Paul Krugman: 21st Century Howard Beale
The profile of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman that appears in the March 1 issue of the New Yorker is full of wonderment and adoration for its subject (his economics work is described as “poetry”). But it’s also revealing about the curious set of contradictions that animate this 21st century Howard Beale — Krugman is always mad as hell about something, perpetually vowing that he won’t take it any longer.
Hilariously, the piece begins by telling us all about how Krugman (who, as the old joke has it, predicted about fifteen of the last three crises) composes his legendarily venomous denunciations literally at the beach, in St. Croix where he and his former student (now wife) Robin Wells apparently spend a lot of time pushing each other’s buttons. Wells, the Lady MacBeth of the piece, is seen urging her husband to turn up the heat, to let his rage hit a roiling boil, as they watch the tide roll in and out. When these pina colada progressives aren’t strolling barefoot in the sand, they’re taking – I’m serious — yoga classes, which Wells teaches in their other home in Princeton. You have to wonder what kind of soothing, peaceful chants are overheard in the yoga room. I picture them sounding a bit like this:
Inhale, and imagine you’re a delicate little lotus, and .. GEORGE W. BUSH IS SATAN! and exhale. Good. Now for the Stabbing Mitch McConnell pose.
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Winning the Nobel Prize in economics last year has greatly added to Krugman’s luster. The opinion aggregator reckons he is the no. 1 pundit in America (hence the world), and that ranking is hard to dispute now that Krugman’s ideological teammates are comfortably situated in the White House and in Congress. These lawmakers and executive branch potentates regularly phone Krugman.
Krugman may be your man when it comes to technical analysis of how economies of scale have affected international trade (the subject he won the Nobel for), but as a science, economics is still in the 14th century. In the profile, we learn that “the most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones [within which an exchange rate is allowed to float], and it was completely wrong.”
So the most famous economist in the world is somewhat of a flop as an economic “scientist,” if you can call him that when the most noted practitioners still debate basic questions about how well Keynesian New Deal policies worked — like befuddled astronomers discussing whether the Earth revolved around the sun or vice versa. His justification for his “target zones” fiasco is this: “If target zones worked the way that people say they’re supposed to work, then this is how it would play out.” Oh, okay. So in some alterna-reality, he’s right. Would doctors be rewarded for publishing papers about how to treat cancer patients as if health were a matter of balancing the bodily humors of blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm?
Just about all the op-ed writers for the Times could use a little mental counseling.
People used to talk about an NYT article now they talk about what a fool of himself that idiot Krugman made of himself. Sometimes it’s Rich, or tecently it’s been Krugman, Rich, and Gore. Quelle embaras de richesse – not!
Krugman? Isn’t he that chipmunk mascot on ABC’s This Week?
Dear Miss Rand,
Who is Jack Boot?
The governmental looting of america requires court intellectuals to provide rationalization. Krugman with his keynesianism is one of the lead useful idiots for the job. Obviously all NY Times columnists are shills for marxism, and marxism is the perfect ideology for the angry victim.
Krugman is a totally partisan hack and not much more. Economists? Thomas Sowell and Walter Williams reduce him to a rank amateur.
At least Howard Beale really believed that he was peddling the truth – even when he claimed that his business was achieving the opposite; “Television is not the truth; Television is a god-damned amusement park!”
Krugman has been caught in so many self-contradictions it is simply amazing that anyone can take him seriously. Punditry is not the truth; punditry is a…
I identified with the Howard Beale line in Network. Beale was shouting that he’d had enough of the Krugmans of the world, or so I freely interpret the line.
I don’t identify at all with Krugman’s self-righteous grumpiness.
George Will (quote: “It has been well said that really up-to-date liberals do not care what people do, as long as it is compulsory”) sort of ate Paul’s lunch last Sunday…
Take that, Paul
Great piece on this Caribbean islander. For reason’s unknown (for reasons to be guessed at) this self-contradictory gentleman’s every word is republished daily on Memeorandum, along with junior whizkid Ezra Klein and noted civil rights authority, who lives in a state with under a 1% African-American diversity population, Vermont, Steve Benen.
Loved this piece, John, highlighted by the great second from last paragraph.
“Krugman is a sci-fi creature, a two-headed Godzilla roaring out of both sides of his mouth….”
Yes, a nice temperate piece by a Mr. Boot maligning Paul Krugman for his rage.
This is the same rag that supported communist polititions(progressives) during the 1930′s. Nuff said.
This is tiresome…
Krugman falls under the rubric of just another progressive. Progressives are marinated in relative value systems, and they are trained to shun and abhor any kind of thinking that hints of absolute standards. This provides us with such feats of mental gymnastics as semantic games, shifting definitions, over-generalizations, double standards, disingenuous rationalizations in one instance that are blithely discarded the next, postmodernist narratives as thinly disguised excuses for might-makes-right, inability to frame hierarchies, and cherry-picked symptoms mistaken for underlying causes.
Progressives then engage in a perpetual love fest awarding themselves honors, so we have the Nobel committee puppets awarding the prize in economics to Krugman.
Reading such nonsense is exhausting, especially since any attempt at rational rebuttal is useless. No wonder most Conservatives ultimately conclude that progressives are clinically insane.
