the other direction, because zombie heads are gonna roll, as we like to say in the economics profession.
When the market has finally cleared, and plenty of heads have rolled, then and only then does the machete line reverse slowly to the upside (blade pointed up), from the carnage, to rebuild society on a more even footing.
This chart illustrates, I believe, how the machete line becomes more ruthless at some point than the zombie line.
Then events cut in a different direction.
Two quick things:
TPM’s current headline is a poll that shows 55% of likely voters consider Obama a “socialist”.
Maria Bartiromo, CNBC’s Money Honey, was just telling Chuck Todd on MSNBC that corporate profits are likely to be “better than expected”, and corporations are holding lots of cash because they have “cut to the bone”, but they are not investing because of “uncertainty”. It would help their “confidence” if “Obama” stops the Bush tax cuts from expiring on schedule.
The zombies have eaten all the brains already.
–TP
Maria needs to interview a market technician regarding the developing “machete effect”.
She could wear a neck guard.
Bartiromo (How come YOU don’t take Social Security?) is another example of conservative, Republican affirmative action, wherein they promote the dumbest, amoral individual examples of every race, color, and creed to positions of high power.
Michael Steele, Erick Erickson (cracker filth minority), Sarah Death Palin, Michelle Bachmann, Tom Tancredo, most of the neocon contingent, you name it, …. they leaf through “The Bell Curve” and find pictures of Charles Murray’s examples of his thesis (hoping those examples would suffice to cause us to generalize from the particular) and dumbocity gets a leg up on the upwardly mobile ladder.
The rest of us are the elites, to be hated… perhaps murdered.
Do you doubt that? How many Republican politicians running for office right now have invoked murder one way or the other?
They don’t speak in metaphors. People at the low end of the Bell Curve don’t have the intellectual capacity to parse a metaphor.
Everything is literal.
The first photo in that article is a good example of why I have very limited respect for the supposed ability of the rich to spend and invest in sensible ways. The tacky faux-Tuscan stucco-and-plywood box is one of those styles whose impending status as an unloved icon of an ugly time would seem apparent from the day they were built, as cheesy a symbol of the times as floor-to-ceiling mirrored closets or deep shag carpeting were of previous eras.
Raze the lot of them and build 1500sq ft Craftsmans, that’s what I say. I always read those articles about the McMansions with numerous empty, never-used rooms, kids off in their own wing, so far from their parents that they might as well be in another house, and think – what on earth are they doing? A little space is nice, but living on top of each other in shared rooms is what makes a family a family rather than a bunch of hotel residents.
People are going to look back in 20 years and say, “That? That’s what you ran up trillions of dollars of debt to invest in?” It’s embarrassing.
Anyway, no surprise that the wealthy are ditching their mortgages, both because they tend to be ruthless (that’s how you get to be wealthy) and because once the bubble logic has faded, you look at the replacement construction cost for a building like that, and notice that there isn’t really a shortgage of land here in California, even in the Bay Area, look at deflationary trends, and realize that nobody is ever going to pay $2 million for your house again. Ever.
And Freddie and Fannie purchased how many loans in excess of one million dollars to assist in their demise?
Unless I’m mistaken (very possible) FNMA and FHMC only purchase conforming loans. Upper limit for conforming loans for a single family house is $417K, $625K in a very high cost area.
The stimulus bill of 2008 expands the upper limit for high-cost areas to $729,750 for FHA loans. That program ends at the end of this year.
So, for single family homes, which is what we’re talking about here, it seems like loans above $1M would all be jumbos, and would not qualify for FNMA/FHMC support.
Some folks work around this by splitting large loans in two loans, one a conforming loan and one a non-conforming loan for the balance. That would still limit the GSE exposure to the conforming amount, however.
Via Kevin Drum, courtesy of the zombie Wall Street Journal editorial page, zombie napkin charter, Arthur Laffable, proffers a new chart showing new laughing curves of unemployment and lagging unemployment benefits.
Then Lafftrack lies through his lying Republican scum mouth and tells us unemployment benefits LEAD and cause unemployment.
I need to get back to work sharpening my theory of the Machete Effect.
Zombie hackdom awaits its final hacking.
‘So, for single family homes, which is what we’re talking about here, it seems like loans above $1M would all be jumbos, and would not qualify for FNMA/FHMC support.’
Thus, FNMA and FHMC managed to go bankrupt without the help of those walking away from million dollar mortgages.
But Eric is right, the real culprits are the stupid bankers who enabled the greedy mortgage loan officers (not all of whom were sub-prime lenders, obviously) and the absolutely immoral Wall St money managers who knowingly packaged and sold those loans to clueless investors.
I thought FNMA/FHMC were only allowed to insure loans of up to $X per Russell’s comment, but IIRC there was no such limit on loans they purchased, whether directly or via securitizations (mostly the latter, again IIRC), for which they did not provide insurance.
Anyway, no surprise that the wealthy are ditching their mortgages, both because they tend to be ruthless…
I wouldn’t even call it ruthless. Just practical- bank made a stupid loan, bank gets to eat the default. That’s business.
The weird thing isn’t how the wealthy and corporations are allowed to be just practical. It’s how the middle-class and poor are demonized for doing so.
From McArdle’s piece: By the same token, however, I can’t really buy the argument that people who made stupid decisions about lending money perpetrated some kind of moral outrage on the borrower that renders any obligation to repay them moot….Undoubtedly many of my readers think that that sort of thing is different because we don’t have a moral obligation to repay our debts to corporations the way we do to people… [that] an honorable man repays his debts if he is able is one of the unnoticed underpinnings of a stable, prosperous democracy.
For some reason it’s cast as a moral argument. I suppose because if it were cast as a simple business decision, it’d be a no-brainer, and the poor would come off looking shrewd rather than morally bankrupt. And we can’t have that, can we?
And since &%*$ing when did pseudo-libertarians start thinking that honorably repaying debts beyond the requirements of a contract was a foundation of society? Where did all of that faith in the free market and the virtue of selfishness go?
Thus, FNMA and FHMC managed to go bankrupt without the help of those walking away from million dollar mortgages.
This is turning the entire question on its head: you assume that Fannie and Freddie supported these mortgages and used that to further some unstated argument about how bad F&F are. Finding that this is not the case, you turn that around and use it to further your (still unstated) argument about F&F in a different way.
Thus, FNMA and FHMC managed to go bankrupt without the help of those walking away from million dollar mortgages.
What CW said.
That was something to behold GOB. You spun around so fast you gave me whiplash.
Looking at FNMA’s 2007 10-K, they said they made $2.9B in the first six months of 2007, but managed to lose $5.0B in the second six months of 2007, the latter more than they made in all of 2006 ($4.1B).
What accounts for such a swing from $4.1B profit in 2006 to a $2.1 net loss in 2007 (which would have been a $5.1B loss if not for the federal income tax benefit) according to the 10-K? (a) a $2.8B increase in their provision for credit losses; (b) a $5.1B increase in market valuation losses; and (c) a $2.2B decrease in net interest income.
Per the 10K, FNMA has 3 busines segments (i) Single-Family Credit Guaranty; (ii) Housing and Community Development; and (iii) Capital Markets. AFAICT, the first two are FNMA’s traditional business of taking on credit risk of mortgages via securitization. (i) was profitable in 2005 and 2006, but produced a loss in 2007. (ii) was profitable in all three years (even though part of this segment was the obviously socialistic business of “making debt and equity investments to increase the supply of affordable housing” including “rental housing project eligible for the federal low-income housing tax credit”). (iii) went from net income of $3.2B in 2005 to a $1.3B loss in 2007.
What was (iii), their “Capital Markets” segment? Well, according to their 10K capital markets group invested primarily in mortgage loans and mortgage related securities, and funded such investments “primarily through proceeds from our issuance of debt securities in the domestic and international capital markets.” What type of income did this business segment produce? “Net interest income,” which is “the difference, or spread, between the return that [FNMA] receives on our mortgage assets and our borrowing costs.”
What was the value of the assets in the Capital Market segment at the end of 2007? $844 billion, or 22 times the value of the assets in their other two segments combined. What did they list as the top two factors that impact their cost of funds that they then used to fund these investments (i.e., the interest they pay on their debt and thus how much they made in “net interest income”)?
“our corporate and regulatory structure, including our status as a GSE [government-sponsored entity]”
and
“legislative or regulatory actions relating to our business, including any actions that would affect our GSE status or add additional requirements that would reduce out ability to issue debt”
So, it seems to me, that they were trading on their status as a GSE and the implicit guarantee that the federal goverment would not allow them to fail (despite statements in the 10K to the contrary but subsequently proven to be correct) to borrow at a low rate (total debt at the end of 2007 – $838 billion) and turning around and investing the borrowed funds in mortgages that paid a higher rate. This worked fine so long as people kept paying their mortgages.
When people stopped, they no longer had the revenue to service their debt and failed (they lost an additional $5.1B in the 1st six months of 2008).
What CW said.
That was something to behold GOB. You spun around so fast you gave me whiplash.
