Firefox Crash-and-Burn Syndrome

My love-hate relationship with Firefox is slowly shifting toward mostly hate. One reason: About every 7 to 10 days, I get a sudden crash where Firefox disappears except for the above dialog. Sometimes the Details button doesn't work. Making me wonder if Mozilla will even get the Crash Report after all.

Clearly, in a situation like this, Firefox is crashing after an unchecked error. (Otherwise why does Mozilla need a complete Crash Report? Why not just get the error code? Answer: There is no error code. The program doesn't know why it quit.) My strong suspicion is that AJAX-intensive sites like Gmail and Twitter are running the program out of memory. Constant client-server AJAX chatter from endless polling is an invitation to memory leakage. (Plus see this post.)

Someday I'll switch to Chrome 100%, but the way I work now is, I use Firefox for business-related browsing and Chrome for personal surfing. I like keeping them separate. I'll continue to use Firefox until the sad day comes when we part company forever. At that point, maybe I'll send flowers and a short, poignant good-bye note. Never to be seen again.

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Bob Lucas on macro

I find Bob Lucas more intriguing than any other economist of the last few decades. I'm always interested to read what he has to say, for example in this recent interview (hat tip to Steve Williamson). Some excerpts, and my quick reactions follow. Here's Lucas on the Lucas Critique:

[T]he term "Lucas critique" has survived, long after [the] original context has disappeared. It has a life of its own and means different things to different people. Sometimes it is used like a cross you are supposed to use to hold off vampires: Just waving it it an opponent defeats him. Too much of this, no matter what side you are on, becomes just name calling.

This is basically what I was conjecturing in this blog post. Of course Lucas gets to say it more matter-of-factly, because...well, his name is on the Critique. Anyway, here's Lucas on DSGE modeling:

Virtually all macroeconomic models today are dynamic, stochastic and general equilibrium (where here "general equilibrium" means you have the same number of equations and unknowns)...If we narrow the definition of DSGE by using "general equilibrium" to refer to competitive or Nash equilibria where the strategy sets of each agent are made explicit in an internally consistent way then we have Kydland-Prescott and other RBC descendants and not much else.

This is interesting, for several reasons. One is that Lucas expands the definition of "general equilibrium" to include Nash equilibria, which is not the way I've ever seen it done; I have always understood the term "general equilibrium" to be synonymous with "Walrasian equilibrium".

Also, it's interesting that Lucas says that RBC models are essentially the only equilibrium models (of the business cycle, presumably) in which "the strategy sets of each agent are made explicit in an internally consistent way". Is this true? I don't think it is true. For example, take a Calvo model. In a Calvo, model, agents' ability to set prices is restricted by a mysterious, exogenous "Calvo Fairy"...but, given the existence of such a "Fairy", the strategy sets of agents in the model are quite explicit and quite internally consistent. In a Prescott-type RBC model, agents' decisions are constrained by exogenous "technology"; you might think that this is more plausible of an assumption than a "Calvo Fairy", but in terms of its effect on the internal consistency of the strategy sets of the agents in the model, it seems no different.

Or maybe I'm reading Lucas wrong here?

Lucas on the causes of business cycles:

I was [initially] convinced by Friedman and Schwartz that the 1929-33 down turn was induced by monetary factors...I concluded that a good starting point for theory would be the working hypothesis that all depressions are mainly monetary in origin. Ed Prescott was skeptical about this strategy from the beginning... 

I now believe that the evidence on post-war recessions (up to but not including the one we are now in) overwhelmingly supports the dominant importance of real shocks. But I remain convinced of the importance of financial shocks in the 1930s and the years after 2008. Of course, this means I have to renounce the view that business cycles are all alike!

In 1980, Lucas had written:

If the Depression continues, in some respects, to defy explanation by existing economic analysis (as I believe it does), perhaps it is gradually succumbing under the Law of Large Numbers.

But with the post-2008 recession looking so similar to the Depression, it seems to have become clear to Lucas that the Law of Large Numbers will no longer do the trick. There must in fact be two types of recessions, with one (more frequent, less severe) type caused by "real shocks", and the other (rarer, more severe) type caused by "financial shocks". 

That Lucas has now twice changed his ideas about the underlying causes of the business cycle - the most important question in all of business cycle theory - is in my opinion a reason to admire him. When the facts change, Lucas changes his mind, as any scientist should.

