Talk:Noah Smith (writer)

Political Views

Unfortunately, it seems that much of the second paragraph of this section is citing a particular interpretation of the titles of his articles as his opinions, rather than the content of the articles themselves. This is particularly egregious in sentence attempting to describe his views in his article "No, you aren't living on stolen land". He states perhaps the exact antithesis of what is being described as his position in this paragraph, in his article. In addition, his comments on "dismantling environmental regulation" are a part of a broader context on how environmental regulation is often used not for environmental concerns, but as an instrument for preventing dense housing developments. To say that this position is an example of a "far-right" view is not an accurate summary of his stance.

If someone would like to recount his stance on these positions to be representative of the words in his articles, that would be a valuable addition given the relevance of these topics. Kennethshoe (talk) 19:48, 9 February 2025 (UTC)

The entirety of the last paragraph, save for the last sentence "The New York Times asked Smith to replace Paul Krugman as an oped columnist, following Krugman's departure in December, 2024", appears to be a pure expression of the personal interpretation of editor Gagaboatly. The only sources linked to in the last paragraph (save for the last sentence) are Smith's own articles, and not even quotable sentences from them to support the paragraph's interpretation. Having taken the pains to read all, I come to very different conclusions than editor Gagaboatly.

But aside from that, exclusive reference to primary sources runs foul of Wikipedia standards. This paragraph may even qualify as vandalism. I am taking the initiative of removing it. Archeophis (talk) 02:24, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

There seem to be two issues expressed here:

1) I've misinterpreted Smith's articles

2) Quoting only from Smith's articles violates Wikipedia's standards.

To the second point first, can you please link to this standard? Quoting from the actual, expressed political views of Smith seems like the best possible evidence we would have available to judge his views. Take the first sentence of this section: "Noah Smith is sometimes considered by others to be a liberal." This has two citations: one to an article where Smith claims to be a liberal (which strikes me as an absurd way to justify a statement that appears to be presenting a neutral characterization of Smith by outside commentators), and the other is to an article that is not about Smith, but rather a National Review article that contains a single tweet by Noah Smith ("Intellectually I knew, but viscerally did not realize, just how much of America's liberalism over the last half century depended on the single institution of the Supreme Court.") I.e., this sentence is supported by two citations to Noah Smith, one of which is him self-describing his intellectual tradition (meaning the Wikipedia sentence should read "Noah Smith considers *himself* to be a liberal), and the other is a tweet which doesn't support any explicit characterization of Smith either way. We could go through the rest of the article like this, but I'll stop here for now. @Archeophis Why are you not deleting this sentence, claiming it violates Wikipedia's standards?

To the first point, I am happy to add quotes from the articles which support my characterization of Smith, but before I do so, it would be helpful for me to understand in bit more detail *why* @Kennethshoe and @Archeophis believe I have missed the mark, and not simply that I have.

@Kennethshoe cites two specific examples. However, it sounds like we all in fact agree that Smith explicitly calls for either repealing or neutering a major environmental regulation (NEPA), because he doesn't like the fact it slows down approval of construction projects. I described this as "calling for a dismantling of environmental regulations". How is that wrong?

To the "egregious example" where I wrote that Smith provides a "moral relativistic defense of the genocide of Native American peoples by white settlers", here is a quote from the relevant article:

"The forcible theft of the land upon which the U.S. now exists was not the first such theft; the people who lived there before conquered, displaced, or killed someone else in order to take the land. The land has been stolen and re-stolen again and again. If you somehow destroyed the United States, expelled its current inhabitants, and gave ownership of the land to the last recorded tribe that had occupied it before, you would not be returning it to its original occupants; you would simply be handing it to the next-most-recent conquerors."

