Myths of ancient China

There is a line of analysis that I see a lot in the press, that goes like this: For thousands of years, China economically dominated the world. Therefore, China's rapid growth is just a case of reversion to the mean; we should expect China to go back to being the same percent of world GDP that it always was before.

Now, I fully agree with the idea that China will return to being a bigger portion of world GDP. That's just "conditional convergence". It's a function of the Solow model. There is no good reason for 20% of the world's populace to produce less than 20% of the world's output in the very long run.

BUT, that being said, the people who make this claim seem to get their history a bit wrong. For example, here is a graph used by Deutsche Bank and PWC to make the point:

And here is one used by Michael Cembalest of JP Morgan:

Finally, here is one used by The Economist:

The source for all of these, if I'm not mistaken, is the esteemed economic historian Angus Maddison. But I have three problems with the use of this data in these charts. The first two have to do with how Angus Maddison's data gets put into those charts. The third has to do with the methodology used by Angus Maddison.

Angus Maddison's methodology, if I'm not mistaken, is something like this:

1. Assume that pretty much everyone prior to the 1700s was a farmer.

2. Very carefully estimate agricultural productivity and population density in ancient times.

3. Multiple population by agricultural productivity to get GDP.

So, here is the first problem with those charts: They leave out many of the major farming regions of the old world. For example, in the Roman Empire, the most productive agricultural region was Egypt. In fact, the Eastern Roman Empire had much higher agricultural output than the Western Roman Empire (France/Italy/England/Spain), which motivated it to periodically try to secede. 

Leaving out these regions skews the ratio wildly in China and India's favor. Including the entire Roman Empire would make the numbers for 100 AD look wildly different. For example, at its height, the Roman Empire, including all those Eastern Roman territories, had between 29 and 39 percent of the world's population. China's Han Dynasty, which was contemporary with the Romans, had only 26% of the world's population. Therefore, by agricultural output alone, Rome probably produced more GDP than China. Also, there was the entire Islamic Caliphate, which was a big deal from 700 - 1200 AD.

The second problem I have with those charts, and the conclusion drawn from them, is that they do not account for changes in the distribution of world population. In 100 AD, Germany was a sparsely inhabited forest. North America was mostly wilderness. China, in contrast, was densely settled. Today, things are different. The clearing of West Europe's forests in the early 2nd Millennium AD is why West Europe is now a densely settled population center instead of a backwater. Similarly, the colonization of North and South America, and the waves of immigration to the Western Hemisphere, has permanently altered the global population balance. China, despite going on a breeding binge that made it one of the world's most densely (over)populated regions, represents less than 20% of the world's population now, as opposed to over 25% in ancient times. As China ages, this percentage will shrink further.

In other words, China will not automatically return to its old percentage of world GDP, since the Western Hemisphere and West Europe are now on the map.

Now, on to my third problem: I think Angus Maddison may be doing things wrong. I realize this is a rather presumptuous thing to say, but I think it's true. Specifically, the assumption that GDP before 1700 was proportional to agricultural productivity seems to me not to be a good one. The reason is that even in a non-industrial society, there is a potentially huge source of GDP increases: trade. Remember, in a world where output is mostly in the form of commodities (i.e. no increasing returns to scale), the old Ricardian theory of trade makes a lot of sense. Stable ancient empires that could act as free trade zones were probably capable of dramatically increasing their per capita GDP beyond the base provided by the productivity of their land.

This is the finding of Ian Morris in Why the West Rules For Now. He constructs a "social development index" that includes things like urbanization and military capabilities, and probably correlates with an ancient region's per capita GDP (it is hard to build cities and make war without producing stuff). He finds dramatic changes in this social development index over the course of the Roman Empire; at its height, Rome seems to have been extremely rich, but a couple centuries earlier or later it was desperately poor. Morris corroborates this index with data on shipwrecks, lead poisoning, and other things that would tend to correlate with output. Basically, Rome saw huge fluctuations in per capita GDP. But it is unlikely that Rome's agricultural productivity changed much over this time. Instead, what probably happened was the rise and fall of cross-Mediterranean trade.

If trade could make Rome dramatically richer, and its absence could make Rome dramatically poorer, then Maddison's data set is wrong. Just because most people in 100 AD were farmers does not mean that most people were subsistence farmers. And frankly, I'm not sure how people use Maddison's data set without noticing this fact.