Incidentally, the idea that "financial shock" recessions are different would tend to put Lucas more on the Reinhart-Rogoff side of things. Though Lucas doesn't mention here whether he thinks financial-shock recessions should last longer.

But the fact that history can cause even the smartest of macroeconomists to change his mind about the fundamental question of his field not once, but twice over the course of his lifetime is a stark illustration of the poverty of data that business-cycle theorists have to work with. In a sense, all we can do is watch history go by and hope it repeats itself enough for us to get a handle on what's happening.

Finally, Lucas on microfoundations:

The "[micro]foundations" of...models don't guarantee empirical success or policy usefulness. 

What is important...is that if a model is formulated so that its parameters are economically-interpretable they will have implications for many different data sets. An aggregate theory of consumption and income movements over time should be consistent with cross-section and panel evidence...An estimate of risk aversion should fit the wide variety of situations involving uncertainty that we can observe...Estimates of labor supply should be consistent aggregate employment movements over time as well as cross-section, panel, and lifecycle evidence...This kind of cross-validation (or invalidation!) is only possible with models that have clear underlying economics: micro-foundations, if you like. 

This is bread-and-butter stuff in the hard sciences. 

This I completely and utterly agree with. The power of microfoundations is that they allow unification. They give you the hope of explaining many phenomena in terms of one underlying phenomenon. In fact, there really should be no conceptual difference between the terms "microfoundations" and "unification". Microfounded models - when they work -are inherently more useful and powerful than equivalent "ad-hoc" models.

Of course, as Lucas points out, this makes microfounded models inherently more vulnerable to falsification than other models. An "ad-hoc" non-microfounded model only has to explain one thing, but a microfounded model has to explain many things. This means that as soon as the microfounded model fails to explain any one of the things it purports to explain, you have to conclude that the model is flawed, and look for a better model. (In practice of course, not everyone actually does this when they ought to...)

Anyway, it's always valuable and fascinating to read Lucas' thoughts. I seem to agree with him on quite a number of important things, though not on issues related to the assumptions or the value of the RBC modeling paradigm...Not that many people especially care whether I agree with Bob Lucas, mind you, but hey, it's my blog!

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Keynes Hayek, by Nicholas Wapshott

I just finished listening to Keynes Hayek: The Clash that Defined Modern Economics, by Nicholas Wapshott. You won't learn much economics from this book, which is mostly an account of the lives and labors of its two protagonists. But you will learn a lot about what economic debate was like back in the 1920s and 1930s, and you will gain some interesting hints about the intersection between science, politics, and personal egos.

Many of the debates between Keynes, Hayek, and other economists working in the UK at the time were carried out in the pages of economics journals, in particular Economica. Hearing these debates summarized and quoted in Wapshott's book, I was immediately struck by how similar they were to today's econ blog debates. There was a huge amount of people talking past each other, quibbling over definitions, and claiming that they'd been misinterpreted. For example, the incredibly byzantine debate between Hayek and Piero Sraffa put me in mind of the Sumner/Wren-Lewis blog debate from early 2012. The sarcastic, bombastic clash of tempers between Keynes, Hayek, and others like Lionel Robbins and Joan Robinson reminded me distinctly of the recent rhetorical fireworks between Paul Krugman, John Cochrane, and others (with Arthur Pigou playing the part of Tyler Cowen, chiding the other debaters for their incivility while advancing conservative ideas in a genteel fashion).

There are some major differences, of course, between the discourses of then and now. The fiery econ debates of the early 20th century advanced a lot more new ideas, and employed more rigorous analysis, than today's blog debates. Steve Williamson often says that you won't learn any cutting-edge economics from reading blogs; but for the back-and forth debates of the 1930s, that was definitely not the case. These days, of course, ground-breaking theories and rigorous analysis have remained in academic journals, and have taken on a far more detached, scientific tone, while sharp debates have mostly moved to the blogs.

As for Keynes and Hayek, the book taught me much more about the latter than the former. Hayek didn't start out as the Anti-Keynes, it turns out - he was a ringer, brought in by Lionel Robbins, William Beveridge, and other British conservatives to battle Keynes when Robbins & co. felt that they themselves weren't up to the task. They brought in Hayek when their first choice, Ludwig von Mises, proved to be too bad at English (and too downright grumpy).

