Every time I edit a post, blogger sends it off into the ether. I'm mad as hell. . . but I tricked it. I kept a copy of the damn post this time, so all I lost was my edits. It'll be back up soon.
Is this the best that the gun control movement can come up with?
Nicholas Kristof's column on the Second Amendment Sisters at Mt. Holyoke puts forth what may be the worst argument for gun control that I've ever seen in a New York Times column, which is really saying quite a bit.
The tone is alarmist:
Alas, one of the most far-reaching consequences of 9/11 is a surge in gun sales around the country.
So while we don't know whether more Americans will be killed by anthrax, we can be quite confident that plenty of us will be killed by these additional handguns. . .
. . . as a country hick, I'm comfortable with guns. But there's abundant evidence that having more handguns also means more gun thefts, more armed robbery, more suicide and more murder.
This in an article on the Mt. Holyoke SAS chapter, mind you. This is what I like to call the "Sauron's Ring" theory of gun control: guns are so dangerous and powerful that merely owning one can send previously law-abiding upper-middle class lit majors rampaging through the green hills of New England, murdering and robbing as they go.
I think he's trying to hide how laughable this is with that "gun theft" remark -- except that this is disingenous in the extreme, because unless Mt. Holyoke's rules are strangely different from those of other New England womens' colleges, those guns aren't being kept in the dorms -- they're being stored at a firing range, a highly secure location. Which I suspect Kristof knows, because he tries to frighten us with the image of bullet-creased target sheets lying around otherwise girl-y dorm rooms. If the guns were there, we can be sure we would have heard about it.
Even worse is that abundant "evidence" he was talking about -- or at least, the examples he chooses to give us:
Japan, where I used to live, allows only about 50 people (all leading target shooters) to own handguns, and while criminals do smuggle them in, there were only 28 gun deaths (murders and suicides combined) in 1999, the most recent year for which figures are available. By contrast, the United States had 26,800 gun deaths in 2000.
England has higher rates of assault, vehicle theft and burglary than the United States. But tight controls on handguns mean that England's murder rate is only one-sixth of America's.
He can't be serious. Japan is also a country where you can leave your car running with the keys in it, and the only thing that will happen is that someone will turn the engine off to keep you from running out of gas. It's crime is almost entirely of the organized variety. Are our nation's colleges really graduating journalists who think that correlation is causation?
England's gun crime rate has gone UP in lockstep with the tightness of it's gun controls, and is skyrocketing now that they have been banned completely. These are his best arguments? Kristof closes with a suitably apocalyptic graf:
Our desire to defend ourselves from terrorism by buying firearms will mean, almost certainly, that thousands more Americans will die in the years ahead from gunfire. It's not terrorism, but it should be terrifying.
Perhaps it should. But if that's the best evidence the gun control folks can come up with, I'm not losing any sleep.
Business school classmates and others have started generating their own indicators for the general health of their sector, or the economy at large. Some of my favorites:
Sector:
-- Availability of Executive Dining Rooms for non-executives -- Availability of free sodas -- Availability of free coffee -- Air travel: First class, business, coach, or standby -- Charity funds -- Recruiting
In the major MBA sectors: Finance, Management Consulting, Tech/Telecomm, and Big Companies That Don't Ask Much of You in Return for Their 85K -- all these indicators are still trending downwards, except availability of Executive Dining Rooms, which isn't a good sign either.
And in the department of economic NLI's:
-- Tech employment is sharply down, which indicates that investment spending has still not picked up -- MBA jobs, which tend to exist in the highly lucrative, highly volatile sectors of the economy, are way down, with only 40-50% of this year's class of Top 5 MBA's employed. For reference, most MBA recruiting actually takes place in the fall of your second year, so for my class the number was closer to 80%, and even higher for the class before mine. -- New York city real estate is looking a little better; some people are buying again. This jibes with the continuing rise in home prices across the country, although in New York prices are considerably off their highs, reflecting weakness in the financial sector. -- Anonymous sources report that a yahoo I used to work with, who lost most of his money in the Internet bubble, has started investing again. I think this means that we should run for the hills.
Swen Swenson of Coyote at the Dogshow has just emailed a picture that proves that he's one of the legions of neanderthal men who think of nothing but big hooters.
Jim Treacher expresses his opinion of Ted Rall quite graphically. Don't forget to click on the "other fans of Ted Rall" to check out the lawsuit Rall is waging against some guy who dared to make fun of him.