This is explicitly drawing a moral equivalence between the genocide that white Europeans committed against Native tribes, and the violence that pre-dated Europeans' arrivals. This is just the way the world is according to Smith. He goes on to provide the reason this violent dispossession is excusable:

"why should land ownership be assigned to a race at all? Why should my notional blood relation to the discoverers or the conquerors of a piece of land determine whether I can truly belong on that land? Why should a section of the map be the land of the Franks, or the Russkiy, or the Cherokee, or the Han, or the Ramaytush Ohlone, or the Britons?"

I am not saying Smith is thrilled that Native Americans were extirpated, hence my characterization that Smith approaches the subject with an ambivalence rooted in an amoral reading of a genocide. I'm happy to have a discussion about the meaning of these statements, I'm not here trying to vandalize anything. But I believe their is a plain meaning to these articles that is quite clear. Gagaboatly (talk) 03:33, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

How is that wrong? The problem is not whether your interpretation is wrong or right. The problem is that editors' interpretations should have no place in Wikipedia articles.

The problem is, Gagaboatly, that Wikipedia's standards are very clear about NO original research and NO only primary sources (a primary source is any statement that is interpreted; exact quotations from primary sources may work, but should not be too numerous as they will be inevitably taken out of context). It does not matter about what "we all" believe (and who is "we"?). Wikipedia articles exist to give information about what is the state of the discussion about a subject, not to provide the opinion of clever or righteous editors about a subject. Individual editors' opinions are explicitly deprecated, no matter how respected they are in the field -- if Richard Dawkins came here to edit Wikipedia on an article about evolution with statements unsupported by other sources than his own words, his edits would be subject to deletion (he could save them by adding as sources the same opinions but expressed in reputable articles elsewhere).

So your interpretation of Smith's positions may make perfect sense, I and others may even agree with it, but the flaw is that is your own. Find some other reliable source, aside from yourself as an editor, that provides those viewpoints (or your own if published is all right), quote it and attribute it, and Wikipedia's standards should be satisfied.

Please read the banner at the top of this talk. Articles about living people are twice as sensitive as they can be interpreted as libellous. I hope you understand the reason why your addition does not comply with Wikipedia standards as it is. And unless you add the needed reference sources, it will be deleted again, by myself or others. Archeophis (talk) 04:51, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Thank you for engaging with me honestly @Archeophis. I hope you understand I am not here to deface Noah Smith's page. When I heard that NYT was offering him an oped position, I was surprised to see a lack of substantive discussion of his very public political positions over the years, and thought it important to add some mention of those to Wikipedia.

To this point about primary sources, I just read through this page: Wikipedia:No original research#Primary. As far as I can tell, the concern around using primary sources is not applicable to this section on Smith's "Political Views". See for example:

"Do not use trial transcripts and other court records, or other public documents, to support assertions about a living person. Do not use public records that include personal details, such as date of birth, home value, traffic citations, vehicle registrations, and home or business addresses."

The concern seems to be about the veracity of first-person accounts, and the privacy implications of certain primary documentation. But this section it literally devoted to Smith's own expressed political views. There is no other way to obtain information about his political views that what he was written down or said on political topics. When he takes controversial political stances (as he had) that necessarily means that Wikipedia is going to: a) ignore anything controversial or b) accurately describe the situation.

To be clear, this isn't like trying to write the "Political Views" section on Hegel's Wikipedia, where generations of scholars have tried to understand and interpret the meaning of his writings. You don't need a PhD to read his 5,800 word article on NEPA, and figure out what he's advocating for. In that article, Smith, in painstaking detail, states again and again that NEPA is inhibiting important construction projects. E.g., "The authors spend some more time illustrating the sheer size and urgency of the green energy buildout, and showing that NEPA reviews of the type we’re used to will basically make that impossible." To claim that it is simply "my opinion" that this means he advocates for curtailing NEPA in order to advance large scale infrastructure projects pushes the notion of subjective interpretation to an absurd limit.

Again, to demonstrate this, I will point you to the rest of this section, which of course commits this sin of primary sourcing over and over again. In my last response I went through the first sentence in this section. Now let's go to the third:

"He has written articles or columns that demonstrate a left leaning perspective, expressing support for affordable healthcare reform, mass expansion of public transit, green energy, immigration reform, industrial policy, labor unions, and YIMBY positions."

