Elizabeth Warren Freak Out, 2: Other things.

Four other complaints I have seen:

Number 3.

Here’s the best smackdown I’ve seen on my piece against McArdle’s piece from a corporate law professor:

Megan McArdle offered up a long blog post criticizing Elizabeth Warren‘s scholarship. This prompted liberal economics blogger Mike Konczal to respond, inter alia, that:

Given that Warren is considered “the leading authority in the country on bankruptcy law,” being called a hack by McArdle, of all people, is something.

If you follow Konczal’s link, you’ll discover that the authority he cites is an unattributed publisher’s blurb for one of Warren’s books. It’s pure PR puffery. Not evidence.

Is Liz Warren the leading authority in the country on bankruptcy? No. If you take citations as the best metric, she’s way behind Bob Scott in Brian Leiter’s latest survey.

Is Liz Warren a leading authority? Sure. By Leiter’s count, she’s tied for third.

I was wrong to quote that press unit, but thankfully the smackdown wasn’t too bad. According to a citation count, Warren is only the third most cited scholar on bankruptcy in the country. Number three is very high, and if you can trust academics to do something well it is navel-gazing gossip about fellow academics pretending to be quantifiable evidence. Are the people ahead properly bankruptcy experts? Warren seems to be the only consumer one. Anyway, I’m more than happy with #3.

Though if Obama nominates Alan Schwartz, the second most cited, perhaps he can split progressives in half. It’s worth a thought if Treasury is reading this.

Deference towards Finance

A problem for Democratic elites more than anything, but our elites more generally, is that Warren has pushed for greater transparency for our TARP funds. There are plenty of Wall Street people who hate this of course. Many want to declare this as having “worked” and move onto the next thing. What went wrong, where all the money went and how, and how do we structure a system that is accountable to the population?

For a field that is accustomed to getting puff pieces about how the financialized economy will lead us to even greater heights, getting treated like war contractors, a field where we now have to assume that the blurring lines and the easy cash breeds bad things requires a higher level of scrutiny, is painful. In fact, I think the biggest hit to the financial sector, more than any regulation, is the greater assumption that something is rotten at the core. The loss of cultural prestige is what I see in a lot of the senior TBTF bankers I’ve talked to since the crisis and bailouts hit. I think Warren gets flack for that, though that’s a nationwide phenomenon