Krugman almost redeems himself by making the rational point that Social Security isn't a pension fund:
The truth — which Mr. Bush's economists understand perfectly well — is that Social Security has never been run like a simple pension fund. It's really a social contract: each generation pays taxes that support the previous generation's retirement, and expects to receive the same treatment from the next generation.
But then he uses this to bash Bush's privatisation scheme, as if hesitating to tell voters that they can't have everything they want were somehow unique to Republicans.
He does a little clever tap-dancing along the way to make it sound as if Bush is an inveterate liar:
Last week George W. Bush did it again, contrasting Social Security benefits with what retiring workers would have if they had invested all their Social Security taxes in the stock market instead. As an article in The Times pointed out, this was a misleading scenario even on its own terms; financial planners strongly advise against investing solely in stocks, and a diversified retirement account wouldn't have risen nearly as much in the 1990's bull market
he says, which is true. But somehow Krugman forgot to mention that that diversified account still would have been better than the miserable 1.7% return available to 2000 retirees.
Every time Krugman makes a rock solid, honest point, he strives to somehow make it sound as if the troubles are Bush's fault:
Mr. Bush proposes to allow younger workers to place their payroll taxes in private accounts — in effect, to break this ongoing contract. But then what happens to older workers, who have already paid their dues?
There are only two possibilities. One is default: make room for the trillions diverted into private accounts by slashing the baby boomers' benefits. The other is to buy the baby boomers out — that is, to use money from other sources to replace the diverted funds.
Yup, that's true -- we're going to have to cut benefits or raise taxes on someone. But that's true if we don't privatise. The system's going broke, and the restructuring's going to be expensive. Krugman notably offers no solution of his own, because if he did, a cursory glance would reveal that -- gasp! -- we'd have to cut benefits or raise taxes.
I want to state a proposition that's not controversial, at least among most reputable economists, and shouldn't be controversial with anyone: government is a ludicrously inefficient way to allocate capital. This is true for several reasons: first, programs develop constituencies independant of their intended result (think teacher's unions; whatever you think of them, the intended purpose of the public schools was not to provide jobs for teachers) that spend a lot of time lobbying to prevent the government from abolishing or significantly modifying their program. The result is, effectively, no quality control; programs continue whether or not they achieve their goals. Problems are solved with more funding to the same non-functioning program, or creation of another program that duplicates the services of the first unsuccessful one.
Second, there's an information problem. Prices provide information to firms on how consumers value their services; competition provides them incentive to innovate. Government has neither. Even if they cared, they have only the most inchoate notion of how much or how little people like what they do because feedback systems are limited to sporadic complaints and widespread whining; most of us aren't going to pick up and move to Japan because there was a long wait at the DMV, and we can't stop payment on our checks.
Third, the government is dominated by the civil service, where half the people are competent and the other half can't be fired. Please don't deluge me with email about the last company you worked for. It wasn't like working for the DMV, okay? As a former consultant I consider myself a connoisseur of corporate stupidity and waste, but they don't approach the inefficiencies of the public sector.
Fourth, politicians are spending other people's money. Picture how you'd feel if, say, the guy who makes your refrigerators could set prices by coming over to your house and taking the price increase at gunpoint. Do you think you'd be getting the best available refrigerator at the lowest possible price, or do you think you'd get a box with a chunk of ice in it for $3000? I'm simplifying, of course, because the democratic process offers a check on this, but not as much as you think -- the people who work for the refrigerator guy vote too.
Fifth, government, in order to prevent abuse of the four conditions above, takes recourse in rigidity -- everything not compulsory is forbidden. This is not a recipe for entrepreneurial success.
I hope we can agree now that government is a rotten way to allocate capital. That's why those of us with a Libertarian bent want the government to do the things that only the government can do, like regulate crime, protect property rights, and defend the country -- things so important and otherwise unobtainable that we are willing to put up with the inefficiency. You may disagree, and add a whole long list of other things the government should do, but you have to accept as part of the cost that some of the GDP the government takes will disappear into a welter of useless bureaucratic activity. But I digress.
The point is that any amount of money given to the government generates a significantly lower return than capital privately invested, unless that private investment is Webvan. Therefore, even if the government were trying to allocate the money in such a way that it would increase productivity in order to raise future GDP and hence future tax revenue to help pay off the Social Security beneficiaries, it would not, on average, increase GDP by as much as private investments.
