James Harkin of the Financial Times writes about Paul Krugman in the... Arts and Weekend section?
Posted by DeLong at July 17, 2004 07:50 AM | TrackBack | | Other weblogs commenting on this postPaul Krugman's terse opening transparency on the overhead projector looks more like a private aide-memoire than material for a public address: "Like Basil Fawlty, don't mention the war. Talk instead about political economy." Krugman has been invited to the London School of Economics, a bastion of liberal Americans abroad, to deliver a lecture entitled, "Whither America?" A small, bearded man with a glint in his eye, he is dwarfed by the imposing lectern on the stage of the LSE's Old Theatre. In front of him, undergraduates in sweatshirts and trainers sit alongside middle-aged men in pinstriped suits who have just arrived from the office....
After September 11, Krugman's column in The New York Times was one of the first to poke its head above the parapet and lay into the conduct of the Bush administration's "war on terror". Since then, the left has elevated Krugman to hero, an eloquent and apparently unimpeachable critic of Bush's tax-cutting and of his stewardship of the American economy.
He begins diligently, all graphs and bar charts. The Bush administration's series of tax cuts, he announces, are not a temporary stimulus to the economy, but a "structural reduction in government revenue". "You deprive the government of the revenue," he says, outlining what he takes to be the strategy of Bush's circle. "You simply say the revenue is not there." Since most government spending is "incompressible", he forecasts the shortfall can only be made good by cutting social insurance programmes in half. Who benefits? "We can be pretty clear on the math," says Krugman, pulling up another transparency. This one shows the bottom fifth of American wage earners have been spared a mere 0.4 per cent of their income by Bush's tax cuts, while those in the top 1 per cent have benefited from a 6.1 per cent cut in their taxes....
If there was a budget surplus, says Krugman, showing us what a reasonable man he can be, then there would be a case for tax cuts which are proportional to income. "But we are cutting taxes into a deficit," he fumes. "For those in the middle of society, it is like being given a lavish gift, but one which is paid for on your credit card."...
Now Krugman the painstaking number cruncher is beginning to jostle for position with Krugman the political agitator. There is a whiff of intrigue in his telling of the story of contemporary American politics, the suggestion of men in the dark plotting strange, millennial occurrences. But he makes no apologies. "Last year's crazy conspiracy theory," he says, "is this year's established wisdom."...
A middle-aged man wants to know why more academics and intellectuals have not spoken out against the Bush administration. "It is difficult for some academics to grapple with the fact that budget projections are blatantly, sneeringly dishonest," Krugman admits. "But actually university professors got a lot noisier recently." They certainly did...
http://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20040526-WhitherAmericaPaulKrugman.pdf
Here is the lecture, from the Unofficial Paul Krugman archive- http://www.pkarchive.org/.
Posted by: Harry Hutton on July 17, 2004 08:25 AMThe New York Times never counted on Paul Krugman being anything but a barb they could use against Clinton. He was supposed to do nothing but write columns about everything Clinton did wrong. After all, he was an award-winning "unimpeachable" figure.
Imagine their horror when he suddenly started pointing out the gross distortions of the Bush campaign, which then because the Bush administration. Can you imagine any mainstream paper hiring him in 2001? He is something of a freak, willing and able to point out that 2 - 1 does not equal 5.
So they're stuck with him. The rest of the mainstream is stuck with marginalizing him as best they can. Does Krugman ever get cited like Safire in other papers? I haven't seen it.
Posted by: Alan on July 17, 2004 08:29 AMYes, Alan, imagine the NYT's horror at Krugman's attacks on Bush. That must be why the paper went out and hired Barbara Ehrenreich, who makes Krugman look like the most even-tempered man in America, to write a column.
The idea that not enough intellectuals are speaking out against the Bush administration, when for the past year the NYT best-seller list has been dominated by books attacking Bush, is simply absurd. I'm not complaining about how many anti-Bush books there are, but the left's constant insistence that its message is being quashed simply doesn't jibe with reality. In this, they remind me of nothing so much as the right, constantly blathering about the "liberal media." Pro-Bush, anti-Bush: both messages getting all the attention they deserve.
Posted by: Steve Carr on July 17, 2004 09:12 AMAlan - Whatever the rationale NYT had for hiring Krugman, I think they (especially Gail Collins who inherited the columnists from Howell Raines) must be
quite happy with Krugman now, since he attained cult status from the left. Of all the NYT columnists, he is the only one with substance (except occasional Kristoff when he travels to far-off places) and
he outshines all their other gas bag columnists.
Brad's posts are appearing in super-wide format these days; running WAY off the right side of my screen. Anybody else having this problem?
Posted by: yesh on July 17, 2004 09:35 AMRe ultra-wide format. I've been having the same problem for the last day or two. (Mac OS 9.2, Internet Explorer 5.0)
Fortunately the comment pages aren't affected, so I've been able to keep reading without horizontal scrolling.
Posted by: Allan Connery on July 17, 2004 10:03 AMTry resizing your type face.
Posted by: masaccio on July 17, 2004 10:50 AMsame issue for me (text running off the page)...mac OS X. I think it might be an issue of access--do academics have access to mainstream media? have the right framed the issue such that academics are immediately pegged as liberal therefor not "objective." Seems like that academics need a PR campaign to undo their image as ivory tower dwellers. Everybody else is in the game (of PR) why not academia?