It seems to me that Hayek took his appointed role as the Anti-Keynes a bit too seriously. During his attempt to formulate alternatives to Keynes' General Theory, Hayek repeatedly flirted with ideas that were - in my opinion - much deeper than the simple theory of aggregates that was being advanced by Keynes. These included the mutual inconsistency of economic plans, and the potential failure of economies to reach stable equilibria. Maybe Hayek bit off more than he could intellectually chew, or maybe he shied away from exploring ideas whose implications ran so counter to the political views of his mentor, von Mises. But in any case, Hayek didn't follow up on his tentative forays into the economics of complexity, instability, and disequilibrium, and instead went into political philosophy.

Hayek's most famous piece of political philosophy was, as we now know, completely wrong. In The Road to Serfdom, Hayek claimed that Keynesian-style macroeconomic management would lead to totalitarianism; in reality, nothing of the sort has ever happened. America, Europe, Japan, Korea, and others became solidly Keynesian after World War 2, and while macroeconomic management didn't always work as advertised, it nowhere and never led to the advent of totalitarian regimes.

It's also interesting that Hayek, despite hating the Nazis and totalitarianism in general, seems to have been somewhat influenced by many of the early 20th century Central European ideas that led to the rise of Nazism itself. For example, he repeatedly asserts that people are not created equal, making reference to "superior people," and stating that he would prefer an economically libertarian dictator to a democratic government that restricted economic freedom. This foreshadowed the unfortunate libertarian support for dictators like Augusto Pinochet, as well as more recent libertarian flirtations with "scientific racist" ideas.

Still, the author of Keynes Hayek credits Hayek with keeping the flame of libertarianism alive through the dark winter of Keynesian dominance, and views the emergence of Milton Friedman as the vindication and apotheosis of Hayek's ideas. In this, I feel that the author makes a major mistake; Friedman's monetarism was a type of macroeconomic management that was more amenable to conservatives of the 1970s and 80s than the type advocated by Keynes, but it was central planning nevertheless (as von Mises pointed out). It was Robert Lucas and Edward Prescott who truly restored Hayekian "classical" economics to dominance in the macro field, with their models of frictionless economies and near-optimal business cycles.

In any case, I definitely recommend Keynes Hayek, especially the audio version.

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Econ grad students and the Macro Wars

In the blog world, there's been some argument as to what the younger generation really thinks about the whole "Macro Wars" thing. Do up-and-coming econ grad students think that the current paradigm needs to be revamped? Do they think macro is basically doing fine? It's tough to tell, because - understandably - most grad students are afraid to get into these academic-political fights (obviously I was one exception, but I'm crazy). But when grad students can speak their minds without fear of consequences, we can see that there is a lot of angst out there over the state of macro - and even over the value of macro itself.

I'm talking, of course, about Econ Job Market Rumors, the anonymous forum. Of course you don't have to be an econ grad student to post at EJMR, but it's hard to imagine that many other people would be interested in the economics job market. If you've ever read EJMR, you'll know that no punches are pulled.

So here's a pretty well-known thread in which the EJMR folks dish their opinions about macro. (The title, "macro no giod p", is an inside-joke meme; I'll let you figure out the meaning for yourself.) A large fraction of the commenters are very critical of the macro field in general, for example:

It's interesting that the fact that their models don't fit does not bother macro economists that much. Whenever a "good" model fails empirically, they just call that a paradox and write hundreds of papers about it.

***

I feel depressed explaining to my friends what I learned in PhD macro . I'm sure most lay people interested in macro would be reallllyyyy disappointed by what is taught and published. But don't fret! You can shrug it off. Just like the students who turn away from macro, lay people too can be dismissed as not sophisticated enough to truly understand the insights of RBCs.

***

[T]he best explanation you [macroeconomists] can come up for business cycles is either 'people are lazy' or a 'negative technology shock'. 

Macro = ideological crap and everything which challenges that view (like ABM) are told that they do not have 'microfoundations' and that's why they are crap. 

Of course, as long as macroeconomists do make the correct predictions they can claim they have the correct explanations, because assumptions do not matter. Oh wait, you even fail on this part. 

To sum it up: Macroeconomists don't know anything about human behavior, how markets work or something about the economy.

***

The biggest puzzle is actually that macroeconomists are so proud about their 'microfoundations' yet they do not understand them at all.

***

I can't wait for the day where econ departments split and leave macro behind, much like physical anthropologists sometimes leave cultural anthropologists behind in their own little circle jerk departments.

***

macro too corrupt
too much black-box
not enough predictive success
too wrong too often

***

macro = ideological bulls**t, should be removed from economics.

