Apropos that Kevin Dowd speech which Brian Micklethwait wrote about earlier, the name Paul Krugman came up when Prof. Dowd pointed to the absurdity of calls for ever more money-printing, government spending and debt as a way to solve our current economic malaise. Some readers will remember that extraordinary comment by Krugman a few days back when he suggested that policymakers should act as if they believed the Earth was under some sort of attack from space aliens. And of course he’s argued that the Great Depression was ended by WW2 (it wasn’t, or not in the way Krugman suggests). And a day or so ago, he seems determined to cause dangerously high blood pressure problems by comments such as this, apropos the commemorations of the 9/11 mass murders:
“What happened after 9/11–and I think even people on the right know this, whether they admit it or not–was deeply shameful. The atrocity should have been a unifying event, but instead it became a wedge issue. Fake heroes like Bernie Kerik, Rudy Giuliani, and, yes, George W. Bush raced to cash in on the horror. And then the attack was used to justify an unrelated war the neocons wanted to fight, for all the wrong reasons.”
This is unhinged. Whoever Bernie Kerik is (information gratefully received, Ed), I don’t think that you can really say that the Mayor of New York was “cashing in” on the immolation of the southern part of Manhattan. If you want an account of how Guiliani and his colleagues dealt with those terrible days, here is an interview he did with Steve Forbes. As for GWB, I don’t think there was some crazy, cynical exploitation of a terrible event although some politicians, Democrat as well as Republican, used the understandably heightened fears about security to hit certain civil liberties, expand government power, and the like. Now by all means criticise the policies pursued at the time by governments in the US and overseas, and goodness knows, libertarians of various hues haven’t been shy on that score, but I detected no immediate “cashing in” on the crisis. When events of such enormity occur, any reaction from a politician, sensible or not, could with hindsight be slagged off as “cashing in”. Suppose Bush/whoever had done nothing other than mount a police operation, hold a few ceremonies of condolence and leave it at that, or go in for lots of vacuous platitudes. No doubt Prof. Krugman would now be foaming about the complacency of such a stance.
Krugman is a man who, let’s not forget, was awarded a Nobel Prize in economics, and it would be nice if a certain gravitas could come with such a position. When I try to recall the way that Milton Friedman, that other Nobel Prize winning economist, wrote about world affairs to great effect for Newsweek magazine – succeeding the great Henry Hazlitt – there is simply no comparison in tone as well as content. The hatred that seems to pour out of Krugman is actually quite worrying. What is eating him?
It seems to me that Paul Krugman is a professional leftie. In Krugman’s world and circles, there is nothing but power and the accumulation of more power.
He doesn’t believe that someone would actually do their job just because they were hired to do it.
I have to wonder if Krugman is a sociopath.
What’s eating Krugman is that his side – politically – is not getting what it wants.
My impression (from those who’ve done the background reading) is that when he stuck to economics, he deserved that Nobel for his work on international trade.
But now, he’s talking politics (all the time, even when it’s notionally economics in the Times), and he’s a hack – because competence isn’t transitive.
Just as with Einstein, who’s the best famous example, being really really smart in one area doesn’t make you omnicompetent – it just gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with if you don’t watch yourself.
Krugman is well on track to be remembered as “that giant idiot foaming-at-the-mouth Leftist prat” rather than “that brilliant economist”.
Michael Kinsley signed up Krugman to write a column for Slate about 15 years ago. Although Slate was (and is) a generally leftist publication, it has always been openminded enough to let its columnists write what they actually think, regardless of party line, and if someone isn’t a leftist but is good, that is fine. (Slate’s media columnist Jack Shafer would be right at home writing for this blog, for instance). For Slate, Krugman wrote mostly about economics, and mostly well. (See this defence of third world sweatshops, for instance).
He then got hired by the New York Times oped page to write more frequently and shorter pieces. In the early days of doing this, my understanding is that editors actually rejected some of his articles when he tried to write about economics, and encouraged him to write anti-Bush political screeds instead. (The New York Times oped page is not openminded. To have a “balanced view” they will employ a “rightwing” columnist like David Brooks who isn’t especially right wing, and (more importantly) isn’t especially bright). Krugman then went along with this, and his articles have become more and more tiresomely left-wing party line. I am sure this gets Krugman invited to all the best New York parties and gets him particularly obsequious service in fancy restaurants, but there is something deeply dishonest about it. I think he knows that he is a whore, but continues to be one anyway.
“…competence isn’t transitive.”