Posted by: delecti on July 17, 2004 10:51 AMSteve Carr,
I get the impression that Krugman isn't as concerned with the number of "popular" critiques of the current administration, as he is with the dearth of rigorous academic critiques. It's one thing for, say, Molly Ivins to slam the President, it's quite another for Ernest May to critique his foreign policy. I think if you look at the NYT list, most books fall in the realm of "popular" critiques rather than academic (I could be wrong of course...I haven't actually looked at the list.)
Cheers!
Everett Volk
They probably fall into the Krugmanian category called "airport".
Posted by: ogmb on July 17, 2004 11:42 AM"A middle-aged man wants to know why more academics and intellectuals have not spoken out against the Bush administration."
Huh? When I was in college not so long ago, most of the professors were more than happy to speak out against anyone to the right of Lenin.
Posted by: digamma on July 17, 2004 12:01 PMhttp://www.lse.ac.uk/collections/LSEPublicLecturesAndEvents/pdf/20040526-WhitherAmericaPaulKrugman.pdf : So how do you take them on and the answer is, well you deprive the Government of the revenue. And then you say, well look, what can we do, we have to cut the spending, the revenue just isn’t there. And that has clearly been the political strategy for the long game of the ideologues behind the Administration.
Notice, friends and neighbors, no Brad's goofy "tax shifts".
Posted by: a on July 17, 2004 12:51 PMSteve:
"Yes, Alan, imagine the NYT's horror at Krugman's attacks on Bush. That must be why the paper went out and hired Barbara Ehrenreich, who makes Krugman look like the most even-tempered man in America, to write a column."
Steve, you have been out of circulation for a while, haven't you? Since before the Clinton administration, judging by your (mis-)perception of NYT columnists.
Just to help you catch up - Safire is still there, and still a reliable guide to the RNC's lies. Dowd is being a catty b*tch - against Bush, because he's in power, but she's pretty omnivorous, and has shown that the most trivial grounds will do, in taking on Kerry. Brooks has joined the NYT's columnist pool, playing a Kaus-like game of being an 'I'm a democrat' right-winger. Friedman has been there, worshipping the war on terror, or rather, whatever is floating around his fume-soaked brain, because he and reality aren't living together anymore.
Kristoff recently pulled a beautiful 'cool kids' trick, claiming that Bush was merely mislead (poor guy, too bad that he doesn't have about fifty zillion family connections to use, to cut through the crap :( ).
And Judith Miller has been doing for the NYT and WMD's in the 21st century that Gerth did for the NYT and the Clinton Scandals in the 20th - namely, printing anything which the right dictates.
Posted by: Barry on July 17, 2004 01:31 PM"When I was in college not so long ago, most of the professors were more than happy to speak out against anyone to the right of Lenin."
In what ways?
Posted by: Brian on July 17, 2004 01:43 PMKrugman of course, but Bob Herbert has taken on many important issues and been effective (cf, the Texas drug cases), much more so than Kristof with his posturing
Posted by: Eli Rabett on July 17, 2004 07:56 PMhttp://www.rmbrmb.com
http://www.rmbrmb.com/map.asp
Eli - You are right. Bob Herbert did some excellent work. Texas drug cases, IBM semiconductor plant cancer cases, recent columns on medical malpractice, Iraqi war injured... He is indeed an original.
Posted by: ecoast on July 18, 2004 06:39 AMShameless post-commonist quote:
[...] but the wealthy individual is alienated from the needs of society because he’s so much wealthier than the society as a whole. So this is a little bit … an American example of economistic thinking. But if you put it in greater generalities you would say that the wealthy … if the economic elite - wherever you chose to start that - becomes increasingly distant in the way it lives and its economic concerns, and increasingly dominant in the tax base because it is so wealthy, they will have diminishing incentive to support programmes that are for the broader social good.
[...] you get a situation in which wealthy people send their children to private schools, and live in gated communities. They are probably not going to have much interest in adequate public for funding schooling and public safety and we are just going to be in a situation where you would expect those people to become increasingly unsupportive of the institutions of a generous government.
Posted by: MarcinGomulka on July 18, 2004 04:11 PMThank you!!! Finally, someone mentioned Bob Herbert. He may not be as flashy as some of the NYT's other writers, but he is consistent and thoughtful, worthy of admiration. And he will occasionally respond to an emailed comment. (Did anyone else notice how his photo changed after the fall of 2001? Same pose, a bit more sorrow.) And Krugman may be one of many critical voices now, but when he was first dissecting this administration's fiscal mishaps, he was not. His was a lone voice of sanity during that absurd time. If the NYT hired him only to bust on Clinton, the laugh is on our side; righteousness seldom pays off, even--no, especially--for newspaper editors. (Dowd? Occasionally she writes something worth reading, but mostly I consider her the Queen of Conflation! With her in print, who needs the neocon sympathizers?)
Posted by: Karen on July 19, 2004 07:47 PMI'm sorry, but in what world is the London School of Economics a bastion of screaming leftists?
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