The sources for these claims are:

1) A YouTube video where Smith talks to a Bloomberg writer

2) Four blog articles written by Smith

3) A final blog article that like the NR article mentioned above does not discuss Smith *at all*, except to provide a block quote from another one of his published pieces.

I.e., this laundry list of political positions allegedly endorsed by Smith is backed entirely by a subjective Wikipedia editor's interpretation of a small subset of Smith's published writings. As far as I can tell, there are two things that differentiate this sentence from the paragraph I wrote:

1) It's far more vague. The things Smith is apparently "expressing support" for are sweeping categories, not specific topics, as was the case in my paragraph.

2) This list characterizes his political opinions as "left leaning", which is just as editorializing as calling genocide apoligetics "far right", but perhaps more palatable and less "controversial and potentially libelous"?

We can continue. Sentence 4: However, he has been critical of unions and praises Elon Musk on Twitter ^{[citation needed]}.

(no citations, but apparently this intends to include a link to his tweets).

Sentence 5: Smith has appeared on the Neoliberal Project's podcast multiple times[21] and was labeled the "Chief Neoliberal Shill" by the group in 2018.[22]

Citation 21 is (as stated), an interviews with Smith, and Citation 22 is an oped written by Smith.

Sentence 6: Smith aligns himself with liberal commentators and has written in dissent about conservative slants in the economics industry and profession. [9]

(Citation 9 is the same Smith blog article cited in Sentence 1, as discussed previously)

Sentence 7: Smith has expressed disagreements with socialism and communism[23] as well as the degrowth movement, or a post growth world.[24]

Citation 23 is again a YouTube video featuring Smith in a debate

Citation 24 is a discussion of a Bloomberg Oped by Smith (this is arguably the first secondary source in the entire section)

Sentence 8: He has views on the education of economics, particularly microeconomics, stating that more of the focus of economics education should be data driven, and less of a theory emphasis.[25]

Citation 25: This is a blog post that I suppose is technically a secondary source, but is meaningfully just three links to three articles written by Smith

Sentence 10: He has characterized Modern Monetary Theory as "a set of political memes to push for more deficit spending", rather than a useful economic theory.[29]

Citation 29 is an article written by Smith

Sentence 11: New York Times writer David Brooks has characterized Smith as a proponent of industrial policy alongside center-left commentators such as Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson who champion a so-called "abundance agenda."[30]

Citation 30: This is indeed a secondary source, and you can see the problem with relying upon such sourcing. There is one mention of Smith in Brooks' oped ("As the economics writer Noah Smith has noted, if the 1930s brought us the New Deal and the 1980s brought us the free-market Reaganism, today we are entering an era of “New Industrialism.”"). This is entirely uncited, so its impossible to know if Brooks himself is getting it wrong (David Brooks frequently gets it wrong: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2015/06/16/the-david-brooks-files-how-many-uncorrected-mistakes-does-it-take-to-be-discredited/)

Okay, so let's do the math. Paragraph 1 has 11 sentences. 3 of them use secondary sources. Six rest entirely on links to blog articles, opeds, and interviews by Smith, and are therefore interpretations. 2 more sentences primarily rely on links to Smith's work. There is a total of one direct quotation from Smith.

If you are seriously as strident in your opinions about sourcing as you are claiming, then we would have to strip this entire section down to its bones, and obviously, this would result in such a vacuous presentation of Smith's politics as to be useless. If we're not going to do that, let's figure out what kind of sourcing and quotations would allow for an accurate and informative depiction of Smith's political opinions. Smith is a public figure with substantial sway on the political discourse, but not someone so important that historians have written tomes parsing his writings and piecing together a grand narrative of his political opinions. Honestly, he does not seem interesting enough to warrant such effort. But he is productive and influential enough that Wikipedia should provide some minimal overview of where he stands on the issues of the day. Gagaboatly (talk) 14:34, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

Just to make the point a little more succinctly: the analogy to Richard Dawkins editing a page on evolution does not apply here. What would be analogous would be Dawkins going to the Wiki page about "Richard Dawkins beliefs about evolution", and adding citations to speeches he's given explaining his views on evolution. Obviously this would be reasonable for Dawkins, or anyone else to do.

