Oy

Greg Mankiw wrote a post Saturday on why he is agnostic on the question of how long people should be eligible for unemployment insurance. While he does a good job of raising the questions that we should ask to figure out what the optimal length of eligibility should be, the post is somewhat disingenuous, as he could pretty easily get good answers to all of his questions by walking down the hall to talk to his colleague Chetty who's studied this stuff, as pointed out by DeLong.

However, DeLong, in the course of pointing this out, is even more disingenuous, and more blatantly so. He points that out Chetty "conclude[s] that an unemployment benefit-market wage of about 50% is about right", and that he also concludes that more is called for at certain times (such as now). Well, that's all fine and good and interesting, but it really doesn't tell us how long people should be eligible for benefits, neither in normal times nor in times of high unemployment. I pointed this out to DeWrong in his comments section. His response? To delete my comment and ban me.

Why oh why can't we have a better economics professor section of the blogosphere?

Update: Well, BDL let me know why I'm banned. It's because I spread misinformation in the past. How did I do so? By questioning how someone used a model of global climate (NB: no claims about climate change made by me), and by trying to fill in the blank spots in the story of the Krugman-Okrent tiff. I don't know if I was right or wrong in either case, but I certainly never spread misinformation; both times I speculated a little (clearly labeled so marked as such, not as fact) and asked questions. Regardless, I think we can take this as an admission that I'm right in this case; why else go to the extra effort to bring up things that happened years ago instead of engaging on the points I made about his UI evidence this time? Also, he's clearly lying about why I'm banned, as I've left a few comments in between then and this most recent time; I embarrassed him with truth, and it pissed him off so that he had to find an excuse to get rid of me. In any case, I'd still like to know if there's good research on the ideal length of benefit eligibility.