Huh? I don’t see GOB’s initial question implying that it was his view that $1 million + mortgages doomed F&F, in fact if anything leading with “And” implies the opposite.
That’s how I took it ugh. YMMV.
Obviously, just seemed like a whole lot of mileage there.
YM of the M MV.
😉
‘Huh? I don’t see GOB’s initial question implying that it was his view that $1 million + mortgages doomed F&F, in fact if anything leading with “And” implies the opposite.’
Yes! Ugh, you got it.
the real culprits are the stupid bankers
Personally, I blame the liars.
The folks who lied about what their income was. The mortgage brokers who lied about the value of the property, and/or the financial status of the folks they were writing mortgages for. The ratings agencies who called any stinky pile of crap AAA. The investment banking firms who bundled the good, the bad, and the ugly into one big bag and invented new and exciting ways to pretend that It’s All Good. The other financial sector smart@sses who sold hedges on the securities to anyone who would put money on the barrelhead, whether they had skin in the investment or not, until they had leveraged themselves to the point where their exposure was more money than there was in the whole freaking world.
I blame those guys.
The *changes* to the CRA underwriting rules in the late 90’s — not the CRA per se, as originally construed — arguably helped enable the first two items above.
The GSE’s helped to establish the secondary market in securitized mortgages which was exploited by the creative bundlers of crap. And to the degree that they were active in that secondary market, they exposed taxpayers to the blatant fraud that was rampant in the financial sector as a whole.
But every time the topic comes up, it was the CRA and the GSEs who are to blame.
Cut the throat of the economy of the whole damned world in the name of making your own personal pile of millions, and it’s just business.
Create a government agency or program, even if indirectly, to help poor to middle class people improve their lives, and it’s an outrage.
Strain at a gnat, swallow a camel.
Yet another episode of “what russell said.”
Yes! Ugh, you got it.
In that case:
1)write more clearly next time
2)unless you were agreeing with Eric, in which case you should check out point one again.
3)if you’re attempting to support the theory that Fannie and Freddie were the primary causes of the housing crisis, Im not sure why their lack of involvement with a sector experiencing very high default rates is evidence for that theory. Thus the confusion- most people cite evidence that demonstrates their point rather than contradicting it.
4)unless you’re arguing that it’s a given that Fannie and Freddie caused the crisis, and therefore 1M+ USD mortgages weren’t involved with the crisis because they weren’t funded by F&F. Again, see point 1, plus it’d be circular to argue that F&F were the cause by assuming that that was the case.
Personally, I blame the liars.
The folks who lied about what their income was…
I dont really blame them very much- they had the least information of anyone and often were just putting their trust in people who were supposed to know how things worked.
I mean, you go to your doctor and he says “I want to give you this scan. But your insurance won’t cover it unless you’re in a lot of pain. *wink* are you in a lot of pain right now?” Or your accountant says “You could write off that entire room if you never do anything that isn’t work-related there. *wink* that’s right, isn’t it?”
I mean, I still blame them some; people should understand what sort of things they’re getting involved with, in the end, it’s their money and their lives. But I don’t want to lump in the dupes with the con artists; one group made a bunch of money, the other lost their homes and wrecked their credit.
To Carleton Wu:
What i was saying is very simple. Not that FNMA and FHLMC caused the housing or the financial crisis, but that they and they alone caused their own bankruptcies, through buying or backing bad paper that they had every resource available to them to have known better.
GOB,
That is very simple, but
it is a non sequitur
it is also profoundly obvious
My head hurts on both the original post and the comments. It seems to me just another case of a reporter for the NYT practicing statistics without a license.
The proportion of million plus homes that are delinquent and the proportion of under a million dollar homes that are delinquent tells us pretty much nothing about any of the large economic effects without knowing what proportion of the total homes we are talking about. And like most reporters who fling statistics around, this one didn’t bother to provide the important parts. And while I don’t actually have the statistics, I strongly suspect that the number of under million dollar homes greatly exceeds the number of over million dollar homes. In fact if forced to guess, I suspect it is at least an order of magnitude. Which would tend to suggest that problems in the more normal homes end up being a bigger problem for the economy as a whole than problems for the million+ homes.
Which might be a fruitful area of investigation if you were a full time paid reporter. But it probably isn’t as fun.
The easy-for-me-to-find statistics are a mess, but the best I could come up with was page 5 and 6 of this report. (It references Census Table H74, which the ten minutes I was willing to put into it couldn’t turn up, but is probably better data).
And the data is from 2000 so it is already in the bubble run-up.
But anyway, it looks like million+ homes are less than 2% of all homes. So it is darn close to two orders of magnitude difference. I’m very roughly thumb-sketching the difference in median price of under million dollar homes and million+ homes at 6-8X, which VERY roughly would put the importance for the purpose of large scale economic effects of the under million dollar houses at about 10 times that of the over million dollar houses. (Since this is very napkin-math the error bars are wide, I’d guess the correct value is likely to be 8x to 15x. But in any case for non-statisticians: the under million dollar houses are way more important.)
My Greek brother-in-law was telling me earlier this evening that a popular aphorism in Greek academic circles nowadays is this:
If you’re rich and an a$$hole, you’re rich.
If you’re poor and an a$$hole, you’re an a$$hole.
Sebastian is surely correct that the economic impact of defaults on $1M+ mortgages by rich people is trivial compared to the economic impact of defaults on under-$1M mortgages by a$$holes.
And it’s irrelevant what the RATE of default in either catogory is, because that would be comparing rich people to a$$holes.
–TP
The proportion of million plus homes that are delinquent and the proportion of under a million dollar homes that are delinquent tells us pretty much nothing about any of the large economic effects without knowing what proportion of the total homes we are talking about.
You are making the argument you want to make rather than making an argument that has something to do with the topic of discussion.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless” is the proposition being put forth.
Corporations are excused if they renege on contracts when it is financially beneficial. And now rich people are being excused for doing so. But middle class people have not been excused for such actions – they have been excoriated for them in the financial press. Different moral rules are being applied to the middle and working classes than are being applied to the rich and to corporations.
That is the topic of discussion. It is the topic of the original NY Times article and the topic of the parent post. You are distracting from it.
Hmmm, I thought the topic of the post had something to do with the economic history of the recent crash. “The rich are different: they are more ruthless, but in a way that has no big effect on the economy” is the kind of cheesy topic that I’d expect on Cosmopolitan magazine, not ObWi, so I guess I didn’t recognize it. My bad.
The topic of the post was the extremely prevalent idea that the housing crash was caused by banks being forced to lend to irresponsible poor (black) people whose moral corruption is evidenced by their lack of money and high foreclosure rates.
The point of the post was that given that wealthy people – whatever their absolute numbers – are walking away at an even higher percentage rate, and therefore the tut-tutting over the irresponsibility of the poor is hypocritical.
House prices were pumped up far beyond either what people could repay or what the market could possibly sustain (those being closely related) across the board. That’s what that statistic tells you.
The chance to bash the wealthy who bought ridiculous multi-million dollar McMansions because they are extremely insecure, have no idea what would actually make them happy, and are engaged in pointless status contests with other extremely insecure wealthy people is just gravy.
“The rich are different: they are more ruthless” you certainly recognize, it is 7 paragraphs in to the article linked to by the first word of Mr. Martin’s post.
The part you added to the quote is the argument you want to make that has nothing to do with the discussion.
Right wing ideologues blamed poor minorities for a crisis in which they were participants but that they certainly did not originate. Now they are being held to one moral standard while corporations and the rich are being held to another (or to none).
Anything to say about that, rather than more distraction?
The post was centered around this as evidence that “the housing crisis and financial meltdown were [not] the result of the CRA, Fannie and Freddie and, in general, extension of home ownership to poor minorities”.
(I introduced the [not] because he was pretty clearly being snarky.)
But the statistics offered pretty much show no such thing one way or the other.
Which is why this has pretty much devolved into a relatively useless class warfare/whining comment section.
The thing I had to say about that, is that even as a class warfare post, the statistics are pretty useless because the NYT writer attempted to tie it to the financial crisis as if the million dollar homeowners were a major contributor to the problem when as actual statistics suggest, they were not. So, if you think the ONLY thing worth discussing in the post/article is that rich people are mean, I guess you can go there.
But there are a million places on the web to do that kind of thing. At obsidianwings we try (try I say, not always succeed) to do better than that.
Seb,
This post was centered around the claim that poor minorities were the engine behind the financial meltdown – specifically that lending to poor minorities, as mandated by the government, led to a cratering of the housing market.
The evidence shows that wealthier home buyers are actually more likely to default, which casts doubts on the above stated claim, and certainly calls into question all the moralizing about people walking away from their underwater mortgages (which was certainly all the fashion when the CRA myth was being pumped).
That is all.
..this has pretty much devolved into a relatively useless class warfare/whining comment section.
Pointing out that poor people are being held to a different standard than rich people and corporations is not class warfare.
Holding poor people to a different standard than rich people and corporations is class warfare.
Pointing out that poor people are being held to a different standard than rich people and corporations is not whining.