That is what I did, and that is what everyone else who has contributed to the "Political Views" section as done, because that is the only tenable way to characterize the political views for someone for whom there is no substantial body of secondary literature. Gagaboatly (talk) 16:42, 11 February 2025 (UTC)

@Gagaboatly: Engaging in discussions is what editors should do. So, you are welcome. I am not particularly obsessed with the strictest adherence to rules (I am only a kommaneuker in proper grammar), but I very much care for the balanced aspect of Wikipedia, which is even more relevant with respect to the biographies of living persons.

@Kennethshoe did a good job in creating this article. Problems arose when the article developed to the Political Views section, which is always a prickly subject -- proven by the fact that said section has already been subject to several revisions on the hot topic of the Israel/Hamas war. And this article, you may have noticed when you went to edit it, has a pop-up warning, probably for that reason.

Your defence of your contribution is mostly a very detailed list of other parts that in your opinion suffer from the same fault. It is obviously very difficult to have perfect quotations for every single reference -- and primary sources written by the subject of the article are fine if they actually explicitly say what the article states they say, in a quotable manner. Attributions of this or that position through the hermeneutics of an editor are pretty unacceptable. I think you seem to also miss that it is a matter of how controversial are the positions attributed, which demands further and extreme carefulness. (For this, I remand you to Wikipedia policy on the biographies of living persons and specifically this paragraph: the "4.Do not analyze, evaluate, interpret, or synthesize material found in a primary source yourself; instead, refer to reliable secondary sources that do so." applies to the articles you link to: find a secondary source unless you can find in the article a literal statement of the position you are attributing, which can be used in an inline citation to support your statement.

Yes, maybe the entire Political Views section should be deleted and revised. But I am not going to do so, because the statements of the first part are pretty uncontroversial, and if someone would like to add sources offering a different perspective they can do so. Meanwhile, you compelled me to revise in minute detail the accuracy of your edit (thanks, by the way for having directed me to the work of Smith, which I did not know in detail -- I happened on this Wikipedia page to learn about his age and studies). And so I will share with you my conclusions and suggestions on how to give, on the basis of what was written, "an accurate and informative depiction of Smith's political opinions".

The problem with the part that you added is that it consists exclusively of your /interpretation/, made in very loaded language, of the articles that you link to in their entirety. The articles linked to are very long and nuanced and in most cases nowhere in them can be found actual literal words that confirm your interpretation.

To support the statement that Smith issues "blanket denunciations of modern left political movements", you should find a quote from Smith that says something like "all modern left political movements" are bad (that is what the term "blanket" means used adjectivally). Easiest would be editing the sentence to read "Smith issued denunciations of some modern left political movements and intellectuals", with the links to his article about the Pro-Palestinian Movement's celebrations of the Hamas attack held just one day after the massacre (article is 3 days after the event); and to his article about Chomsky (who is an intellectual and not a movement).

I would simply drop the sentence "Smith has also advanced far-right, controversial views on a wide range of social and political issues." for the simple reason that it is again, a judgement and an interpretation, not corroborated by fact. If there has ben controversy on his positions, links to such should be easy to find. On Wikipedia, to put a label of far right (or far left, or whatever) on somebody's views, one needs to give very specific and detailed evidence, from reliable sources, of membership in organizations, of repeated participation in public events, and even better, from the subject's own published statements of belonging to that political side. Otherwise, and especially so for labels that may be repugnant to some, the possibility of libel raises its ugly head.