So anyway, to sum up: These graphs don't tell us as much as people think they do about how world GDP was distributed in the past. So don't use them as a guide to the future.

Update: Some people have been commenting "What about the 'other' parts? Couldn't that include the other parts of the Roman Empire?" Sure, it might, though the charts don't make it clear (look at Chart 3; if "other" = Rome, why isn't 1 AD the "golden age of the West"?). And does the residual include those portions of the world where records were not well-kept? Does it include areas that relied on animal herding? Does it include the Americas properly? And why does Chart 2 (the one by Michael Cembalest) not include "other"? In general, these charts just seem to present the data - such as it is - in a very misleading way.

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Where Good Ideas Come From

In case you haven't heard of Steven Johnson's book (Where Good Ideas Come From), the above video will get you started.

Here's a rough overview of some key ideas from the book:

1. The "adjacent possible": An inventor generally uses components that exist in the immediate environment, and these are sometimes conveniently adapted for non-obvious uses. Gutenberg used a wine press for his first printing press, for example.

2. "Liquid networks" and connectivity: Large cities, and now the Internet, make it possible for loose, informal networks to form, and these tend to enable discoveries.

3. The slow hunch: It can take years for a hunch to blossom into a full-blown invention.

4. Serendipity: A certain amount of luck helps, but bear in mind Pasteur's famous observation, "Chances favors the prepared mind." E.g., LSD, Teflon, Viagra, aspartame, Post-It notes. Fortunately, no one has a patent on serendipity.

5. Error: E.g., Lee de Forest's development of the audion diode and the triode was the result of erroneous thinking, and de Forest never understood how they worked. But the inventions changed the world.

6. Exaptation: Birds developed feathers to keep warm and regulate their body temperature, and only later used them for flight.

There's more, as well. For example, Johnson advocates keeping a journal of half-baked ideas (following no organizational pattern at all) that you revisit frequently over a period, potentially, of years.

Bottom line, the "Eureka moment" is a myth in the sense that most such "moments" are the culmination of many hours (and/or years) of rumination, cooperation, hunch-accumulation, and serendipity. It's process, in disguise.

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Keen attempts a purge

"He knew that you could trust no one. No one. Ever. Not your wife. Not your brother. Not your oldest comrade. No one. Ever."

- Andre Marty, in For Whom the Bell Tolls

The Communist movement in early 20th century Europe became famous for its atmosphere of insane paranoia, unrelenting suspicion, and constant ideological purges. The above quote is from a novel, but the man who thinks it was a real historical figure, whose paranoiac purges killed 500 of his allies in the Spanish Civil War. I suppose it was unsurprising that the left lost that war.

Since 2009, the macroeconomics profession has been embroiled in another sort of war. At stake is not just the direction of policy, but the entire future of the discipline. The insurgency has been led by Paul Krugman, a Nobel Prize winner, Princeton professor, and New York Times pundit, and by other eminent economists like Brad DeLong whose accomplishments (in my opinion) are only slightly less august. I say "led" not because Krugman et al. were the first to poke holes in modern macro - that was mostly done in the 1990s and involved many other brilliant people - but because it was the prestige of Krugman, DeLong, and others that gave this revolution public credibility, that made the intelligent, news-reading public sit up and say "Hmm, maybe something is deeply wrong with macroeconomics!"

Steve Keen is a "post-Keynesian" economist who works in Australia. His work, although I have only read a bit of it, is largely about debt, and why debt behaves differently than it does in most mainstream macro models (an idea to which I am very sympathetic!). In public, Keen has been highly critical of neoclassical macro, and supportive of a return to the ideas of Depression-era thinkers like Keynes and Minsky; he writes a blog, and also attends INET (I actually met him last year, though I only spoke to him very briefly).

One would think that Keen would be a natural ally of Krugman and DeLong. However, one would be wrong. In fact, Keen recently unleashed a tirade against DeLong:

I can scarcely believe what Brad Delong has dared to publish on Project Syndicate today... 

[P]eople like Wynne Godley, Ann Pettifors, Randall Wray, Nouriel Roubini, Dean Baker, Peter Schiff and I had spent years warning that a huge crisis was coming, and had a variety of debt-based explanations as to why it was inevitable... 