Grumbling because someone points out that poor people are being held to a different standard than rich people and corporations is whining.
Do you have anything substantive to contribute to the discussion?
“The evidence shows that wealthier home buyers are actually more likely to default, which casts doubts on the above stated claim”
How does it cast doubt on the above stated claim when the number of $million+ houses in question is so vanishingly small?
I don’t think the stated claim is strong. But the statistics in the NYT article have almost nothing to do with it, because the number of $million+ homes is so small.
I’m not complaining about the stated claim. I would say that the Republican stupidity on the CRA has at the very most a very small germ of truth to it–that government pushes toward home ownership as a whole contributed quite a bit toward the bubble, of which the CRA was a very tiny part, Fannie and Freddie was a biggish part, and the thing no one likes to talk about [large tax advantage embedded into the tax system] was the largest government part. And that as a whole, the housing market bubble was a giant government/private joint venture in cluster-f!@#$ing in which both sides played a huge part in making things much worse.
But the NYT article has pretty much nothing useful to say about all that because the reporter isn’t statistically literate enough to realize that the base of $million+ homes isn’t large enough for 7:12 ratio of $million+ homeowner delinquency to under-$million homeowner delinquency to say anything remotely interesting when the ratio of homeowners in said positions is about 1:50 or greater.
Basically we have here a completely awful misuse of statistics that have almost zero bearing on the question.
So, I talked about the statistics.
Then I was told that it wasn’t ‘really’ about the statistics, it was about how rich people are bad, whaaaaa.
And I said if THAT was the crux of the matter, it wasn’t worthy of obsidianwings.
Duff Clarity: The article in question does NOT suggest that rich and poor people are being held to a different standard. Both are defaulting at historically very high rates, which is the crux of the problem. It suggests that among these very high rates, rich people are defaulting at even higher rates. It says nothing about poorer people being disallowed from defaulting at higher rates or some such nonsense.
Since the beginning premise of your comment is wrong, and since I’m pretty sure you’re trolling anyway, I can’t respond to the rest.
I do refer you to the posting rules.
The United States Pharmacopeia (USP) sets purity and content standards for various substances. It appears to me that Sebastian has somehow manged to obtain the USP standard vial containing pure, 100% essence of willful obtuseness. This is difficult to do on a weekend, when the office is usually closed. So well done.
“The evidence shows that wealthier home buyers are actually more likely to default, which casts doubts on the above stated claim”
How does it cast doubt on the above stated claim when the number of $million+ houses in question is so vanishingly small?
Im not sure why you’re missing this: the proposition that certain types of loans (eg CRA) caused the crash would be called into question if people who received different categories of loans default at similar or even higher rates.
Comparing the sizes of the two groups might be useful in some contexts, but not this one. This is like someone claiming that certain immunizations cause autism, and being confronted with statistics that non-immunized children suffer from autism at similar or higher rates- the size of the two groups is irrelevant, what we’re interested in is rate of the observed result in two different groups.
Your argument would make sense as a defense against the proposition that rich people defaulting on their mortages *caused* or was a major cause of the crisis itself v lending to poor people. But that’s not the question at all, the question is specifically about the effect of the CRA and Fannie and Freddie.
Having said that, there are still some logical holes in the case being made. Eg if CRA and F&F loans caused the entire market to tank which then led to a decrease in value of high-end homes (ie the time element). But, the last time I saw numbers, CRA loans were still defaulting below the average rate for non-CRA loans during the crisis- better direct evidence that indirect evidence.
Also, sidenote: you wouldn’t be interested in the number of houses in each category, you’d be interested in the value of the housing stock in each category. Just sayin.
“Also, sidenote: you wouldn’t be interested in the number of houses in each category, you’d be interested in the value of the housing stock in each category. Just sayin.”
Sigh.
Yes, which may be why I wrote as a non-sidenote: “I’m very roughly thumb-sketching the difference in median price of under million dollar homes and million+ homes at 6-8X, which VERY roughly would put the importance for the purpose of large scale economic effects of the under million dollar houses at about 10 times that of the over million dollar houses. (Since this is very napkin-math the error bars are wide, I’d guess the correct value is likely to be 8x to 15x. But in any case for non-statisticians: the under million dollar houses are way more important.)”
I was trying to be fair to the argument by bringing that up.
“Im not sure why you’re missing this: the proposition that certain types of loans (eg CRA) caused the crash would be called into question if people who received different categories of loans default at similar or even higher rates.”
That depends largely on which ‘different categories’ you use. I would say that the proposition that certain types of loans (eg loans that required unsustainable housing market growth to make sense) caused the crash would be a pretty darn defensible position.
“Eg if CRA and F&F loans caused the entire market to tank which then led to a decrease in value of high-end homes (ie the time element). But, the last time I saw numbers, CRA loans were still defaulting below the average rate for non-CRA loans during the crisis- better direct evidence that indirect evidence.”
Since the under million dollar homes are a tiny portion of the market (under 2%), a large uptick in defaults in the large portion of the market could spur a large decrease in value of the market as a whole. At the highest ends of the bubble market this would lead to a larger number of defaults in the highest parts of the market even if the loan quality standards were the same or even worse in the lower end of the market. (Because the drop in value at the top end is larger even as a percentage of housing price, and much larger in dollars, than at the bottom end).
Or at least maybe it would.
But the NYT reporter didn’t give any evidence whatsoever on any of these useful discussions.
The basic thing I find irritating on both sides is the complete disinterest in noticing how the run-up causes complications for traditionally favored arguments. Stupid Republicans crow ha-ha about the CRA and Fannie and Freddie and tax benefits for homeowners while stupid Democrats tut-tut about the market. Both are missing the enormous part that their favored side of the private/public equation had in creating this mess and instead engage in generally statistics-free/misused statistics rants about morality plays that let them ignore the troubling questions about their own side. If we have to suffer through a Depression, for God’s sake lets learn a few things from the pain.
And for what it is worth, this is a good discussion to have. What I object to in the NYT ‘report’ is that it didn’t get to any of the useful things, it pretty much was just rich-bashing. Which I’m sure is emotionally fulfilling or something. And they way this comment thread was going was just playing in to that.
The article in question does NOT suggest that rich and poor people are being held to a different standard
Of course it does, “The rich are different: they are more ruthless”, “The rich and successful often come naturally to this sort of attitude”, etc.
It says nothing about poorer people being disallowed from defaulting at higher rates or some such nonsense
Total red herring. This is not an argument anyone here is making. Poor people are being held to a different standard. When corporations renege on their contracts for financial reasons, people justify it by claiming that corporations should do whatever makes the most money. When rich people renege on their contracts, they are just ruthless businessmen. Quite a different message is displayed in the press when poor people renege on their contracts.
I do refer you to the posting rules.
Would those be the rules that forbid disrupting meaningful conversation as you have been doing with your above noted “willful obtuseness” this entire thread? The best counter argument you can make to a commenter is “whaaaaa”? And then you’re going to refer other people to the posting rules?
With all due respect Mr. Sebastian, your behaviour here today is childish.
That depends largely on which ‘different categories’ you use. I would say that the proposition that certain types of loans (eg loans that required unsustainable housing market growth to make sense) caused the crash would be a pretty darn defensible position.
Those aren’t the categories under discussion. Yes, if your proposed categories cut across the two groups, then they aren’t very useful groups. But again, that wasn’t the question being asked. If you want to front-page a post about what sort of loans you think caused the crisis, knock yourself out. But for the moment, it’d be cool if you could stay on the CRA/Fannie&Freddie line. If only because trying to argue one side of that while you argue something only tangentially related is difficult.
Since the under million dollar homes are a tiny portion of the market (under 2%), a large uptick in defaults in the large portion of the market could spur a large decrease in value of the market as a whole.
I think I said that exactly two seconds ago. I also said that, iirc, CRA loans are defaulting at lower rates than non-CRA loans- a useful tidbit, and IMO much more interesting than trying to indirectly determine causal relationships without considering the time factor or by extrapolating from large groups where many in the test group (non-1M+ homes) weren’t subjected to the cause being tested for. cite.
What I object to in the NYT ‘report’ is that it didn’t get to any of the useful things, it pretty much was just rich-bashing. Which I’m sure is emotionally fulfilling or something. And they way this comment thread was going was just playing in to that.
There is a very interesting sociological discussion about how, in the eyes of some, the rich or corporations are rational or savvy etc while the poor are immoral for practicing the same behavior. No one expects a corporation to go beyond its contract because the counterparty didn’t anticipate some event. There is also an interesting discussing debunking the idea that this mess was caused by the government.
This is apparently not the discussions you wanted to have, but that doesn’t make it useless or uninteresting.
Stupid Republicans crow ha-ha about the CRA and Fannie and Freddie and tax benefits for homeowners while stupid Democrats tut-tut about the market. Both are missing the enormous part that their favored side of the private/public equation had in creating this mess
Im completely open to the idea that half-privitizing Fannie and Freddie while maintaining an implicit gmvt guarantee was profoundly stupid, or that the mortgage tax break is very badly focused on its stated intent (I think probably intentionally badly focused, insofar as its a great tax break for the wealthy). Having GSE investors make money on the upside while the government holds the bag on the downside is a recipie for disaster.