That's why private accounts are the refuge for a battered system. Private accounts have two things going for them: they offer higher returns, and they confer a property right to the pension, which, contrary to popular belief, is not true of Social Security. The more money we allow current beneficiaries to divert into private investment, the more stable the system will be over the long run. This is certainly not risk free; there are serious concerns about what will happen to the stock market as the Baby Boomers and those who follow them try to cash out in retirement. But those concerns are about the prices of the assets in the portfolio. As long as the underlying companies are solid, there will still be value in dividends, stock repurchases, and interest to support today's scrupulous saver. There is no such likelihood when you invest in the Trent Lott Memorial Hogback Research Center at the University of Mississippi.
But there is a cost to all of this: by diverting that money from the current tax system, we create a void that will have to be filled either by raising taxes or lowering benefits. This is what Krugman is talking about. But what if we didn't do this? Well, somewhere down the road -- opinions vary on the date; is it in the next decade, when Social Security stops running a surplus, and we have to cover the shortfall in the budget; the date when outlay exceeds intake; or the date when we've spent down the imaginary "lockbox" (more on this another time). I vote for the second date. There are no assets for Social Security to spend down. So late in the teens or early in the twenties, Social Security is broke. And shortly after that we either raise taxes on the two people left in the workforce a whole lot, or we tell the beneficiaries to get off the golf course and start looking into jobs at Wal-Mart.
The question is not, as Krugman pretends, whether or not we have the crisis. It's when. And with pyramid schemes, earlier is better, because it limits the number of people who get stuck with the bill. Amway and its many followers tend to collapse after ten levels or so, taking the savings of a lot of unfortunate people and leaving them with some shoddy merchandise and possibly, a funny story. Albanian pyramid schemes went on for over a year, involved the whole country, and decimated the entire nation. The push for privatisation is the push to give some security to the young workers who will otherwise be left with nothing but the Federal equivalent of six cartons of unsaleable widgets.
Krugman knows this. Why is he against privatisation? Three answers: the first is that Krugman, by virtue of his politics, wishes to expand the obligation of the state to care for its citizens, not contract it. Fine, but this offers no guideance to whether privatisation is, considered on its own merits, a good or a bad idea. The second is that he is making good points; we can't just talk about privatisation without confronting the need to pay for it. And the third is that the the Republicans are for it, and so Krugman is bound and determined to be a loud voice against. He has a perfect right to all three. But we don't have to take him seriously.
postscript: please don't send me emails about how paying off the debt is the solution. it's a very silly argument, which I will deal with another time. in super-brief summary, it's not so much wrong, as that the effect is not large enough to produce the results the Democrats allege. paying off the national debt is a fine idea, but it won't rescue the program -- it won't even delay its demise by much.
The panel of judges that appointed Ken Starr and Robert Ray just released Ray's final report, which reveals that there was enough evidence to go after Clinton if they'd wanted to pursue criminal charges. Of course, taking a case to trial isn't exactly the same thing as a conviction.
The Democratic spin machine immediately went into overdrive attempting to cast this as Ray's attempt to boost his fledgling Senate campaign against Robert Torricelli. Only one problem: Ray didn't release the report. According to the wire, the judges did.
Most hilarious of all, however, is the dutiful way the reporter sums up the details of the case:
Clinton was impeached by the House, but the Senate acquitted him. Senators split 50-50 on an obstruction of justice charge and voted 55-45 to acquit the president of perjury. The congressional battle followed up the detailed findings of Starr that there was "substantial and credible information ... that may constitute grounds for impeachment."
The Lewinsky controversy grew out of a sexual harassment lawsuit by former Arkansas state employee Paula Jones. Testifying in the lawsuit, Clinton denied having sex with Lewinsky and said he didn't recall being alone with her.
The criminal investigation of Clinton in the Lewinsky matter began in January 1998. Former White House employee Linda Tripp, a friend of Lewinsky, turned over to Starr secretly taped phone calls in which the ex-intern confided her relationship with Clinton. The tapes contradicted Clinton's sworn testimony in the Jones case, which the president gave just days after Tripp had turned the tapes over to Starr.
The sequence — first turning over the tapes, then Clinton testifying in the Jones case — led Clinton and his defenders to accuse Starr's office of setting a perjury trap for the president.
Starr's prosecutors and the FBI (news - web sites) looked into whether Clinton had tried to silence Lewinsky by getting presidential friend Vernon Jordan to find a job for her. Besides opening doors for her job-hunting efforts, Jordan arranged to hire a Washington lawyer for Lewinsky so that she could file an affidavit in the Jones case. In the affidavit, she denied having had a sexual relationship with Clinton.