To my knowledge, of Delong’s motley crew [of economists who saw the potential for a crash], only Raghuram Rajan was in print with any warnings of an imminent crisis before it began...Krugman, who Delong crowns as first amongst equals in those working “in the tradition of Walter Bagehot, Hyman Minsky, and Charles Kindleberger” first read Minsky in May 2009–and noted that he didn’t really see what all the fuss was about... 

The only excuse for the cant Delong has spewed forth today is that, as with Krugman and others in the self-described “New Keynesian” camp, he perceives himself as being at the left end of the economic spectrum, with the only competition being from the far right represented by the purist Chicago version of Neoclassical economics. Since the Neoclassical left supports deficit spending during a Depression, while the right supports austerity, to Delong it’s game over, and the Neoclassical left is right. 

The reality is that there is an entire other dimension of economists who have known for decades that both extremes of the Neoclassical economic axis were neither left nor right, but plain bloody wrong. We also knew that our criticisms of the Neoclassicals had no chance of being listened to by the public until a major crisis hit, and we also expected that this crisis would do nothing to alter their own beliefs. Delong’s delusional mutterings today confirm it.

Wow. With friends like these, who needs enemas?

I find Keen's rant completely unacceptable. And not just because it's uncivil, rude, and largely free of substantive content. No, the reason I find it unacceptable is that this sort of ideological purge is the kind of thing that loses revolutions.

Keen's tirade can be boiled down to the following: "I got things right long before Krugman and DeLong, so I'm the pure Keynesian; these other guys are posers." By this logic, no one can join a revolution unless they were part of it from the beginning. 

DeLong and Krugman were not part of the revolution at the beginning. DeLong, in particular, has made this abundantly clear, along with the reasons for his change of mind, in an essay called "What Have We Unlearned From Our Great Recession?":

My role here is the role of the person who starts the Alcoholics Anonymous meetings. 

My name is Brad DeLong. 

I am a Rubinite, a Greenspanist, a neoliberal, a neoclassical economist. 

I stand here repentant. 

I take my task to be a serious person and to set out all the things I believed in three or four years ago that now appear to be wrong.

When I read this essay, I was amazed. I can't think of anyone else who writes things like this. Most economists - indeed, most people of any stripe - first stake out a position, and then defend it to the death. If they change their ideas, they try to pretend that they had these ideas all along and had never been wrong. Proving that they are Wise Sages is more important than actually searching for the right answers. Brad DeLong is different.

(Update: And you know what else? Before the crisis, the real state of things was probably not as clear to an impartial, rational observer. It could well be that an honest, open-minded, smart person would have seen the potential for a crisis before '08, but not been certain that a crisis was overwhelmingly likely...but I digress...)

(Update: And while we're at it, I should point out that Brad DeLong is totally exaggerating the degree to which he was wrong before the 2008 crisis. In the late 80s and early 90s, along with Larry Summers, Andrei Shleifer, and Robert Waldmann, DeLong invented "noise trader models" of financial markets, which present one of the first coherent, mathematical alternatives to efficient-market theory. So DeLong was attacking the neoclassical paradigm successfully, in mainstream economics and finance journals, decades before the Crisis of 2008.)

But this is not enough for Steve Keen. He demands that the revolution be led by the people who were in on it first. He seems interested more in jockeying for prestige within the revolutionary movement than in actually seeing that movement succeed. Because by shooting DeLong and Krugman in the back, Keen is attempting to discredit (and succeeding in alienating) two of his most potent allies. Without the support of leading figures like Krugman and DeLong, the anti-neoclassical revolution, right as it may be, will remained confined in the public's mind to the realm of fringe movements and cranks. (Also, frankly, exiling Krugman and DeLong would deprive the post-Keynesian movement of much-needed intellectual firepower; whatever their past mistakes, these guys are very very intelligent).

Here's the bottom line: You can bask in the hipster underground street cred of being a "heterodox" outsider, or you can actually change the world. I am on board with the anti-neoclassical revolution (as you can verify here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, etc.), but I am not going to take Steve Keen seriously if he is mainly interested in purging the ranks of his own comrades. First you win the revolution, then you jockey for position. Get it straight.

Update: Steve Keen drops by in the comments section. Excerpts:

Firstly Noah, I'm interested in achieving a dialogue. My rudeness was a deliberate tactic since Neoclassical economists have ignored seventy years of attempts to critically engage with them by Post Keynesians.