I also think that these are two very different critiques. That is, the argument against regulation is to produce better regulatory regimes. But the argument against the market is (or ought to be) a devestating blow to free-market worshippers. The market failed miserably, on a number of levels, and in a number of circumstances where they were not being compelled by the government to act. Banks and other institutions badly misjudged risk; the market as a whole, the ‘wisdom of the crowd’, totally &%$*ed up. So, where advocates of regulation can suggest improvements, advocates for the market are left denying that anything happened at all on the market side: somehow, the evil government forced AIG to become a pass-through guaranteer of massive amounts of risk. Somehow, the evil government forced banks and investors to continue to trust ratings agencies that had moved to a pay-for-ratings business model. etc.
“The article in question does NOT suggest that rich and poor people are being held to a different standard
Of course it does, “The rich are different: they are more ruthless”, “The rich and successful often come naturally to this sort of attitude”, etc.
What are you talking about? Those statements are statements about rich people. Neither the author nor the article show examples of the rich being held to different standards. It argues that the rich are behaving differently, but that isn’t the same proposition at all.
Now, please quit with the name calling, come up with actual argument, or I will ban you on your next comment.
Then I was told that it wasn’t ‘really’ about the statistics, it was about how rich people are bad, whaaaaa.
See, I understood the issue wasn’t whether rich people are good or bad but was the way the rich are excused as acting in their own rational self-interest while the poor are excoriated as immoral and irresponsible for doing exactly the same thing. (That latter point was repeated endlessly for the last year.)
So, it has nothing to do with the actual morality of rich or poor, it has to do with the broader perception of the morality: the rich are excused, the poor are not. Whether either is actually moral or immoral is not the point. You’re smart enough to get this, I think.
“But again, that wasn’t the question being asked.”
There wasn’t a question being asked. There was snark, a link to a poorly reasoned and statistically incompetent NYT article, and pretty much nothing even remotely related to the CRA or Fannie/Freddie.
And to the extent the question being asked is: what does this have to do with the CRA Fannie/Freddie critque, the proper answer is–pretty much nothing.
The reporter, and Eric, both seem to intend to convey that it has something to do with that. But it doesn’t. There are all sorts of good arguments against the Republican propaganda on that point, but this ain’t that.
“There is a very interesting sociological discussion about how, in the eyes of some, the rich or corporations are rational or savvy etc while the poor are immoral for practicing the same behavior.”
Speaking of things that weren’t the topic of the post….
But while we’re there, it isn’t supported in the NYT article either. He claims that the Core Logic data “suggests that the rich do not seem to have concerns about the civic good uppermost in their minds, especially when it comes to investment and second homes. Nor do they appear to be particularly worried about being sued by their lender or frozen out of future loans by Fannie Mae, possible consequences of default”.
The Core Logic data, says no such thing. It is data about the sales and defaults of houses. It doesn’t track the reasons for default, nor does it look into what people are worried about in terms of consequences of default.
This is reporting? I can think of a couple of other reasons why rich people might default at a higher rate after a stock market crash than poorer people, the most obvious one being that a stock market crash hits the wealth of richer people much more directly than it does poorer people.
And while we are engaging in fact-free speculation like Mr. Khater, how about this: the new rich extended greatly to buy houses at the very tip top of the bubble market. And some of these weren’t even the houses they were living in, but rather second homes. After the crash, much of their accessible wealth, and cash flow, was destroyed. Therefore they are more likely to be strapped to the extent that giving up the ridiculously overpriced home may be more immediately necessary than for lower-cost homes.
But anyway, if you want a sociological explanation for the difference, how about this one: rich people are more likely to realize that the problems of default aren’t as bad as many poorer people popularly think. So the difference isn’t in ‘shame’ so much as ‘understanding’.
The difference doesn’t have to be some moral magic about how ruthless rich people are. It could just be that rich people are more aware of the possibilities.
Anecdata: a lower middle class friend just had his father die. He had a serious heart condition, wasn’t likely to live, but they tried some interesting surgeries that were fantastically expensive. He told me that his mother was going to pay $100 a month or so on a negotiated settlement for like 20 years. She is disabled, has no job, and is living hand to mouth with no assets as is. I said: have you considered bankruptcy? He said: that will ruin her credit? I said: she has a 3 year old car that is paid off, and no house, and no chance of getting a house any time in the next 7 years. What is she using credit for that is worth paying on a medical bill that is impossible to pay?
He had never even considered the idea. Not because he is more or less moral. It just didn’t enter his mind. And maybe it won’t be the right decision. I don’t know. But a rich person would have thought about it because they have more knowledge.
When will some other front-pagers finally take some long-deserved and much-needed action and finally ban Sebastian? If the posting rules are to have any force, they have to apply to moderators as well. Or is that not the case?
Sebastian does remain the only front-pager who directly insults commenters, then threatens to ban them when they respond in kind. FWIW.
I’m pretty much the only front pager who engages commenters at all. But if we stick to facts and discussion we don’t really have much of a problem.
There are hundreds of places where you can preach to the choir. We don’t have to make this yet another one where the only thing that happens is snark.
That’s it? That’s your excuse for why the civility rules don’t apply to you?
I’ve seen you here and on other blogs where not just a few, but a lot of people have called you on your incivility. And frankly, what Buff said in response here:
Should have been said a long time ago. So here’s the situation: you want a “civil” place where “reasonable people can disagree”, and here’s a list of rules that everyone has to abide by? Fine. But that’s everyone, not “everyone except front pagers”, and certainly not “everyone except Sebastian who gets to interpret what’s uncivil and what’s not.”
How about it? Can someone in charge at least say publicly that Sebastian has had a strike declared against him for flouting the rules?
Oh yeah. Except for:Nor, I suppose, will we see the same amount of moral tut-tutting from the people that were extolling the virtues of personal responsibility, and the depravity of the decision to walk away from debts unrepaid, now that it’s shown that the wealthy are doing so in higher numbers.
Aw, who am I kidding. Of course we’ll see the same reproaches from our elites. This inconvenient fact regarding the actual identity of the groups that are doing most of the abandoning will just be ignored, and the poor and minorities scapegoated some more.
Eyeballing, that’s about half of the post. So maybe not so much.
The difference doesn’t have to be some moral magic about how ruthless rich people are.
Echoing RobW, I think the interesting sociological question is how some people view the poor and middle class defaulting on debt as immortal, but corporations and wealthy people are viewed as merely rationally taking advantage of their options.
But while we’re there, it isn’t supported in the NYT article either.
Actually, I would argue that the NYT article is more symptomatic of this sort of thing- it takes a shot or two, but mostly just observes that these are businesspeople making business decisions. But I think Eric cited it on the first point about GSEs and the CRA anyway, not the second point about the the morality of walking away from obligations. It doesn’t have to speak to every aspect of his post if he’s only using it to support one point.
But anyway, if you want a sociological explanation for the difference, how about this one: rich people are more likely to realize that the problems of default aren’t as bad as many poorer people popularly think. So the difference isn’t in ‘shame’ so much as ‘understanding’.
Im not looking for a sociological explanation of the differences in default rates; it’s probably too complicated to assign to a single cause anyway. Rich people could be defaulting at lower rates and still be given the ‘corporate exemption’ on the morality of defaulting. Two completely different issues.
“Rich people could be defaulting at lower rates and still be given the ‘corporate exemption’ on the morality of defaulting. Two completely different issues.”
Have we established that rich people get the ‘corporate exemption’ on a regular basis anyway? That really isn’t my experience. My experience is that they are more likely to get called greedy soul-sucking bastards when they default, while poorer people get more sympathy for being in a crappy situation.
Maybe we just run in different circles, but that is what I see happening in mine.
How about it? Can someone in charge at least say publicly that Sebastian has had a strike declared against him for flouting the rules?
I think that he’s discussing the issue along different lines than the original post did, but I think that’s a long way from an intentional threadjack- he’s still talking about mortages, GSEs, etc. And he’s willing to engage on those points, so he’s not trolling either.
Remember, this is a forum that is considerably more hostile to conservatives than to liberals. I don’t post anymore on right-leaning sites bc the signal-to-noise is too low for me.
I do agree that belittling a questioning of differing ethical standards for rich and poor as “whining” and “class warfare” and “the kind of cheesy topic that I’d expect on Cosmopolitan magazine” isn’t productive. But these are opinions, and interjecting different opinions isn’t an offense, even if the opinions don’t seem very useful to you.
That, and ObWi has an ecosystem. eg Thullen says stuff that would ordinarily be out of bounds and gets away with it, because everyone here gets his shtick (and he’s hilarious). Seb will debate the finer points of an issue with you for days if you come back with logical arguments and data. He’s a valuable member of the community.
There wasn’t a question being asked. There was snark, a link to a poorly reasoned and statistically incompetent NYT article, and pretty much nothing even remotely related to the CRA or Fannie/Freddie.
