Submitted by F.F.Wiley via Cyniconomics blog,
In May, I learned about this thing called the Wayback Machine from the Reinhart-Rogoff-Krugman tiff. (I know, I can be pretty clueless about Internet stuff.)
Basically, Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff used it to show that Paul Krugman was being Paul Krugman – making claims that don’t stand up to the facts. I wrote about it at the time, in “It’s Time to Change Focus from Reinhart-Rogoff Witch Hunts to Krugman’s Contradictions.”
Also in May, I wrote about economist Brad DeLong’s contradictions.
He had written a piece of pure fantasy that he called “Bernanke the Washington Super-Whale, Hedge Fundies and the Widowmaker.” In response, I posted “Fed Policy Risks, Hedge Funds and Brad DeLong’s Whale of a Tale.” Here are the last few paragraphs:
Now sure, I can understand why he wrote it the way that he did. Is there a better way to fire up your acolytes than by wrapping a clever little rant around a popular villain? According to DeLong’s crowd, hedge funds are about as villainous as they come. And this crowd was beside itself with glee as they spread the word about the whale of a tale. Check out the tweets noted above and you’ll see that the comments following them were full of giddy, backslapping fun and many happy contributions from DeLong himself.
But to me, the shoddy quality of DeLong’s work buries his wit. It’s nice to have camaraderie, but we all know that people are capable of some pretty ugly camaraderie.
In my opinion, DeLong and his joyful followers are once again behaving like a pack of fools. And he once again made a mockery of the header for his website. Beneath the simple title, “Brad DeLong,” his tagline reads “Grasping Reality with Both Invisible Hands: Fair, Balanced, and Reality-based.”
As I said, DeLong may have been grasping for some Twitter love with his whale of a tale, but he certainly wasn’t delivering reality, fairness or balance.
Getting back to the Wayback Machine, I fired it up this morning just to make sure I hadn’t lost my mind. You see, I could no longer find the tagline I referenced in the excerpt above.
I was relieved to find that I didn’t imagine it.
Here’s the Wayback snapshot of DeLong’s blog on May 12, coincidently with the article that I critiqued as the first post (he used a different title on his blog than on the Seeking Alpha post that I worked off):
And here’s the new DeLong blog:
Is there any chance the tagline was changed in response to my critique? Does Brad DeLong read CYNICONOMICS? Reading between the taglines (sorry, couldn’t pass that up), is there a subtle message in the decision to drop the old branding?