Don’t Trust an Economist Who’s Never Been a Parent and Never Made a Payroll
WASHINGTON, D.C. July 23 (DPI) – Paul Krugman, America’s most strident promoter of Neo-Keynesian economic policies, is leaving his tenured post at Princeton this summer, and his many enemies are hoping it’s a sign the ultra-liberal professor’s influence will diminish.
It’s unlikely it will, so long as Krugman has his soapbox at The New York Times, where his op-ed column and “Conscience of A Liberal” blog continue to be published.
Krugman, who won the Nobel Prize for Economics in 2008, for years has not simply promoted the expansionist fiscal policies of the Obama administration and The Federal Reserve, he has attacked – repeatedly, mockingly and sometimes viciously – critics of those policies, particularly Republicans, even moderate ones.
Yes, you can argue the Republican legacies of Lee Atwater, Karl Rove and their ilk helped foster ultra-partisanship in American politics. But Paul Krugman’s columns have been just as nasty: They are more than simply “guided missiles” as columnists like to call their hyper-focused commentaries; his columns have been the American Left’s lowest and least dignified contribution to modern political discourse.
Just yesterday he posted a reply to a column in The Wall Street Journal by Ohio Senator Rob Portman, who repeated warnings about long-term deficits, the absence of entitlement reform and the potential economic catastrophe if nothing is done.
http://online.wsj.com/articles/rob-portman-heading-off-the-entitlement-meltdown-1405983479
Krugman not simply dismissed Portman’s concerns but he ridiculed the Senator as well, even speculating that the Senator didn’t write the column, a clear suggestion that Portman was either too lazy or stupid to do so.
krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/debt-disaster-dead-enders
In my view, neither Krugman nor Portman advocates the obvious solution: Simplifying the tax code, for starters, and then undertaking a broad restructuring of our many layers of government, which all remain intact to serve a horse-and-buggy age. Broader de-regulation would help as well.
But Krugman’s undignified and arrogant tone – he’s comfortable with it because he’s used it for so many years – has only served to alienate him from anyone who is not a dyed-in-the-wool follower of his views. He certainly never convinced me of much.
Forbes Magazine has followed all this in recent years – it picked up on the now-famous comments on Krugman by historian Niall Ferguson. In a 2013 series of responses to Krugman, Ferguson wrote in part:
For too long, Paul Krugman has exploited his authority as an award-winning economist and his power as a New York Times columnist to heap opprobrium on anyone who ventures to disagree with him. Along the way, he has acquired a claque of like-minded bloggers who play a sinister game of tag with him, endorsing his attacks and adding vitriol of their own. I would like to name and shame in this context Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O’Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias and Justin Wolfers. Krugman and his acolytes evidently relish the viciousness of their attacks, priding themselves on the crassness of their language.
Where I come from, however, we do not fear bullies. We despise them. And we do so because we understand that what motivates their bullying is a deep sense of insecurity. Unfortunately for Krugtron the Invincible, his ultimate nightmare has just become a reality. By applying the methods of the historian – by quoting and contextualizing his own published words – I believe I have now made him what he richly deserves to be: a figure of fun, whose predictions (and proscriptions) no one should ever again take seriously.
And this month, Forbes picked up on Krugman’s departure from Princeton:
One thing is clear: In terms of economic policy America is very, very fortunate. We are getting away with economic murder, issuing more and more debt to meet our unrestrained obligations. Our central bank keeps interest rates where it wants. Its balance sheet has exploded, the consequences of which we have no real grasp.
We do all this largely because we can: The rest of the world is full of even worse actors, we are still the civilized world’s policeman, and we have powerful and competitive corporations asserting themselves throughout the globe. Our public markets somehow remain credible. And the US dollar continues to be the world’s reserve currency, a privilege other blocs are jockeying for.
In many respects, Krugman and his allies have already won the ideological war – the Fed’s “quantitative easing” of the last five years has indeed reduced unemployment, and restored if not robust growth some semblance of it. If he walked off the stage now he could do so – in the public’s and his own mind at least – victoriously.
The economist Henry Hazlitt wrote back in the 40s that the Keynesians would always win over the public in an economics debate over economists who advocated for market-based reforms. Keynesians, after all, print and spend for average people, creating a measure of short-term prosperity. Hazlitt was right then, and though he died in 1993 at age 98, he’s still right.
The continuum being what it is, America’s economic story ain’t over. For one thing Krugman and the policymakers inspired by his views have long since pushed us over the fiscal cliff — the consequences of which still haven’t been felt.
Of course the only reason we are not Argentina yet is that we are still America, still in a position to manipulate and intimidate and bamboozle our global creditors. But for how much longer?
Like any good Keynesian Paul Krugman simply doesn’t care about the impact of inflation on wealth. After all wealthy people have wealth, and they of course are the Darth Vaders of Krugman’s morality play.
I’ve long believed that Paul Krugman – for all his awards, all his followers, all his rampant arrogance – has been simply unqualified to remark authoritatively or maturely on many of the issues he’s alleged to be an expert on.
Why? In my view he lacks the perspective of two essential authorities in life: Being a parent and being an employer.
For one thing, you can tell that Paul Krugman, from his years of writings, has simply never been a parent. (I checked – he’s not.) He’s precocious, for sure, but he’s also petulant, the obnoxious know-it-all in the classroom’s front row.
He just doesn’t get the mentality of normal parenting – concern for long-term consequences, respect of others and restraint in behavior, just for starters. I see those qualities flower in new parents all the time. But I’ve never seen them in the writings – the substance or the style – of Paul Krugman.
Both Krugman’s economic views – deficit spending is the only cure for what ails us, and there are few harmful consequences from that spending — as well as his lack of civility in the way he communicates them reflect the fact that he’s never had kids.
I feel confident that if 61-year-old Paul Krugman had children now, his economic views would likely change; certainly his manners would improve.
And it’s clear, too, that Dr. Krugman, the brilliant economics professor that he is, has never in his life made a payroll. I think he would gain great insight – especially if he used his own money and his own business income — if he did. Certainly he would develop a greater sensitivity to the single coin that is wealth and capital.
Employers are routinely maligned by the media, often characterized as oppressors of workers everywhere. But it is employers – especially private and small employers with no special access to cheap capital — who do life’s very harsh day-to-day calculus, of determining whether human energy and skills – those of themselves and their workers — can translate into any measure of prosperity. I’ve never seen a government create wealth – ever.
That Paul Krugman is leaving his tenured teaching job at Princeton is a good thing – for us and maybe even for him. Perhaps he can go start a family, and maybe even start a business. I would he interested in knowing what his views would be then. I know his tone would change. –Stephen Clark