#5 P.T. Bull: “the governmental looting of America requires court intellectuals…….all NY Times columnists are shills for Marxism…” Well, the looting appears in more than one form. In studies released last year, the GAO has chronicled hundreds of billions of dollars in cost overruns on weapons procurement programs in the Pentagon. Those by the way occurred during Bush/Cheney. One has to wonder why the Tea Partiers decry Obama spending, but ignore government waste in the Pentagon?
Charles, are you sure you didn’t mean “RUBE?”
Just another angry Progressive, mad at the fact their Utopian world is falling apart all around them at the hands of their “messianic” leader. He like all of them have always been angry and always will be. Just another day in ……
Well, steveb #13, I can’t speak for ‘tea partiers’ but I believe that we should not be engaged in occupations of two countries, nor should we maintain standing armies around the world. Were my wishes to come to pass, military spending would drop quite a bit. The military/industrial complex is a waste of american lives and money at its present level.
I am guessing you are a liberal who presumes that everyone who criticises liberals automatically shares all the beliefs of neo-cons. You guessed wrong, and I hope you do more thinking and less presuming in the future.
I am put to mind of something bill clinton said about NY times columnist maureen dowd: “Her greatest fear is that somewhere in the world there is someone who is not miserable.”
You’d be mad as hell too if you were once an adviser to Enron. He’s just trying to stay out of jail with his projections. Of course, he has nothing to fear, AG Holder has no interest in prosecuting marxists.
I used to like to read him to marvel at his hackery. But the photo of him began to give me nightmares, he looks like a really scary garden gnome. Come to think of it, I avert my eyes from the writer’s photo whenever I read any of the NYT op-eds for fear I’ll see the spittle.
For some reason, RealClearPolitics likes to run links to his pieces. After reading the last one, I went to the reader comments to see if anyone else thought that he was an over-rated economist who has reached the level of his incompetence as a pundit. Since it was, after all, the New York Times, most of the comments were glowing affirmations. There were 393 comments, entered over two or three days. I guess the other 7 people who subscribe to the Times either didn’t read it or didn’t feel the urge to comment!
#13
Another librul[no, don't tell me another one] makes the case that if the Bush administration did it its OK for the Obama team to do it. Good going SteveB and congratulations to your home state for raising such a bright boy. But I feel compelled to say that a wrong in the past doesn’t represent a right in the present. (What a curious way to argue! But if you are going to argue this way, SteveB don’t forget to include LBJ, JFK, Eisenhower, and all the other Presidents who were unable to stop Pentagon waste.)
Progressives are marinated in relative value systems, and they are trained to shun and abhor any kind of thinking that hints of absolute standards. This provides us with such feats of mental gymnastics as semantic games, shifting definitions, over-generalizations, double standards, disingenuous rationalizations in one instance that are blithely discarded the next, postmodernist narratives as thinly disguised excuses for might-makes-right, inability to frame hierarchies, and cherry-picked symptoms mistaken for underlying causes…Progressives then engage in a perpetual love fest awarding themselves honors
Gotta agree with that. Deconstructing progressives does get a little tiresome.
Deconstruct one, you’ve deconstructed them all.
Next time Krugman’s mug is on TV, look closely……it’s in the eyes.
He is an example of that useless elitist that would last less than two days if the power went out or the food store was closed. He has no real idea how the world works. His theories are as corrupt as his politics.
Here is one of my posts about this inability of the elites to survive in the real world. My son is a huge zombie fan and it made me think of this.
http://truthandcommonsense.com/2010/02/20/zombies-and-liberals-democrats-why-i-wish-the-living-dead-would-pay-a-visit/
If Krugman told me the sky was blue, I would go outside to double check.
Steve B & PT Bull: Are you guys kidding? Do you really equate cost overruns on weapon systems or even the cost of the Iraq/Afghan wars as anything like the TIDAL WAVE of red ink from the “Stimulus” or entitlements or Medicare? Most cost overruns are due to requirements creep over the (protracted) lifetime of a weapons program and the enormous challenge of accurate initial cost “estimates” for such complex, high stakes systems. I always marvel at how people can get so focused on the accounting challenges of the only consistently successful government agency (a brilliant war record of 15-0-1) when every other gov agency (think Medicare, Medicaid) can miss their “estimates” by 3000% and no one complains. It is perfectly legitimate to argue the merits of our current and future military commitments being affordable or not; it is ludicrous to expect better cost control when the subject is a government agency fighting a war.
As for Krugman, seriously, why does anyone with a functioning brain pay any attention to the man? He is a politically unhinged advocate hiding behind a Nobel Prize for an obscure theory in a pseudo-science likely to be proven wrong in the next 20 years by a marginally less idiotic pseudo-scientist working with better data.
All you need to know about Krugman’s competence as an economist,is that a few years ago he wa advocating loosening retrictions on mortage loans.He was thus promoting the “welfare mortgages” that destroyed the US banking system by promoting an unsustainable housing bubble.KRUDGMAN in a less corrupt world,would be considered a demented charlatan;in the world of Obama, this Frank Rich with a degree in economics, gets the Nobel prize and is considered smart.No wonder that no one save, leftist yuppies, reads the NYTimes or the New Yorker.