Not-A Does Not Imply B
Just a thought suggested by some economic discussions I’ve followed, including the comments on this blog: many people seem to have a hard time accepting that there are intermediate positions, in particular that you can question free-market, hard-money dogma without being a wild man. To say that some inflation can sometimes be a good thing does not mean advocating hyperinflation; to call for deficit spending in slumps does not mean saying that debt and deficits never matter; and so on.
This inability to make distinctions was really on display in response to my recent Argentina post. My point was that you really can’t use Argentina to make a case that default is always a disaster, since Argentina had a strong recovery after default. I would have thought that was a clear and simple point. But apparently many people believed that I was claiming that
1. Everything in Argentina is wonderful to this day
2. Everything the Kirchners did was right
3. Default was the sole cause of good news in Argentina
4. Everyone should immediately default
Um, no. None of those are claims that I made.
I really do worry about the state of reading comprehension. Or maybe it’s just that extremists can’t grasp the notion of non-extreme positions held by other people.