Well, it is true that being rude (and then being nicer later) is an efficacious and perfectly legitimate way of getting noticed. Still, I feel like the effect of saying things like "self-serving drivel" is just going to have the effect of starting a permanent feud...

Now if you, Krugman, deLong, etc are actually willing to listen to what Post Keynesians like me are arguing (Mark Thoma already appears to be open to dialogue), then let's organise a joint seminar where we can set out both our differences and our similarities.

This idea I like a lot. I felt that INET had some flavor of this. YES. There should be this sort of interchange!

And thanks for the laugh about me leading a purge. I suggest you look around you: how many Post Keynesians are in your economics department? How many Post Keynesian subjects are there in its curriculum. The purge happened long ago when non-Neoclassical topics were driven out of the teaching canon--ask Phillip Mirowski at Notre Dame what a real purge feels like.

Well sure. But a purge of the revolutionary movement is still a purge. Calling Krugman and DeLong "neoclassical" is like when Ludwig von Mises called Milton Friedman a Communist. It just dilutes the power of the term. Krugman has been bashing DSGE in the New York Times for years now. He's called the Rational Expectations revolution a failure. DeLong has less of a bully pulpit but says much the same. If they are "neoclassicals" I'm a Scientologist!

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New Atlantic piece: Government, help us fight fat!

Keeping with my recent "Japan" theme, I have a piece up at the Atlantic about one thing that Japan undeniably does better than us: Fighting fat. The upshot:

Government paternalism is in some sense a last resort, but it has worked wonders in the realm of public health in the past. Hand-washing regulations, sewage treatment regulations, cleanliness education, and other such paternalistic initiatives brought us out of the cesspool of the Middle Ages into the clean, safe, mostly disease-free paradise in which we now reside. Fat, though not contagious, is no different in terms of its ability to cripple and kill our citizenry, and the epidemic has reached emergency proportions... 

The American people must become healthy again. It's time to bring in the government.

Check out the whole thing!

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Japanese poverty: Who's to blame?

Bryan Caplan is a thinker who is famous for his introspection. When he asks a question - "Why do people go to college?", or "Why are poor people poor?", his instinct is to carefully examine his own pre-existing ideas on the topic. Turning his own beliefs over and over, he examines them from every possible angle, mining his brain for insights.

This sounds like I'm making fun of Bryan, but really, introspection is quite a good technique for understanding the world in many cases. It can tell us much about how consciousness and reason work, about what is right and wrong (because morals = opinions), and other interesting topics. And to the degree that we accumulate knowledge incidentally or accidentally, introspection is valuable because it samples the influences we've accidentally aggregated. But, that said, there are questions for which introspection tends not to be of much use. One example is physics. Racking your brain for memories of how balls rolled down hills in your past is just not going to get you as far as actually going and rolling some real balls down some real hills.

I think that one of these questions is the question of why people are poor. Bryan is planning to write a book on this, called "Poverty: Who's To Blame?" Here are some blog posts that summarize Bryan's ideas on the subject: Post 1, Post 2, Post 3, Post 4, and Post 5. Bryan's main thesis about poverty is that the main cause of poverty is irresponsible individual behavior, chiefly:

1. Drug use (including alcoholism)

2. Single and unplanned parenthood

3. Crime

Bryan is not as clear about how he arrived at this conclusion. Was it introspection? It's easy to imagine that someone who has spent most of his life living in a self-described "bubble" might have had very little contact with actual poverty. But if you spend your life avoiding poor people and passively absorbing the thoughts of people like Charles Murray (a Caplan favorite), your ideas about poverty will be 9 parts stereotype to every 1 part fact. Asserting ideas about poverty that were derived from introspection will then lead to a feedback loop, in which conventional wisdom becomes divorced from extant reality.

Now, maybe Bryan has done more than introspection to come up with his thesis that poverty is the result of bad behavior. I'd like to see his data. And note that simply correlating poverty with bad behavior is not sufficient, because it can't distinguish cause from effect. Bad behavior might be a mechanism for coping with the pain of poverty. Or a third variable might cause both poverty and bad behavior.

In any case, what I really want to talk about in this post is Japan. 

Japanese people will often tell you "There is no poverty in Japan," but this is just false. Japan has significant poverty. Professor Koichi Nakano estimates the Japanese poverty rate at 16 percent - lower than, but generally comparable to, the rate in the U.S. If Bryan Caplan's grand thesis is correct, these Japanese people should be poor because they have children out of wedlock, abuse drugs and alcohol, and commit crime.