***

Oh quit your bellyaching...Nobody likes macroeconomics unless they're a macreconomist. You still have to take it. It's the rite of passage. Just pass your prelim and never look back like the rest of us did. 

A small handful of people in the thread show up to defend macro, but their defenses tend to be very circumspect:

In real life though I find the people who usually make macro no good comments have little to no exposure to modern macro yet have a pretty strong opinion. Its one thing to critique a subject with an understanding of it, then there is a room for intelligent debate. It is anotherthing to dismiss the subject 

Even if you don't like the approach in current macro, macro has difficult questions that are worth asking and answering. Being stupid enough to voice allowed an opinion that macro shouldn't be studied at all means you aren't fit to be an economist. It shames me that some of you are Ph.D's or Ph.D candidates. 

It seems that some of you haven't ever intelligently thought about why the lay person seems to barely realize that there are other fields in economics other than macroeconomics. It is the economics they see as most relevant to them. They do not care about novelty/usefulness of an approach. They care about whether what you have to say is relevant to their understanding of the world, and if it impacts them or those around them. Macroeconomics of fields has the most visible impact on ordinary people and which is why it is a field worth studying.

***

Now you probably learned nothing in substance in a conventional macro-course. You worked through a few seminal papers most of which were written in the 80s and mid 90s (King, Rebelo, Kydland Prescott, gali 1999). You might have looked at Solow 1956 for good measure and some other growth papers from 1970s. The point of that curriculum is to learn the existing approach to dynamic economics. Something you spend little to know time in studying in your mathematics economics courses or first year micro-theory courses. That approach in general can go a long way to explain phenomena around us, even the current crisis. 

You can criticize the approach, but one needs to understand that simply stating the approach is no good isn't any sort of substantive critique. Its unfortunate that few outside of the field have been able to give a real substantive critique, beyond that calibration is wonky and you don't like exogenous shocks. I think most of us realize calibration is wonky, except maybe Prescott. The point of the modern approach is to endogenize as many variables as possible, as that was even more prevalent in the past. (This is really why we ought to teach IS-LM, in grad classes.)

And then a number of people seem to accept that macro field has severe limitations, but still insist that the field is worth studying:

When macro is the subfield with the highest demand for economists, second only to metics? What are you going to do then? Micro theory? 

What you guys don't realize is that in the eyes of the public macro IS economics (and vice versa). Let go of macro and just see enrolment fade and your salaries plummet.

***

Yes. Perhaps that precisely is the problem. The public wants us to do things we aren't very confident with. I must admit, I don't think I would have started in econ if macro wasn't a part of it.

***

I admit macro is no good, but maybe that is why macro is precisely the best subfield for us, since so many questions still lie ahead. What more can we really do in econometrics?

***

I am a macroeconomist too. I decided to work in this area partly because I am interested in the questions, and partly because it is clearly a field where the social marginal product is potentially very high.

***

no one thinks macroeconomics we are doing is that robust. There wouldn't be disagreement in the first place. Its because we lack tools to do good causal inference in the first place. Its nice you can use cross-sectional data or panel data and come-up with an identification strategy as outlined in mostly harmless econometrics. 

We on the other hand have about 4 business cycles worth of auto-correlated time-series data to do most of our inference on. What ever empirical tools are only fit to answer a narrow range of questions. That is why the a toybox economy like DSGE model can catch on in the first place.

(These last two probably best sum up my own views on the topic. Macro has very poor data to work with, and this means we should lower our expectations for the field to some degree; at the same time, the lack of real progress in the field leaves it wide open for innovative thinkers to make a big difference.)

Anyway, I was somewhat surprised at the depth of animosity towards macro among the grad student community. Not only were the anti-macro posts far more numerous, but they received far more likes than dislikes. The same pattern seems to hold elsewhere on EJMR. Non-macro students tend to be very disparaging of macro, and macro students tend to express deep misgivings and reservations about their chosen field. There are, of course, exceptions. But despite a couple retorts of "micro no giod p", there doesn't seem to be nearly the same amount of skepticism directed toward the various micro fields.

I'm not sure what conclusions we can generalize from these anonymous forum posts, or whether EJMR is an accurate barometer of econ grad student sentiment. But the criticism of macro nevertheless was eye-opening, even to a macro-skeptic blogger like myself.


Update: A commenter points me to this thread, where EJMR denizens debate the value of structural estimation. Not really related, but also fun.