And to the extent the question being asked is: what does this have to do with the CRA Fannie/Freddie critque, the proper answer is–pretty much nothing.
See, I wish you’d led with that. I basically agree- this isn’t really useful data on the CRA/GSE front. It’s too broad, not focused in time, and there’s better data that’s been available for a while that get to the heart of this rather than trying to look at it tangentially- I don’t mind a tangential look in principle, sometimes that’s the only data you’ve got.
But when you started talking about the relative size of the two markets, you were apparently making an entirely different argument about whether the 1M+ segment couldve caused the crash. Im not sure where that came from, but I still don’t think it got us anywhere, and trying to figure out how that fit into a critique of the original statement was confusing- I didn’t get until you said it explicitly that you weren’t trying to address that argument so much as produce a more interesting or relevant one. Or react to some implied argument that “the rich caused the crash”, but I don’t think anyone was making that argument.
I’m pretty much the only front pager who engages commenters at all.
Seb, do you even read this blog from one day to the next, in the gaps between your occasional appearances?
Or maybe you use some definition of “engages” that I’m too dense to understand. If so, feel free to enlighten me.
On a quick count, since the first of April there have been the following post tallies for ObWi front-pagers and guests:
Eric: 93
von: 11
Seb: 5
Robert Mackey: 4
Jacob: 3
Cheryl Rofer: 2
Lindsay Beyerstein: 0 (why is her name still on the masthead, remind me?)
Picking a random post of Eric’s written in June, there were 55 comments, 11 of which were Eric’s.
But again, maybe that’s not “engaging” commenters, by your definition?
And FWIW, I can’t remember the last time Eric threatened to ban someone with whom he was “engaged” in the comments. By contrast, there’s today, when you reminded someone else of the posting rules (for what offense it’s hard to tell without appealing to a double standard) not long after you arrived, and threatened a ban a few comments later. There was also a fairly recent brouhaha in which you threatened to ban Phil almost as soon as you both showed up on the scene. For someone who is here so seldom, yet has the power of a front-pager to ban people, you ought to work on the length of your fuse. IMHO.
Have we established that rich people get the ‘corporate exemption’ on a regular basis anyway? That really isn’t my experience. My experience is that they are more likely to get called greedy soul-sucking bastards when they default, while poorer people get more sympathy for being in a crappy situation.
Ok, at least now we’re engaging on the issue. I think that the unstated yang of this argument’s yin is that there are some people who always blame the rich for everything, just as there are those who always blame the poor.
I do think there are people who hold the viewpoint that Eric is mocking- eg McArdle, whom I have a hard time imagining writing a moral critique of corporations that default on loans as a business choice. Or Rick Santelli, who famously decried “the ones who drink the water” as the mortgage defaulters and “the ones who carry the water” as the ones who were keeping up with their mortgages.
In general, I don’t think that the rich get called greedy soul-sucking bastards for defaulting on their houses. They do get called that, but mostly IMO for other reasons. And certainly, while some people decry corporations for their “heartlessness” etc, it’s a left-wing critique that is often ridiculed by the mainstream rather than one that’s endemic throughout society.
But let’s just stick with the knowns: McArdle is an advocate of the free market, rational selfish decision making, and corporations whose existence is predicated on fiduciary responsibility to do things like default on loans when this makes business sense. And she is a person who wrote a column about common people defaulting on loans, with the attitude that they were immoral pieces of crap, tearing down the pillars of their own society.
And, I think, it’s tough to argue that she’s alone in thinking these two things.
There’s a lot wrong with what you said, which was basically advocating some sort of exceptionalism (which kind of defeats the purpose of having civility rules). But this was a Huh!?!?!?:
You really seriously believe that accusing someone of “whining” isn’t uncivil or impolite because it’s just an opinion? So that if I accused you of being a lying dishonest hack, that’s not really uncivil, because that’s just an opinion? We have different ideas of what’s uncivil. But that’s not really the point; let’s go back to what Duff said:
Notice that he wasn’t calling Sebastian names, and that what he was stating was just an opinion, so by your reasoning, there was no incivility displayed at all. What did Sebastian say in response?
So, you were saying? Either way you want to play this one, Sebastian deserves a strike at the very least, either for being insulting, or for threatening to ban a person over behavior that did not violate the guidelines.
In any event, given that front pagers can – and do – violate the civility guidelines, what procedures are in place to enforce the rules when this happens? I think the regular commentators deserve an answer from the front-pagers on this one.
Which regular commenters are you talking about? Mr. Clarity has a total of 6 comments in the history of the website, four of them complaining about me here. And so far as I can tell, you have 3, all of them complaining about me here.
The only person who is even close to a regular commenter here is JanieM.
It is way off topic, but if I seem more hostile, I think it isn’t just me, but that the entire environment that has changed. I was on topic, and very much willing to talk about specific evidence. Not only that, but I was pretty fair about that evidence, giving things that supported my argument, and things which didn’t support it as well. I also linked directly to the evidence that I found.
For that I pretty much got crapped on. And the Cosmopoliton comment didn’t come until after I got crapped on.
And that pretty much has been the tone in the past couple of months. In the last few threads I’ve commented on I’ve been attacked for not noticing obvious things that in fact I raised first on the thread, for advocating views that I don’t even come close to having, and for supporting torture when my record on that is at least clear as pretty much anyone this side of katherine.
And yes, maybe we shouldn’t let John Thullen get away with so much, but I don’t notice because I rarely read them–he has a particular style which is immediately recognizeable, and when I’m not in the mood for jokes I don’t read them. But now that I did on this thread, I do kind of think that they lend a poisonous air to the threads if it makes people think that it is the kind of discourse we look for.
But to be completely frank, I think that considering that any comment I make is likely to be interpreted in the least charitable way possible at least twice, that I will have views attributed to me that I actively and publicly disagree with, and that everything I say will be picked apart in a way that never happens to the liberal front pagers including wild speculations about my personal life and frankly vicious insinuations about the *real* reasons that I hold certain views, I do relatively well at keeping my cool most of the time.
Now that I’ve looked up the history and IP addresses of the person here who did it, I suspect I was just trolled. Which is unfortunate, and I probably should have ignored it.
But this is supposed to be a community about discussion. Maybe we don’t care about that anymore. But it seems to me that there are hundreds if not thousands of places where you can just go to throw apples.
Sebastian, there is a contradiction when argue that it is only newbies who are complaining, and the commentariat is attacking you. I’m going from memory, but the people who engage you tend not to have a long history of commenting on this blog unless they, as you suggest, are actually oldtimers who are trolling you. If it is someone or someones who are doing that, I strongly support you saying ‘gee, weren’t you so and so, and why are you changing your nick?’ In fact, speaking for myself, I’d strongly support you if you said ‘the commenter formerly going by xxx changed his name to yyy and I’ve banned him’ If you don’t feel comfortably wielding the ban hammer, at least link up the names and let the chips fall where they may. I don’t really care whose ‘side’ they are on, please link them up. I don’t want to engage someone who is going to use throw away identities, and I have a strong feeling all the other regulars don’t want to either.
I can’t be sure in this case. The IP address is similar to that of the IP address of a commenter who changed his IP address regularly but within a certain range but who hasn’t been around in a long while. Similar but not identical, and could be co-incidence. So I can suspect but not prove. Which isn’t enough to ban at this point so far as I’m concerned.
The “regular” commentators I’m referring to are the ones who don’t have the privileges of front-pagers.
So I’ll ask again: what provision is there for banning a front-pager when they violate civility standards – which you certainly have, and by your own admission at that.
If the answer is “nothing”, then there really isn’t much reason to read this blog is there (I only read this thread because of some cross-posting from Crooked Timber on zombies.) Certainly the so-called civility rules don’t mean anything special when they are so arbitrarily enforced.
Barb, the general posting rules are:
Be reasonably civil.
No profanity. For the record, ‘hell’, ‘damn’ and ‘pissed’ are not considered ‘profanity’ for the purposes of this rule; also for the record, the more offensive racial slurs and epithets will be deemed to ‘profanity’ for the purposes of this rule
Don’t disrupt or destroy meaningful conversation for its own sake.
Do not consistently abuse or vilify other posters for its own sake.
The standards for reasonably civil have always been fairly loose, but we’ve been lax recently on the last two, a laxity I’m not really interested in continuing.
I’ve been reasonably civil, with both of the commenters in this thread who have had virtually no history on this site except for gratuitously attacking me on this thread.
Sebastian, your 1:21 is a long plaint about the deterioration of civility at Obsidian Wings. It seems to me that there are several relevant factors that haven’t been mentioned in the discussion of this topic.
One is that you yourself are a front-pager of very long standing, and yet — from the point of view of a reader of the blog — you are gone far more of the time than you are here. There is no way to know whether you read the blog on days when you don’t comment, but compared to Eric, the days when you show up (by posting or commenting) are few and far between.