To support "a moral relativistic defense of the genocide of Native American peoples by white settlers", you should find a quote in which Smith actually /defends/ the genocide of Native Americans. Again, this is a personal evaluation of Smith's position -- you read his words as a defence of genocide, others would read simply a contention that the concept of "stolen land" is wrong and useless, especially after centuries. It would be perhaps more acceptable to phrase it as "a moral relativistic position on the occupation of Native American lands by white settlers".

To support "advocating for continued Israeli occupation of the West Bank", you should find a quote in which Smith actually declares that Israel should continue to occupy the West Bank. Which cannot be found either in the article where he actually talks about the West Bank (proposing that it should become one of two sovereign Palestinian states), and even less in the article about the pro-Palestinian protests. This appears to be a case of "did not actually read the articles linked to" or of "do not like his opinions on the matter, so he must also believe the worst".

To support "calling for a dismantling of environmental regulations", you should offer a quote where Smith actually calls for the dismantling of environmental regulations. In the whole article that you linked to (which is a very detailed discussion of the present -- at 2022 -- state of the debate about NEPA, including pro and con positions and mid-way between) the closest I could find is, as a comment to the argument of someone else: "Abolishing NEPA and replacing it with other procedures for enforcing environmental law is certainly an interesting idea. Unfortunately this article gives basically no guidance on how to do that.", which is hardly a call for dismantling, but rather a contemplation of the possibility of substituting one set of regulations with a different one. The conclusions of the article read: "Anyway, that’s the whole roundup so far. Let me know if there are other interesting articles or papers I should add here! A picture of the basic arguments and issues is gradually emerging from the chaos, and I should have more solidly formed opinions about this issue soon." How did you read this article as a call for dismantling environmental regulations is beyond my ability to grasp.

"defending private health insurance companies as falsely-maligned actors in the U.S. medical system" stands on its legs, but it should be perhaps better phrased as "presenting the role of private health insurance companies as only minor in the excessive costs of the U.S. medical system, as opposed to health care providers and suppliers" quoting his conclusions: "But if you look at the list of companies with the highest ROE, you see health care providers or suppliers like HCA Healthcare (272%), Cencora (234%), Abbvie (84%), Mckesson (84%), Novo Nordisk (72%), Eli Lilly (59%), Amgen (56%), IDEXX Laboratories (53%), Zoetis (46%), Novartis (44%), Edwards Lifesciences (43%), and so on. If you want to know which shareholders are making the real money in the health care industry…well, it’s the shareholders of those providers and suppliers.".

To be honest, for someone like me who lives in a developed country with Universal Healthcare, and see the difference where the government negotiates with the providers to lower costs and pays most of the bills for everyone, Smith seems to point out the obvious: that the insurance companies are just a cog, and not even so large, in a big distorted vision of how to deliver healthcare to the general population, basing it on profit. Hardly a hard-right position. Nevertheless this is my opinion, however well founded I believe it is, and as such it is interpretation and should not be put on Wikipedia.

As for "statements advocating for an unelected oligarchy to assume control of the U.S. Federal government", I would change it to clarify more "statements endorsing the role of Elon Musk in directly influencing and enforcing, despite being an unelected actor, the Executive Orders of President Trump with respect to Agencies of the Federal Government." Just repeat what he actually says. Smith seems to be infatuated with the genius of Musk, despite recognising the man's appalling character flaws and the fact that a Government is not a business. But he is not endorsing the "unelected oligarchy" (what could be called the tech dark faction?) he is endorsing (with caveats, but endorsing) Musk. Musk is not a team player, while an oligarchy is a team, however small.

That is it. Hopefully this discussion will produce positive results. Archeophis (talk) 07:40, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

Israel-Hamas War

This guy has written nearly half a million tweets and well over a thousand pieces. He became famous for his writings on the profession of economics and its curricula. Why is half of his political views section about the Israel-Hamas War? The NYT response piece does not allude to him specifically. The only source here is from Matt Bruenig's blog. Tabu Makiadi (talk) 04:21, 9 December 2024 (UTC)