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How much have you written in one day?

This survey is still open even though results from the first 36 hours of polling are shown below. Please record your response. Results will be updated here periodically over the next week.

Results after 1,336 page-visits:

 

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Let's have a little chat about inflation...

Inflation is one of those things that almost nobody who isn't an economist seems to understand (though that doesn't mean all economists understand it either!). First of all, there is the fact that most people don't even seem to know what inflation is. Some people seem to equate the word "inflation" with "a decrease in [my] real wages" - if things seem harder to afford, then it must be "inflation". Others seem to think that if stock prices go up, then that is "inflation". Still others use the word "inflation" to describe specific price changes - for example, if oil gets more expensive, people call that "oil price inflation". And the other day, I had a friend tell me: "[It's] simple. Low [interest] rates mean the price of money is low. That's a form of deflation."

(Note that that last statement is the exact opposite of correct. Inflation is a decrease in the value of money. Deflation is an increase in the value of money.)

Or the other day, someone on Twitter asked me: "How is it possible for inflation to help debtors when wages are going down? If wages are going down, doesn't inflation just make it harder for people to pay off their debts?"

The answer is no. Here's why. Suppose you make $50,000 a year and you have $50,000 in debt. Your debt-to-income ratio is 1. Also, just for convenience, let's say the general price level starts out at "1".

Situation A: -50% real wage growth, 100% inflation.

In this case, the new price level is 2. Your new real wage is $25,000. Your new nominal wage is $25,000 x 2 = $50,000. Your debt is still $50,000. Your debt/income ratio is still 1.

Situation B: -50% real wage growth, 0% inflation.

In this case, the new price level is 1. Your new real wage is $25,000. Your new nominal wage is $25,000 x 1 = $25,000. Your debt is still $50,000. Your debt/income ratio is now 2.

Situation C: -50% real wage growth, 50% deflation.

In this case, the new price level is 1/2. Your new real wage is $25,000. Your new nominal wage is $25,000 x 1/2 = $12,500. Your debt is still $50,000. Your debt/income ratio is now 4.

So as you can see, even if your real wage is going down by 50%, it's better to have inflation than no inflation if you are a net debtor. Inflation erodes the value of your debt no matter what is happening to your real wages.

So what's going on here? Why do so many people misunderstand inflation? Maybe it's a form of "Stockholm Syndrome". Inflation-hawkish economists have been bellowing, so loudly and so vehemently, that inflation is Satan - this goes back at least a hundred years - that non-economists just can't help believing it. People end up trying to think up reasons why inflation must be bad after all. When you offer them freedom - when you tell them that sometimes inflation can erode debt, relieve balance sheet recessions, and help stimulate the economy - they don't want to take it. , and they come up with more brilliant ways to identify with their captors. Or something like that.

I don't know. I feel like that's kind of a weak theory. What's really going on here? Why don't most non-economists seem to get what inflation is or what it does?

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Why I love Michael Moore

I've seen four Michael Moore films: Roger and Me, The Big One, Bowling for Columbine, and Sicko. I've seen him speak twice, once when I was in the Stanford Speakers' Bureau and helped bring him to campus, the other time at Michigan. Every film of his that I've seen has made a big impression on me and changed my thinking in some important way. Every time I've seen him speak, I have come away more sympathetic to his worldview.

Roger and Me is, in my mind, the definitive window into the Rust Belt. It is absolutely heart-wrenching; I dare you to watch the famous "rabbit scene" and not feel a wave of despair. Here's what it's really about: In the 1980s, foreign competition, shifting trade patters, and new technology conspired to break the power of manufacturing unions, end the "corporate welfare state", and relegate much of America's middle class to a new lower middle class. At the same time, we made the conscious policy choice not to use wealth redistribution to compensate for those changes. To economists, these things are just mathematical models and historical facts, but in the real world, they had enormous human costs. Roger and Me makes you look those costs right in the face. That's something I believe every economist should be required to do.

The Big One is a sort of coda to Roger and Me, showing the effects of globalization and deregulation on America's labor markets (and on the real human beings who populate those labor markets).

Bowling for Columbine is about America's gun culture. I don't think it does a good job of explaining America's extraordinary levels of gun violence, most of which is involved in the drug trade, and relatively little of which is committed by the type of gun nuts depicted in the film. But I do think that Bowling for Columbine sheds light on a very dark corner of American culture - white supremacist and secessionist militias - that causes a hefty amount of human suffering in the present and could be very dangerous for our national security in the long run.