Here are facts: 1. The rate of single parenthood in Japan is miniscule compared to that in the U.S. 2. The rate of drug abuse in Japan, though higher than in the past, is far lower than in the U.S. 3. Crime rates in Japan are far, far lower than in the U.S. 4. Alcoholism is a problem in Japan; between 0.8 and 4.4 million Japanese people are alcoholics (out of a total population of somewhere over 120 million). 

So of the types of bad behavior listed by Caplan, only alcoholism is comparable between Japan and the U.S. Perhaps Caplan should narrow his focus - perhaps alcoholism is the main cause of poverty.

Or perhaps Caplan is just dead wrong. Perhaps his preconceived notions about poverty, developed in self-imposed isolation from the actual phenomenon, are simply not an accurate guide to extant reality. 

As it happens, I have had a fair bit of contact with the Japanese poor. In general, although they do engage in more bad behavior than other Japanese people, they engage in less bad behavior than middle-class people in America. In general, they work very hard, abstain from drugs, don't have children out of wedlock, and obey the law. Every day they get up, slave away diligently and conscientiously for 8 or 10 hours at a mind-numbing menial job at pittance wages, and every night they return to sleep on the floor of tiny bare rabbit-hutch studio apartments barely larger than my bathroom. They were born well-behaving and hard-working and poor, and they will die well-behaving and hard-working and poor. Every day, even as people like Bryan Caplan inadvertently mock their struggles, the Japanese poor make a mockery of Caplan's prejudices and stereotypes.

If I had never seen the Japanese poor - if my only contact with poverty had been with the American poor, who tend to bully and rob people like myself at alarming rates - then I expect I would find Bryan Caplan's thesis quite reasonable, and even obvious. But that is why, if you want to know what is actually going on in reality, you have to get outside your bubble. 

If we get outside the "blame-the-poor" introspection bubble, we find that income and wealth pretty much follow a Pareto distribution in every country - there are poor people everywhere. Not poor in the absolute sense - American and Japanese poor people generally have food and shelter and warmth - but poor in the relative sense. The real question of "Why does poverty exist?" is the question of "Why do income and wealth follow a Pareto distribution?". Bad behavior is not likely to be the answer.

Update: A commenter kindly pointed out this paper, which gives somewhat recent (year 2000) numbers on inequality and poverty in Japan. Key takeaway facts: 1. In 2000, the Japanese poverty rate without government benefits (the "market poverty rate") was 16.5%, compared to 18% in the U.S. and 18.2% averaged across a sample of rich countries. 2. Income inequality, measured by the Gini coefficient, was the same for the Japanese working-age population (15 to 64) as for the entire population. This provides strong statistical support for my thesis that poverty is not substantially less common in Japan, despite the far lower prevalence of "bad behavior" there. Bryan Caplan would do well to check out the numbers.

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Remembering Nora Ephron

I was deeply saddened, not long ago, to hear about the recent passing (at the far-too-early age of 70) of one of my favorite writers of all time, Nora Ephron.

Nora Ephron

I had a personal connection with Ephron (which I'll get to in a minute), a tiny "brush with greatness," as some like to call it, and for many years after making contact with her, I had imaginary conversations (quite a few of them, if you must know) with Ephron, the way she herself admits to having had countless imaginary conversations with New York Times food critic Craig Claiborne.

Our conversations were great, of course. The stuff of legends. We'd talk about our writing adventures. The banality of American life. The inexplicable appearance of pomegranate extract in hand creams.

I suppose I could, in theory, go on having imaginary conversations with Nora. But unfortunately they'd be of the kind you have with a headstone in a cemetery. And I can't stand to think of her that way.

Most people alive today are not of Ephron's generation, so most do not know of the scores (hundreds?) of savagely witty, fiendishly funny, always entertaining essays and articles she did for The New Yorker, The New York Times, Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and (especially) Esquire. Today's audiences mostly remember Nora Ephron as the screenwriter behind When Harry Met Sally. Some may remember her role in cowriting You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and Silkwood.

But to me, Nora Ephron's best work (by far) was as a journalist and essayist. That's why I strongly recommend that you drop what you're doing right now (I'll wait) and go order a copy of I Feel Bad about My Neck, or Wallflower at the Orgy, or Crazy Salad, or one of her other books. I personally guarantee you will not regret the decision to buy one (or all) of these books. As Nora herself would say, they're far cheaper than psychoanalysis, and (in the end) more uplifting.