When Lewinsky eventually agreed to cooperate with investigators in the summer of 1998, she turned over a stained blue dress from an encounter with Clinton. Lab tests showed Clinton's DNA on the garment.
Jordan said he kept the president informed of his efforts on Lewinsky's behalf. Jordan said he had known of no sexual relationship between Lewinsky and the president and Jordan said he engaged in the job search at the request of presidential secretary Betty Currie. Lewinsky insisted she was never promised a job in exchange for her silence.
Just in case, you know, you've been living in a hole for the last four years.
Don't let your mouth write checks your ass can't cash
Frankly, I've been overwhelmed by the multiple $25 contributions my off-the-cuff comment has engendered. I'm super-extremely flattered that this many people are willing to pay money to see someone they've never met.
But I'm a wimp.
I never imagined I'd get even one contribution, otherwise I wouldn't have said it. Because my somewhat reserved personal ethics do not include selling provocative pictures of myself. Plus my parents read the site and they'd faint.
So here's my offer to those who contributed:
1) First, apologies galore for misleading you. Apologies also for not posting this message sooner, but if you're a regular reader, you'll know I've had the flu.
2) I will be more than happy to mail or email you a lovely autographed picture of myself, fully clothed, with or without the debate on Logical Positivism.
3) If this is not satisfactory, I will refund your donation. If you gave because you liked the site, or even just wanted to humiliate me by calling my bluff, you're free to leave it -- but believe me, I would not fault you in the slightest for asking for your money back. So don't be embarassed to ask.
Just shoot me an email stating your preference, and if you're one of my Amazon donors and want your money back, I'm afraid I'll have to ask you for the day and time you donated, since I have no other way to identify you. Paypal donors will note that I have not yet picked up the contribution, and won't until I hear from you.
And thank you to everyone who gave. It's nice to know, after all, that there are still men out there who really are just interested in our minds. ;-)
Welcome to my humble home, home on the web! Just as soon as we get the electricity hooked up and the curtains in the windows, it'll be just like the old spot, but better!
Does anyone else in the blogosphere experience sudden, violent rage when they realize that no matter how hard they try, they will never be 1/20th as funny as UThant?
Merck is the latest in a long line of companies to decide they'd rather have their books done by someone, you know, legitimate. Which, as far as I can tell, will be pretty damn hard to find among the Big Five. The Wall Street Journal says it best:
Our question is whether such an outcome is the best thing right now for restoring credibility to U.S. corporate governance. We were especially struck by yesterday's Journal story announcing that the "Big Accounting Firms Break Ties With Andersen to Resist Changes." The odor of that one can be detected from 40,000 feet.
Having stood behind Andersen's lead in blocking tougher accounting rules before, the four competitors now want to erase Andersen from the family photo. This would sure be good for their business if Andersen fails; as former SEC Chairman Arthur Levitt points out, 95% of Andersen's clients will then migrate to those four. Andersen's collapse would also mean the remaining Big Four could go back to lathering Congress with campaign money to stop any meaningful accounting reform. With Andersen's failure assuaging our collective guilt, the politicians could also applaud and go back to moralizing as usual.
I honestly don't see how Anderson can survive; the public taint of the Anderson name on one's books doesn't seem likely to go away any time soon. Of course, institutional investors are presumably well aware that there's little difference between Anderson and the others, but they in turn are accountable to the Moms and Pops who invest in their mutual funds, and it's not hard to imagine it being easier to pressure a company to switch auditors than continue to explain why it doesn't matter.
The Dow: Up 170+ points yesterday. Down 150+ points today. No enormous information change between yesterday and today; investors just. . . changed their minds. I'm beginning to have flashbacks to the bipolar roommate.
A reader thinks I'm giving coyotes a bad rap. I come from a long line of farmers, who dislike sheep-killing scavengers with a depth of passion hard to imagine -- yet I do understand that coyotes are closely related to my beloved Finnegan, the drool-master; and moreover, that coyotes and vultures occupy an important place in the ecosystem (that's why they're ranked above the parasites ;-) ). So I urge my readers to take a moment to click on the link and enjoy a Coyote Appreciation Moment.
Okay, I know I said I wasn't going to be crabby, but this is revolting. Ted Rall, apparently sensing that he'd worn out the patience of his viewers for ceaseless whining about the most trivial adventures of the Bush administration, sought out a new target and found: the WTC widows.
