Today's Quote

If the four of them brought this to my office hours I’d advise them to take an incomplete for the class and turn in the paper next semester in January.

That's Michael Konczal on the four-man "minority report" of the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission.  He means it in the strict sense:

The paper is 9 pages, and about 5,000 words. There are almost no hard numbers. There are only three citations. Everything here was in the popular narrative a year and a half ago.  This was supposed to be original research.... They had the power of subpoena, staff and a budget, and, random bloggers covering it have done a much better job. 

"Random bloggers" is unfair; it fails to identify the central contribution of some very skilled and experienced bloggers including, of course, Konczal himself.  He also includes references to a more serious effort to analyze -the crisis from a point of view with which he is not specially in sympathy-  The Squam Lake Report, out as a book last summer.