Sicko is about America's health care system, and the alternatives. Before I saw Sicko, I believed the common line that, for all its flaws, America's health care system was "the best in the world". After I saw the movie, I did not believe anything of the kind. Sicko opened my eyes to the existence of Britain's National Health Service; after watching the movie, I looked into the NHS, and found that it achieves better results than the U.S. on almost any outcome measure, for far fewer costs. Importantly, it does this using a rational incentive system - doctors are paid for improving the health of their patients, not for recommending large numbers of expensive services.

I'm not sure, but around the same time that I stopped believing that America had the best health system in the world, I noticed that other people stopped saying it (and in fact started saying the opposite!). Around the same time I started thinking that Britain's NHS is the best alternative, I noticed a lot of policy-wonkish people praising that system in the press. Around the same time I started realizing the insanity of the "fee for service" incentive system, everyone started talking about it. So I wonder if Sicko, rather than just changing my mind, actually changed the whole national conversation about health care. If so, that would make it one of the most politically influential films of all time.

So Michael Moore A) shows slices of life that reveal the real human consequences of economic policy choices, and B) raises important policy issues. And he does this while managing to be entertaining enough to hold an audience's attention. In my opinion, this makes him an important and positive figure in America today.

But it has recently come to my attention that there is quite a lot of anti-Moore sentiment out there. As with anyone who becomes a favorite media target, it is not obvious what Moore has done to deserve being "hated on" to such an extent. Here are some possible reasons not to like Michael Moore, and why I think each one is not a very strong reason.

1. "Moore advocates bad economic policies." Michael Moore talks like a fire-breathing socialist - he criticizes the profit motive, demonizes big business, and even praised Cuba's health system. And watching his movies and listening to him speak, it quickly becomes apparent that Moore doesn't have any coherent alternative to Anglo-Saxon capitalism - no, good middle-class manufacturing jobs are not going to be brought back by the generous altruism of corporate CEOs.

But I don't mind. Because Moore is a filmmaker, not an economist. Because I think it is perfectly fine to show problems without offering solutions. Simply alerting people to a problem is a valuable social service. And making people witness and understand the downsides of the tradeoffs they make - like keeping America's productivity growing at the expense of the lifestyles, self-worth, and communities of millions of workers - is a valuable social service. You don't need to replace capitalism to show the flaws in the American flavor of capitalism.

2. "Moore distorts the facts". Somewhat predictably, this criticism seems to be made mostly by people who appear to have no problem with the Alternate Reality Bubble in which the entire conservative movement has recently encased itself, in which lying in support of conservative policy goals is regarded as a virtue. So I take claims that Moore plays fast and loose with the facts with the same grain of salt that I take the "Krugman Truth Squad", the mercifully short-lived and utterly bullshittinous National Review column from ten years ago. Somewhat unsurprisingly, a quick Google search for "Michael Moore fact check" reveals that Sicko is not too shabby in the accuracy department. Reading the websites dedicated to showing that Moore is a liar, I find that many of the supposed lies are actually either A) juxtapositions that the critic thinks are misleading, but seem perfectly legitimate to me, or B) simply things the critic disagrees about, like whether America has a high murder rate. Only rarely do I see something that looks like it might be an actual intentional distortion.

(A note, however: Much of the criticism of Moore's factual accuracy seems to be made with regards to his film Fahrenheit 9/11, which I have never seen, mostly because I heard bad things about it from everyone I asked. So maybe that movie makes more fibs than the others?)

So this criticism might be true - and if true, it is of course a legitimate criticism - but I haven't seen solid evidence for it yet.

3. "Moore is a hypocrite". Here's a guy who criticizes the rich, and has gotten rich off of his successful movies. This criticism doesn't really bother me, for at least three reasons I can think of. First reason: Moore criticizes people who get rich by exploiting workers, and he may feel that the workers involved with the production and distribution of his movies are not exploited. Second reason: One person giving up his money is not going to change the system. Third reason: Even if Moore is a total raging hypocrite, who cares? Does that decrease the importance or the quality of his films?? No.

I love Michael Moore professionally. Personally, he may be Earth's douchiest douchebag. I don't know and I don't care. I don't even know the guy.

So while I allow that there might be bigger problems with Michael Moore than I have yet realized, so far I love what I've seen. Feel free to try to convince me otherwise; I am not committed to this point of view...

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