Now, I too, have questions about the wrangling over funds by families, which often seems to imply that the purpose of the emergency money is to enrich the beneficiaries rather than keep those affected by the tragedy from financial devastation. Part of me says, "What the hell, they deserve it -- they're suffering is a proxy for all of us as Americans." Another part of me wonders about the level of funding. But the way to make such arguments is by stating them quietly, in a reasonable voice, that tries to establish what obligation the rest of us have to those who were affected by the tragedy.
It is not making fun of the widows in a petty, sarcastic tone heavily redolent of Freshman Composition.
I imagine that Ted Rall thinks he has established himself as a sort of latter-day H.L. Mencken, unafraid to lampoon even the most dearly held prejudice of those of us in the "Booboisie". All I see is someone whose emotional depth seems permanently halted in early adolescence, to whom noone's suffering is worth acknowleging except his own, and who justifies the most gratuitous cruelty by an idealism that cannot stoop to take actual human beings into account. Can Mr. Rall honestly say that if someone he loved were ripped from him, he would be perfectly sanguine about those who disliked him directing this sort of self-righteous editorial at his suffering? Oh, I'm sure that he would say so, but I can't believe he would mean it -- or rather, I can believe it only by believing what I halfway suspect to be true -- that Rall is incapable of experiencing the kind of love that leads to deep grief, and therefore feels free to make brutal fun of the WTC widows for not displaying what he believes to be the proper outward signs of an inward emotion he cannot imagine.
Charles Johnson noted this, and started an email campaign which apparently, at least in part, got the cartoon pulled from the New York Times site. I have no doubt that we will hear much whining from Mr. Rall over the next few days about his "free speech" rights being violated. Mr. Rall of course has a perfect right to write what he will -- just as I have a perfect right to cancel my subscription to the New York Times except, oops! I already did. Anyway, my point is that while he has the right to say anything he wishes, I also have the right not to fund his revolting emissions. What Rall wants, of course, is not free speech but speech without consequences. I will be glad to see him get his wish: when he is sitting alone in his room, mumbling into the mirror.
I just read through some of my archives, being too sick to really post, and I've come to a conclusion: I'm getting crabby. And it's not just because I have one of those painful, "oh my God was that my lung?" coughs and a warmish fever.
Partly, I think, this is because I read so many good conservative warblogs, and when you read a lot of people who share most or all of your views, you start to feel a tremendous anger at people who don't for willfully ignoring things that are perfectly obvious to you. That, I think, is why much of the mainstream media is perpetually snotty about conservative ideas.
So to cure this part of the disease, I'm going to be trying to read more liberal weblogs written by thoughtful, intelligent (if utterly wrongheaded -- ed.) people.
The other part is simply that everyone gets a little crabby now and then. In this sense, being sick's been good, because it made me take a little break from things. Starting tomorow, you'll hopefully see a sunnier, gentler cynicism coming from this weblog.
Even though I'm sick, I have to take some work to the sofa now. Thanks to all the wellwishers, and check back later tonight or tomorrow for some updates.
From Smarter Times: A front-page news article in today's New York Times reports on President Bush's plans with respect to a steel tariff. "Rarely has Mr. Bush faced such a delicate economic decision," the Times reports. "He is weighing the costs of keeping Americans employed -- one of his most impassioned current themes -- against the inevitable charges from conservatives that he is violating free-market ideals."
So in the delicate way the Times phrases this debate, free-market ideals work against keeping Americans employed. And conservatives are only interested in "ideals," not in jobs. One has to read far down into the Times article to find out about a study cited by Senator McCain "concluding that tariff increases could cost 86,000 American jobs in industries that use steel -- 13 times the number they would save." A little Web research shows that the study in question comes not from "conservatives" but from a senior fellow at the eminently center-left Brookings Institution. The study is available in PDF format at http://www.criterioneconomics.com/documents/crandall_report.pdf
A while back, I mentioned that the thing I really hate about Krugman is that he plays stupid when he's not, so that he can get away with saying simplistic or erroneous things and not get called on them. Now Jonathan Chait, in his defense of Krugman against Sullivan, is doing exactly the same thing.
If you read my colleague Andrew Sullivan's weblog--and, if not, I heartily recommend it to all political junkies who use the Internet for procrastination--you no doubt have come across him attacking Princeton economist and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. Sullivan first condemned Krugman January 18, then continued on for days, posting twelve items. After that massive output, he wrote, "No more Krugman, I promise." Alas, he failed to keep the promise, mentioning Krugman in 22 more items before once again promising, "I'm gonna lay off (unless I can't help myself.)." Unsurprisingly, he couldn't help himself and has since gone after Krugman in 17 subsequent items.