Based on the numbers I tallied last night, Eric has offered almost four times as many posts as everyone else put together (other front-pagers plus guests) (93 posts) between the beginning of April and now. He is also almost invariably visible in the comment threads of his own posts and everyone else’s. In the same time period, you have offered 5 posts, and a quick glance through June (I really shouldn’t be wasting time on this…but it’s a slow day for those of us who don’t give a (take your pick of expletives) about the World Cup) suggests that you are around in comment threads maybe a quarter of the time, based on the number of days when your name appears.
So you are gone far more than you’re here, and yet when you’re here you often end up bitching about the tone and threatening people with the posting rules and with banning — far more often than anyone else I’ve seen in my two and a half years of hanging around. (Yes, people give you a hard time. Some of it is unjustified, some of it is somewhat earned, IMO.)
I have two conclusions from all this.
One is that you’re one of the owners of the blog. You — collectively with the other owners — are ultimately responsible for setting and maintining the level of civility you want. But if you’re unhappy with the way it’s going, it seems to me that your first conversation should be with your fellow blog owners rather than with the commentariat. Being here only sporadically, but then bitching because it isn’t the place you want it to be when you do come around, is extremely counter-productive.
But that brings up the second thing, which is that if you’re only going to do five posts in three months, and hang around only sporadically beyond that, if I were one of your partners in this enterprise I would be saying hey, if you want that we should guide the place in a different direction from the way it’s been going, sure, let’s talk about it, but you’re going to have to show up more and carry your share of the load. I would also say that it’s insane to think that one person, with a family and a job to boot, can effectively manage the place alone.
I’m not making these comparisons to praise Eric at your expense, I’m making them as a practical illustration of where I think some of the things that frustrate you are coming from. Obsidian Wings is much less vibrant, varied, and lively than it was when I discovered it in early 2008; since then the election has come and gone and hilzoy and publius have retired from the scene, along with quite a few commenters who were part of the backbone of the place (Gary Farber, Nell, and ThatleftturninABQ come first to mind, but there are others). Various guests and one new alleged front-pager have shown up, but Eric is still carrying the vast majority of the load himself. Where the responsibility for the situation lies is not for me to know, but again I would say that it certainly lies with you more than it lies with the commenting community, and if you want it to change you should be talking to Eric and von before you talk to us. (Lindsay is a phantom and as far as I’m concerned has nothing to do with Obsidian Wings. Where Publius stands at this point, you may know but I don’t.)
I’m also not saying that you “should” post more, or comment more. Maybe you don’t have time. I’m just saying that if you want to have a major role in shaping the place, you should expect to take a major portion of the load of managing it. (At least that is how I’d feel if I were involved in a common enterprise with some partners.)
In the midst of all that, your perceptions of the blog as it actually functions are so weird that I’m still incredulous, and still waiting for you to explain what you meant last night. To say, as you did, that “I’m pretty much the only front pager who engages commenters at all” is so far askew from my experience of the place that I have to wonder if we’re in alternate universes.
One thing we agree do about is that the tone is often unpleasant. I have been weaning myself away from it, in part because there is (or was as of a few weeks ago, when I started cutting back) just too much ill feeling, and in part because there are too many threads where people I consider to be trolls essentially take over the threads. It doesn’t do much good to stop reading, let’s say, Jay Jerome, if every time he comments other people bite the hooks and treat his inanities as if they were worthy of reply. Whole threads go down the tubes that way, and I need to reclaim my ability to find better ways of spending my time, even if it’s just other blogs, never mind here (ht to Russell, as usual). Which is where, metaphorically speaking, I’m headed.
I read almost all the posts and most of the comments.
I rarely see eric now, nor publius before willing to go into the detailed back and forth about specific facts, theories and questions that I do, even still on a fairly regular basis. For the most part their comments have always been of the “I agree with russell” or “That’s interesting” variety. Which isn’t even a criticism, they tend to just post and leave it which is a perfectly valid mode.
“I’m not making these comparisons to praise Eric at your expense, I’m making them as a practical illustration of where I think some of the things that frustrate you are coming from. Obsidian Wings is much less vibrant, varied, and lively than it was when I discovered it in early 2008”
I think this is where the modes of conversation make a very big difference. Eric for the most part seems willing to post and move on to the next post. My style has always been to post and discuss. One of the major reasons I have had trouble being willing to post, is that the ‘discuss’ part seems to have long vanished from here.
At this point, I can’t even comment without extreme bomb throwing immediately being dropped on me, and with very little attention to the content of my comments. This has been especially evident in three or four of the last posts I commented on where I am the one who raises particular issues, only to have, many comments later, it implied (often with a an implication that I’m being deceptive or deceitful) that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I allegedly ignored a point that I was the first one to raise in the thread.
Further, historically it *feels to me* like we had a more police your own concept where even the commenters would call out those on their own side who went too far. That made it so that front pagers rarely had to ban people who were in a disagreement with them, because other commenters and other front pagers would call them out.
Now, maybe there are things I can do to make that better. Or maybe that just isn’t going to happen anymore and obsidianwings was just a fleeting and failed experiment.
I don’t know.
Thanks for the thoughtful response, Sebastian.
I won’t prolong this, but I want to offer a counter to the “failed experiment” phrase.
It might have been an administrator for the Small Business Administration — in fact, it might have been Susan Collins when she was New England regional director of same — who said, when asked about the number of small businesses that fail each year, that for many small business owners, “failure” is in effect graduation.
Just because something doesn’t last forever, or doesn’t fulfill people’s original hopes, doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Be here now and all that. (Ever the child of the sixties….)
Besides, it ain’t dead yet. You have a pretty persistent core of conservative commenters gadflying around the place, despite the hard time they’re routinely given.
But I said I wouldn’t prolong this, so off I go.
Sebastian, a couple of points.
First, the pattern with me, and it seems like with many others, is that they are only going to engage with people who seem sincere and are not just dropping by. The threshold for passing that mark is admittedly becoming higher, but if someone comes in with a new name, I’m not going to pay much attention to them.
Second, in relation to that, if there are people who are coming in with new nicks, but are flogging the same old crap, they ought to be kicked out. And when it is identified by the commentariat and nothing is said or done, it makes the process of policing one’s own a bit of a fool’s errand.
Third, without knowing which threads or who you are talking about, any discussion about the problems is abstract. Since I don’t know who you are talking about, I will just observe that with some of these threads that are on 3 or 4 pages, it is not only easy to miss early statements, it is extremely likely. So if you are upset that you identified something in one of your first comments and then, much later, you are accused of ignoring it, there is potentially a non-malevolent explanation.
Finally, if you want the commentariat to tone things down, you have to give some space for it to happen. I’m assuming that this thread is an example of what you are displeased with, but if you look at your responses, they usually come within 20 or so minutes of the comment you take exception to. I don’t think that’s really enough time to expect the kind of intervention that you seem to desire. Also, when there is a flurry of rapid fire exchanges, I think the natural human reaction is to avoid rushing in, especially when there is no acknowledged brief to be arbiter. As a general rule, when I see someone commenting 2 or more times consecutively, I feel like its a waste of time to try and discuss, because they have clearly got their dander up.
There’s a lot wrong with what you said, which was basically advocating some sort of exceptionalism
I take it you don’t mean “wrong” in the sense that Im not accurately describing how things work here, but “wrong” in that you don’t like it or think it’s fair. It works pretty well. But I am not so much advocating exceptionalism as suggesting that there’s a lot of nuance in the way the rules are perceived and enforced by the community. I’ve seen Thullen seemingly advocate violence on a number of occasions. And it’s not that advocating violence is Ok, it’s that we all understand where John is coming from.
So it’s not so much that history entitles one to step further over the line, but that history is a good guideline that a person is actually trying to eg contribute rather than derail.
So, you were saying? Either way you want to play this one, Sebastian deserves a strike at the very least, either for being insulting, or for threatening to ban a person over behavior that did not violate the guidelines.
I don’t agree with Seb’s threat either- bluntly, I think he was wrong in his characterization of the second part of the post & didn’t help matters. And I think that, rather than engage Duff’s legitimate criticism, Seb accused him of trolling. otoh, I think Duff’s original comment is also wrong: the statistical analysis is clearly part of the post. As is the separate claim that rich peoples’ defaults are perhaps treated differently than poor people’s defaults. Duff claimed that only the latter was the topic that could be discussed.
So I think they were both wrong: Duff insisting that the post is about separate treatment of rich and poor, and Seb insisting that the post is about statistics (or, if it’s not, then it’s cheesy, whining, etc). Neither is trolling afaict, and both are making accusations of bad faith.
[nb of course, if Duff is an alias for a known bad actor, then that’s different; known bad actors don’t get elbow room].
If I learned anything from hilzoy, it was that being reasonable when other people aren’t not only has a higher success ratio, it also lets one come out smelling like roses while the other person looks the fool. Not that I always practice this, but it was still a good lesson.
But there isn’t any kind of strike system here; if you don’t agree with a front-pager, then just say so. Politely is best. I’ve seen that work. I’ve not seen accusations of bad faith work yet. Assumptions of good faith go a long way towards civil discourse. And, like I said, even if it doesn’t work you’ll look like the voice of reason rather than someone dumping gas on the fire.