My personal connection with Ephron was small. Let's be clear on that. It was the kind of connection that, if it were a number, would round off to zero. But in my mind, it's bigger than big.

I need to explain.

Back in the 1970s, when I was starting out as a writer, I got all these lofty ideas (from reading Writers Digest, mostly) that if only I could sell articles to magazines like Playboy, Esquire, and Good Housekeeping, I could quit graduate school and never have to worry about pipetting Salmonella cultures by mouth again. I imagined it was possible to become famous as a freelance writer and throw down the shackles of "working a regular job," never to pick them up again.

What an ass I was.

I sent queries to every newsstand magazine under the sun. And got rejections by the Kubota dump-truck load. Every rejection note I got was some type of pre-printed slip with a message that began either with "Dear Sir or Madam," or no salutation at all. All of them were form-letters, in other words. Or form-slips, I should say.

But then there were the rejection letters I got from Esquire magazine.

The rejections from Esquire were hand-typed (on an actual typewriter) personalized notes from someone named Nora Ephron.

I've kept a couple of these hand-signed rejection letters, and let me tell you, they're some of the most precious items I have in my box of Precious Items.

In one case, I had queried Esquire on an article I wanted to do on a particular medical subject. Nora wrote back saying to send the finished article to her, she wanted to see it. She apologized for the fact that I would have to submit it "on spec," meaning that not only could its eventual acceptance not be guaranteed, but there would be no "kill fee" in the event of rejection.

I sent the manuscript for the article. Nora wrote me back, saying that the bad news was that a previous writer had done a piece on a similar subject less than a year earlier, and therefore the article couldn't be accepted. However. The "good news" was that she loved the piece and was taking the liberty of submitting it (for me) to someone she knew at The New York Times.

I was elated (needless to say) with her reply. In fact, I had never been so comforted by a rejection letter in my life. It gave me hope. It gave me encouragement at a time in my writing career when I most needed it.

Nora's rejection letter kept me going (odd as it may sound) to the point where I did eventually sell some articles to some (minor) newsstand magazines. Eventually, I got a job as Associate Editor of The Mother Earth News. Not long after, I was the one sending rejection letters to would-be writers. Always hand-typed. Always personalized. Always kind and generous.

I've had a pretty good run (over the last 35+ years) as a writer, editor, publisher, and all-around "word guy." And I do think I owe more than a small bit of gratitude to Nora Ephron. Way more.

That's one reason (but certainly not the only one) that I am so sad to see Nora leave us.

She was a force for good, in my life (and in many others, I'm quite sure).

R.I.P., Nora. We miss you. A lot.

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What to tell Jehovah's Witnesses

"I'm Jewish, my ancestors killed Jesus. And we'd do it again in a heartbeat."

"Not now. I just rented Batman."

"I'd love to talk to you, but my beer is getting cold."

"Everlasting life? Why the fuck would anyone want that?"

"There are no public restrooms here, sorry."

"Nice shoes. Did you make those in prison?"

"I thought the PeeWee Herman Convention ended last weekend."

"Love the outfits. Where did you park the DeLorean?"

"Wait. Pat Boone is not dead, is he?"

"In the old country, where I come from, 'Watchtower' rhymes with 'toilet paper.'"

"Hey thanks, man. I love comic books."

"It's not Halloween. You know that, right?"

"Can't help you. The National Alliance on Mental Illness moved out of this building a month ago."

"If you're looking for the titty bar, it's one block down."

"Sorry, I don't have any spare change. Plus I know you'll just buy wine with it."

"Don't you Amway people know when to stop?"

"Sorry, but no, I won't allow a new episode of Jackass to be filmed on my property."

"I thought there was supposed to be a third Stooge?"

"Good, can you wait while I make a quick phone call? Your illegitimate uncle was here looking for you an hour ago."

"I didn't realize the New Republicans were still in existence."

"I don't suppose you can get L. Ron Hubbard's autograph for me?"

"Wait. Didn't all you guys commit suicide in Guyana?"

"Aren't you a little old to be selling Girl Scout cookies? What the fuck, dudes."

"That purse you have there? It's probably worth something on eBay. Just sayin'."

"Don't go next door. The guy fucking hates Mormons."

"Hey, man. Give Mitt my regards."

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