Oh… that is a precisely correct way of phrasing it.
Krugman, along with Skidelsky*, may now be on the verge of discrediting himself even among lefties. They will spit him out onto the street once they think he is no longer useful.
*His calls for a “national green investment bank” surely look a bit more dodgy now following the collapse of Solyndra.
From what I understand Krugman consciously decided to go totally left wing and to abandon all semblance of rationality when he joined the NYT. Apparently his wife had something to do with it.
As I wrote before we should all say Kaddish for Krugman’s marbles.
George Bush never claimed to be a “hero” (fake or otherwise). He spent most of 9/11 arguing with the government machine about whether (admittedly in defiance of all established procedure) he should be allowed back to Washington (he eventually was – only to be dragged from his bed that night over a report of another aircraft).
Donald Runsfeld (I did not know he read the NYT till he announced yesterday that he would no longer subscribe) spent 9/11 refusing to leave his command (the Pentagon) in spite of it having come under attack. Whether that is the sign of a “hero” or someone who had just “reverted to the 1950s Navy man he once had been” (a-captain-goes-down-with-his-ship) has been hottly debated.
Rudy G.?
We all watched him via television (at least I did) – covered in dirt with only a few of his staff around him (others having been trapped – as his command post had been crushed by the falling buildings) desperatly trying to organize things.
“Phony hero?”
Paul Krugman is scum – there is no point using nice words about him. He is what he is.
With Murry Rothbard one always has to state that he was a great economist and a great historian of economic thought (and he was – both).
With Paul Krugman a tiny bit of that may have been true in the past (as Michael says), but these days (judgeing by what he writes about ecomomics – as well as everything else)…….
Paul Krugman is scum – and that is ALL he is.
Krugman is indeed scum (or, as Bod put it on another thread, “a contemptible little shit”), but (as I said on that thread) I don’t think he’s completely wrong here. Power-grubbing politicians (on both sides of the aisle) did seize upon the events of 9/11 to expand the power of government and further diminish our liberties. And that diminution continues to this day. But I don’t agree with the “cashing in” comment; both Bush and Guiliani acted admirably on that day and in the immediate aftermath (although Bush was complicit in the governmental expansion which followed).
Having said that, I do wish to take exception to the assertion that Krugman is a brilliant (or even competent) economist, or that he somehow “deserved” that Nobel Prize. Remember, it was awarded the year before Obama “won” his Peace Prize, and although the awarding committees may have been different the zeitgeist was the same. A few months ago I went to the trouble of looking up that award, and wrote about it here. Re-posting* a portion of that in this thread seems appropriate:
So I don’t accept the proposition that Krugman’s opinion are worth much consideration even in his field of soi-disant expertise.
* Hey, if Brian can link to his “best video bits in Oxford” I can quote myself, too!
Creutzfeldt-Jakob?
Paul Krugman? You mean the Enron lobbyist? The man writes what his masters desire to be written.
Krugman is emblematic of the Left in general. As their policies become increasingly rejected for the hokum that they are, expect the hysteria level to rise still more.
If you’re think the Left is becoming unhinged now, wait until November 2012 when they realize they’ve just lost the White House, Senate and House to the Tea Party. The temper tantrums will be awful.
You heard it here first.
The Nobel Prize, in soft subjects like peace and economics, is more a curse than a prize. Who wants to stand on the same podium as Yasser Arafat, Jimmy Carter, or Barack Obama?
What’s eating Dr. Krugman? The good Instapundit was a good deal less terse than usual in explaining his take on that matter:
EVERYBODY’S ANGRY, to judge from my email, about Paul Krugman’s typo-burdened 9/11 screed. Don’t be angry. Understand it for what it is, an admission of impotence from a sad and irrelevant little man. Things haven’t gone the way he wanted lately, his messiah has feet of clay — hell, forget the “feet” part, the clay goes at least waist-high — and it seems likely he’ll have even less reason to like the coming decade than the last, and he’ll certainly have even less influence than he’s had. Thus, he tries to piss all over the people he’s always hated and envied. No surprise there. But no importance, either. You’ll see more and worse from Krugman and his ilk as the left nationally undergoes the kind of crackup it’s already experiencing in Wisconsin. They thought Barack Obama was going to bring back the glory days of liberal hegemony in politics, but it turned out he was their Ghost Dance, their Bear Shirt, a mystically believed-in totem that lacked the power to reverse their onrushing decline, no matter what the shamans claimed.