You really seriously believe that accusing someone of “whining” isn’t uncivil or impolite because it’s just an opinion? So that if I accused you of being a lying dishonest hack, that’s not really uncivil, because that’s just an opinion?
I am not teh kitteh, but afaict “reasonably civil” goes something like this: add to the conversation, and don’t gratuitously insult. There is a lot of stepping on the line with saying someone’s idea is “just crazy” etc. If, in the process of developing a good argument, you add a little spice, that’s Ok. But just using invective will get you tossed.
People do actually accuse each other of lying here, but as above, it’s best done as part of a reasoned refutation rather than just plain accusation. And “lying dishonest hack” would probably be over the line in any circumstance, altho more likely to provoke a warning than a ban.
This has been especially evident in three or four of the last posts I commented on where I am the one who raises particular issues, only to have, many comments later, it implied (often with a an implication that I’m being deceptive or deceitful) that I don’t know what I’m talking about because I allegedly ignored a point that I was the first one to raise in the thread.
If I believed in karma, I’d believe this was retribution for all the times you’ve told people they don’t understand their own posts or their own arguments. But I don’t believe in karma, so I’m at a loss to explain it, aside from saying, “Yeah, it sure sucks to be told that, huh?”
“Besides, it ain’t dead yet. You have a pretty persistent core of conservative commenters gadflying around the place, despite the hard time they’re routinely given.”
Of all of this discussion this is the part that is rapidly becoming less true. Other than a few financial discussions Brett participates in, many of us have taken to watching the progressive contingent talk among yourselves.
There was a time when I could count on some level of moderation in the most intense discussions, but no more. The exception is that Eric is very good about direct crude attacks. That doesn’t prevent people here from engaging in ridicule and name calling, then excusing it for each other. I, of course, am not free to name names because that would require hours of search and cut and paste to prove the most obvious points.
I have been called every form of epithet that can be imagined (from stupid to racist to homophobic) in the name of “you must be X that to have that opinion”, no general objection from other commenters, minimal from the kitty.
It was perfectly predictable to see the string of immediate and mutually supportive comments blasting Seb, that is the way it happens.
Most disappointing is that, out of all of those 100’s of blogs one could participate in, I chose this in the first place because I am completely uninterested in the me too rants of most conservative sites or the immediate hostility of most liberal ones. This one used to be the only site where both viewss seemed respected.
Not so much anymore, so, as pointed out elsewhere, no more Camelot.
To most men , experience is like the stern light of a ship which il-luminates only the track it has passed. Do you think so?
Would somebody please explain to me the difference between “disrespect” and disagreement?
I only ask for curiosity. I am not in the least inclined to pretend to agree with anybody merely to demonstrate “respect”, or “civility”, or “moderation”. If that’s the price of admission to “discussion”, it’s too rich for me.
Short of pretend-agreement, though, what makes for “respect”? What forms of disagreement are respectful enough to pass muster with people who are outnumbered in a particular forum?
–TP
Here’s the heads-up I gave Marty last year.
Well, Marty, how does it feel to be in the belly of the progressive beast. To use an Obamaism, I’m empathetic.
You should have long ago figured out that here every person who substantially disagrees with or totally discounts the progressive agenda, including federal government dominating matters related to healthcare, education, energy and the environment, will be a lying, fear-mongering, bullsh*tter. The progressives have all the facts and the rest of us don’t have any. Any democrat in the Congress who has a conservative bone in his body needs a primary challenge. Republicans have no integrity but little is said about democrats who obviously have such problems, (Reid, Rangel, Dodd, Jefferson, Franks).
I agree with your point that Grassley is not a liar but a politician expressing a political view, as are most republicans and democrats, for that matter. I don’t consider progressives liars or lacking integrity, but only that they have political views that are essentially collectivist or tribal or some other word that expresses a view that is against the concept of an individual’s personal liberty. There will never be a way to reach common ground between those who believe in individual liberty and those who believe in the power of the collective.
Posted by: GoodOleBoy | September 01, 2009 at 03:21 PM
Oh come on, a belief in individual liberty and a belief in collective ability are hardly mutually exclusive. It is possible to believe that there are opportunities to do things collectively without fundamentally infringing on individual liberty. A corporation is a collective enterprise. A government is a collective enterprise whether it’s a village council or the US Federal Government. A church is a collective endeavor. A family is a collective endeavor (and in fact tends to be the main source of limitations on personal liberty because of the web of relationships and responsibilities it involves you in).
Sebastian, there are one or two people here who are regular commenters who I think have been responding to you and to some other conservatives here in a way that is rude and unproductive and that has been worse in recent months, I agree. (It’s possible that some of you think that includes me. I hope not, and if I have been, I regret it and would invite criticism next time it occurs.) But this particular thread doesn’t seem to me to contain one of those attacks. Still, next time I see one I will say something.
Someone with the nickname GoodOleBoy decrying tribalism is comedy gold. And it’s interesting that you seem to conflate the ‘progressive agenda’ (which seems obvious to you, but the notion of agenda requires that something be agreed upon, and historically, the left has a hard time agreeing on anything) with the ‘Democratic party’. And quoting from that Grassley thread is a nice touch, since that is where Marty insisted to all and sundry that any kind of nationalization of medical care was socialism, pure and simple. It’s like I’m watching a parade of own goals.
“There will never be a way to reach common ground between those who believe in individual liberty and those who believe in the power of the collective.”
I’ve got my own roads. Whaddayou got?
We need some checkpoints to weed out those who use my roads to pursue their individual liberty.
I rarely see eric now, nor publius before willing to go into the detailed back and forth about specific facts, theories and questions that I do, even still on a fairly regular basis. For the most part their comments have always been of the “I agree with russell” or “That’s interesting” variety. Which isn’t even a criticism, they tend to just post and leave it which is a perfectly valid mode.
I definitely engage more substantively on foreign policy threads because that is my area of expertise, and I am capable of engaging in more substantive discussions.
If you look at those threads, you will see me participating, perhaps too much, with lengthy cited arguments and theoretical discourse.
“I only ask for curiosity. I am not in the least inclined to pretend to agree with anybody merely to demonstrate “respect”, or “civility”, or “moderation”. If that’s the price of admission to “discussion”, it’s too rich for me.”
Hmmm, respect is admittedly kind of a ‘know it when I see it’ kind of thing but I don’t think the crossover with ‘agreement’ is necessarily very strong. But maybe I can give some examples:
A) If one of your main modes of argument requires guessing what your opponent is ‘really’ thinking, and especially if that is more about motive than other items, that is more about disrespect than discussion. It often works by rhetorically negating the idea that the person even believes their own thoughts. E.g. “You claim that you don’t like late term abortions because of concerns for the baby, but *in reality* you just hate women”. It lacks respect because it doesn’t listen to what the person says and it attacks them in an irrefutably circular way: “You’re in denial. No I am not. SEEE!!!! You deny it, that proves you’re in denial”.
Now it isn’t IMPOSSIBLE that someone is in denial. Denial does actually exist. But you better have a pretty darn excellent case, because it is a discussion ending nuke that becomes a complete derailing of the argument. You’ve now turned it into a attack/defense on the person’s essential character instead of whatever you were actually talking about.
B) If your main argument requires that you associate the other person with some outside group, and further that additional views attributed to that group must be associated to them (often which they do not apparently believe or sometimes which they have directly said they don’t believe) in order for your argument to succeed, you are probably exhibiting disrespect rather than argument. Now I’m guilty of using this one from time to time. It is very human and normal to think in groups and group associations. But like many human impulses, just because they are natural doesn’t mean we should always indulge in them.
C) If your comment is designed more with the effect it will have on people who already agree with you than on people who disagree with you, you may be engaging more in disrespect than in discussion. This one is probably trickier. Maybe I should have said “designed more with the emotional effect it will have on people who already agree with you than on the intellectual effect it will have on people who disagree with you” but while I think that captures something important, it is also more limited than what I’m trying to say.
This one is also very human, as it is a natural tendency to want to impress our in-group rather than caring as much about what our out-group thinks. In this particular forum I lucked out because there are lots of people who disagree with me so chances to impress an in-group are rare. I won’t claim that I’m psychologically insulated from this problem, but I’m situationally not as prone to it here.
This last one is also complicated by the fact that it might be appropriate in some cases–you may believe that your chances of convincing are low but your chances of clarifying some important point that my be useful/demonstrative for your own side is high. That is fine, and not disrespectful.
Now something to note is that these modes of attack are very normal and human. I fully expect that from time to time nearly everyone who has long discussions will engage in them. We should try not to, but being the beasts we are, we probably will be the beasts we are at least some of the time.
But I think at obsidianwings we have tended to *try* to engage more in the respectful mode than in the disrespectful mode.
So what I get from the responses to my repeated questions is that Sebastian can violate the guidelines whenever he feels like and suffer no consequences, that he will ban or threaten to ban other people for behavior he engages in, and that there are good reasons why some people are more equal than others when it comes to the guidelines.
