More Pickin' on the Young'uns

I was reading this Yglesias post on the economic consequences of a possible Israel-Iran war, which seemed completely reasonable to me, until I came upon this sentence:

I don’t know nearly enough about the oil industry to be sure whether prices really would spike to cataclysmic highs (seems plausible enough, though) but if such price spikes do happen the consequences would be much worse than either 2008 or 1973. That’s because the pre-crisis economic conditions in the early seventies were totally fine, one of the reasons Nixon cruised to re-election in ‘72:

Now as I've said before, I think Yglesias is a smart and talented blogger, but Jesus Christ, the bolded sentence is just a howler.  Nixon imposed national wage and price controls -- imagine that -- in August 1971 in response to rising rates of inflation.  The wage and price controls would remain in effect for nearly three years, although they failed pretty miserably, in part due to the first Arab oil embargo during the Yom Kippur War.  

People in the United States in 1972 did not perceive the economy as fine.  Nixon's landslide win had little to do with the economy and much more to do with the backlash politics of the era, which the nomination of George McGovern helped take to another level.  

Forgive my pedantry, but I really hate when basic historical facts -- easily ascertainable -- are subject to this kind of half-assed writing.    

Comments

[litbrit]

Welcome to my world, C. So much of what I read--in "prestigious" publications, too--is poorly-written, error-laden, just-get-it-done-and-posted stuff that clearly bypassed the copyeditor, went directly to Go, and did not earn its $200. Sometimes it's written correctly enough, but the dull word choices and template-generated sentence structures resemble the plodding prose of a bright engineering or pre-med student who knows he needs the A in English but makes no bones about how much he loathes language; indeed, he would seem to want the reader to really get how little pleasure he takes in the artistry-free execution of same.

Then there are the times when I wind up wishing I'd never read something in the first place, like Stanley Fish's latest plagiarism apologia.

Sure, plagiarism isn't as bad as murder, but I am sick and tired of people getting hired for plum writing positions when they can't fucking write their way out of a wet paper bag, and then--and THEN!!!!--with the pressure on, they freak out and steal someone else's creation.

Because that's what plagiarism is: stealing someone's work. Fuck that noise.

Finally, there are the Young'uns. There is no excuse--NO EXCUSE, NONE NONE NONE, do you hear me? NONE!--for a Harvard graduate to be writing such a blatant, easily-fact-checked error when constructing an argument that in part relies on that error. And no, running out of coffee, being in a hurry, or not being a nit-picker are not excuses. That's just plain laziness. Especially now, when fact-checking doesn't require one to drive to the library, comb through spools of microfiche, or worse, spend an hour sorting through the card catalog and then have to climb the stairs (ladders) through a half-dozen attic-like warehouses to reach the bookshelves containing the copies of the publications you need, and then sit on the floor, with cobwebs sticking to your sweaty hair, while you sort through a few dozen issues in order to narrow it down to the three or four you can safely manage to carry under one arm while you negotiate your way back down the stairs (ladders).

No excuse. None.

[Davis X. Machina]

Eh. I take the long view, in which a thousand years from now there are hot arguments at dissertation defenses over whether there was ever was a president Johnson, or that all the contemporary references were instead to President Clinton's Johnson as the thing that finally undid the Republic.

[wev]

No research skills are required; any old geezer would have gladly given him an earful about those days. There are many millions of grandparents out here who remember the relentless squeeze of inflation very well.

I'm not the only one who pledged to stop buying this or that foodstuff if it went higher than $1 a pound and then upped that limit three times before giving up the pledge altogether and just trying to stay afloat. A lot of us concurred finally with the poet, "I wonder what the vintner buys one half so precious as what he sells." Things were not fine, kid.

[litbrit]

As long as it didn't also undo the Democrat, fair enough.