I’d say that you’ve just got the answer why the atmosphere has gotten more poisonous. Either these civility standards are enforced impartially at all times with no regard as to the status of the commentator (ie, that includes front-pagers as well) or some people will make a mockery of those standards to the considerable and well-earned resentment of others.
Sebastian – you need to clean up your act. What you did up above with your threatened ban is inexcusable. If you perceive people as ganging up on you, which is also your complaint over at Crooked Timber, maybe you better look to yourself to find fault. As it is, you can’t even admit that threatening to ban people while you are engaging in the exact same behavior at the exact same time is wrong.
I’ll be happy to look more closely at myself. Though to be honest the lack of introspective self-criticism is not one of my many many faults. [Paralytic self-criticism, more likely].
BTW, I think you are confusing civility standards with discussion standards. The goal is excellent discussion. Civility is one of the components.
Barb: Either these civility standards are enforced impartially at all times with no regard as to the status of the commentator
By and large the civility standards are “enforced” not at all or by mild reprimands offered as often as not by people who are just regular commenters.
There is a thing you might call “process trolling” in which someone endlessly demands a more consistent and objective and impartial enforcement of the rules, and spends a lot of time trying to make the case that one or another person has violated those rules and deserves to be punished. But blogs, and online discussions in general, have no due process, no courts, no judges and juries, law enforcement is random and easily circumvented, and the long-term significance of any given comment or thread is nil. Absent some actual harm – not in evidence here – it is a total waste of time to try to arbitrate that kind of thing. This isn’t the New York Times. It isn’t even Wikipedia.
I say this next thing in no way speaking in anything resembling an “official” capacity, but just as an opinion developed over 15 years of arguing online: if you don’t like the type of discussion that is taking place somewhere, you can do one of two things about it:
1. Leave, or:
2. Be the change you want to see.
Notably absent from that list is, “3. Complain bitterly about how everyone else is not being the change you want to see.”
I am not a fan of process trolls. There ain’t no justice and there especially ain’t no justice on discussion threads on the internet, and demanding that someone produce justice where none can be had is boring and a waste of time and energy.
Of course, in even commenting this much on this total non-issue, I am engaging in not being the change I would want to see while simultaneously advising other people to change. Sucks to be me.
I am now more thankful that lawn maintenance and sprinker repair (it says “sprocket”, not “socket”) kept me away from this thread than I ever could have dreamed, sweating in the 95-degree July heat in Central Florida.
Regarding Sebastian’s actions in this thread: ObWi has the right to handle these things (or not) as it sees fit, and that the advice of others in this regard, however well-intentioned, might go unheeded even if not unheard. It’s not that we don’t care, it’s that we don’t care as much as you do.
We’ve never been widely adored for our grievance-handling process, if you can call it that, so none of this should come as a disappointment. Our policy has ever been: if you have a serious issue, please address it to the kitty. And we mean that. But the kitty, as kittys are wont to do, spends a great deal of time sleeping and playing with balls of yarn and whatnot, and might want to spend some time considering its next move.
Plus, hardly any of us are the boss of any of the rest of us, except everyone is the boss of me. Including Sebastian.
Now, go forth and spend a great deal less of your time, collectively, in righteous dudgeon. Lighten up, for crying out loud.
Shrug. When a front-pager is threatening to ban someone for some behavior that they themselves are engaging it – and at the exact same time at that – I’d say you’ve gone a little beyond being concerned about “process standards” (Lovely euphemism, that.) That sort of arbitrariness and hypocrisy is something I’d be more likely to associate with Red State or Little Green Footballs.
And while I see no problem with calling people on their very visible hypocrisy, I’m not trying to change the system either. I’m merely giving one explanation why some people are observing that the atmosphere has gotten more poisonous. Come to that, maybe that’s part of the reason why Hilzoy, one of the big draws of this blog, left.
Ah well; I’m an infrequent visitor. I only saw this because of some cross-posting about zombies on some other blogs. I was just shocked that someone would so obviously violate the civility standards in such a gross fashion and that people like you would think that this is a total non-issue.
I’m having trouble understanding you Barb. CrookedTimber (where you say you frequent) exercises quite a bit more freedom in banning people than we do here.
I’m hardly in a dudgeon. I’m merely pointing out that the civility guidelines . . . aren’t really that. And that’s fine, really it is; lots of other blog owners are very upfront about capricious nature of the process.
But then they don’t pretend that they are enforcing the “civility guidelines” either. They just up front say that they can ban any commentator for whatever reason they deem fit – or none at all. That’s what you seem to be implying that you have here. You just don’t want to call it that, and want to pretend instead that some sort of impartial standard is being enforced, when all indications are that even gross lapses are overlooked . . . so long as it’s certain people doing them and not others.
Whatever. As I said, maybe that’s one of the reasons you lost Hilzoy. Ah well, I’m done shedding light on this matter. I’m just glad you finally admitted what’s really going on.
No, I didn’t say that. I said that you have a certain reputation over there that would seem to involve repeatedly violating the civility guidelines posted here, and that you frequently complain that people there are “ganging up on you” (Trust me, when you go on about something like the researchers who were cleared in Climategate still being somehow guilty of some nebulous charge, or that AGW hasn’t been proven, the overwhelming majority of commentators there are going to be “ganging up on you”.)
But come to that, they don’t self-righteously pretend that it’s because someone is flaunting the “civility guidelines” either.
Barb: maybe that’s part of the reason why Hilzoy, one of the big draws of this blog
Attributing fictitious opinions in support of your views to people not in attendance does not constitute argument in good faith.
In related news, Barack Obama thinks you’re all jerks and I’m right about everything, maybe.
Yes, they really are just that: guidelines. We just don’t go banning folks for the occasional infraction.
Maybe. Maybe not. We could engrave those on opposite sides of a metal disk and toss the coin.
hilzoy never seemed daunted by the occasional blogfight, though. And given that she owned the blog at the time, I rather think she would have preferred to have done something about it, rather than just give up.
I think you’re giving hilzoy a bit of rhetorical shortchange, here.
Reading through the lurker emails, you just might be right about that.
Jacob, I didn’t attribute any motives to anyone. I do know that when the atmosphere of a group goes bad, this is enough to make a lot of people leave. And saying that “maybe” that’s one of the reasons Hilzoy left is not attributing fictitious a opinion to anyone. I’m certainly willing to admit that it’s speculation and may not be true. That’s what I said in the first place.
You, on the other hand, by apparently categorically denying that this could ever be the case, really are attributing fictitious opinions to someone. Are you really saying that this person could not possibly have left because of the sour turn the tone of the comments were taking? If so, are you then arguing in bad faith . . . precisely what you are accusing me of?
In any event, it’s interesting that you want to accuse me of this while at the same time giving a free pass to someone who by their own lights violated civility standards.
Sigh. DNFTPT
There you go again. Nope, the “guidelines” – something much touted to promote “civil discourse” – are just the usual capricious and uneven whim of the administrators. Nothing wrong with that. But I won’t pretend that this is any different from elsewhere. May I suggest that you call it what you want, and let me call it what I want, a sort of live and let live solution?
But I won’t pretend that this is any different from elsewhere.
Please, do not pretend on our behalf. Barb. The occasional commenter who has, actually, never commented on this site until this very post/thread.
May I suggest that you call it what you want, and let me call it what I want, a sort of live and let live solution?
As long as we all agree to pronounce it “throatwobbler mangrove.”
You’re a very silly man, and I’m not going to interview you.
Please, do not pretend on our behalf.!?!?! That doesn’t make any sense. The second sentence doesn’t seem to apropos of anything either, given that I’ve already said that I rarely appear here let alone comment, and in fact only commented on what looked like an amazingly egregious case of bad behavior and everything else has followed from that single comment.
You post doesn’t seem to communicate much of anything at all that furthers the conversation, at least, to me it doesn’t.
As I’ve already said, why don’t we just agree to let you call it what you want, and let me call it what I want, and be generally tolerant? That’s not too much to ask, is it?
As I’ve already said, why don’t we just agree to let you call it what you want, and let me call it what I want, and be generally tolerant? That’s not too much to ask, is it?
As I’ve already said, as long as we all agree to pronounce it “throatwobbler mangrove.”
I’ve been following this site for about five years and almost never comment outside of goodbyes, congratulations, and condolences. Since I don’t participate in the community aspect I normally would not try to offer a solution, but since it seems so obvious: you need a more conservative front pager. I remember hilzoy saying that you were looking before she left, and that it was difficult, but has that thought been dropped?
Sebastian is absolutely right that it has come near impossible for a conservative commentator to offer an alternative point of view without taking it on as full time job. Fortunately Eric is amazingly reasonable and even takes time to link and briefly discuss posts from a conservative, or at least not traditionally liberal, perspective. This place would have gone under long ago if not for him. But of course he never links to conservative arguments he disagrees with unless they are absurd. I think that is a problem.
To be honest any other quality front pager would be a help.
Sebastian, I came here to comment pretty much exactly what you said there. Thanks.
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