Sullivan's animus against Krugman actually predates all this. Krugman is a moderate liberal who has criticized what he regards as the silly economic nostrums of both right and left (the latter prompting a lengthy and hostile profile by Robert Kuttner in the American Prospect.) Given the vastly greater power of the economic right, he has devoted far more attention in recent years to stupid right-wing economics than to stupid left-wing economics. So, given Krugman's prestige and influence, he makes a natural target for a supporter of supply-side economic policies like Sullivan.
That's true. And in the last year, he has also made himself a natural target of anyone who likes good, honest economics. But that's not why Sullivan is targeting him. . . he's targeting him because he got caught taking the same money he blasted the Bush administration for taking.
I bring my own biases to this issue. While I know Sullivan and enjoy his company, Krugman is one of my favorite writers and thinkers. We share similar ideological views--Sullivan has linked the two of us, railing in a 2001 column against "the Krugmans and Chaits," an association I find flattering -- and Krugman has been kind enough to cite my work in his column. So I admit that, on balance, I'm predisposed to defend Krugman against Sullivan's accusation. The trouble is that I can't figure out exactly what the accusation is.
Here we go. "This accusation is so stupid that I'm afraid simple, straightforward old me doesn't get it." Give it a rest. Sullivan doesn't like Krugman because he's a hypocrite, and he took money for doing nothing for a company, and the great populist economist doesn't seem to have suspected that there was anything at all odd about this. Sullivan also thinks that journalists shouldn't take money from companies, and has blasted any journalist he's heard about who does. You may disagree -- I do, though I think Krugman's a world class hypocrite -- but it's hard not to understand, since Sullivan says this about eighty times a day. If you don't know why he doesn't like Krugman, it's either willful ignorance or inability to understand simple declarative English sentences.
Sullivan's online obsession began when the Times disclosed that, prior to his joining the paper, Krugman had received $50,000 to serve as a consultant to Enron. Sullivan's interest in this fact, as he explained it, had nothing to do with the fact that Krugman was an influential critic of President Bush's economic policies--policies of which Sullivan happens to be a fawning admirer. "I've banged on about Krugmangate because I feared no one else would," he explained, "It's not ideological."
Subsequently, it came out that conservative pundits Bill Kristol, Irwin Stelzer, Peggy Noonan, and Lawrence Kudlow also received money from Enron. If Sullivan's interest in this were "not ideological," then you'd think these disclosures would outrage him just as much. And indeed, having already worked himself into a lather over Krugman, Sullivan couldn't completely ignore the others. Yet, relative to his hysterical attacks on Krugman, Sullivan treated the others in an utterly pro-forma way--"make of it what you will," he casually remarked about the Weekly Standard's favorable coverage of Enron--mentioning them in a total of 25 items, as against the 57 devoted to Krugman. The disparity is especially glaring given that Krugman is the only member of the group who disclosed his Enron ties before writing about the company.
I hate to accuse Chait of lying, but what else do you call it? Sullivan attacked Noonan and Kristol just as vocally, the difference being that they acknowleged and responded to what he said -- and that they weren't continuing to write columns about how corrupting the influence of Enron money was on everyone but. . . them. Kudlow gets a pass because he got paid for consulting, not lending their imprimatur to Enron's PR efforts.
Around the time this was happening, Sullivan's nobody-else-is-covering-it rationale fell by the wayside, as The Washington Post, The Washington Times, Wall Street Journal Online, and columnists Joe Conason and Jonathan Rauch all weighed in on Krugman. Sullivan kept up his crusade, continuing to insist he was motivated by lofty principles of journalistic ethics. "What this is about is the enmeshment of some of the pundit class in major corporate money," he declared at one point. "Haven't these pundits essentially undermined themselves as independent watch-dogs of the culture?" he wrote in another post.
First of all, Conason & the Washington Post picked it up because Sullivan hammered it; second of all, the WSJ Online "picked it up" by linking to Sullivan's website; third of all, where's the liberal press besides the WaPo and Conason? More importantly, where the hell are Krugman and the New York Times, which still haven't deigned to respond except by personal attack on Sullivan?
You'd think eventually Sullivan's interest in this one bit of media news would eventually wane. And it has. Yet, instead of dropping away, it has simply metastasized into a broader personal attack. "As Paul 'Enron' Krugman has asserted, the war is not actually a war against terrorism, but a war for corporations," he wrote recently, distorting Krugman's views so wildly as to venture into pure fantasy. (Krugman complained that Bush was using his relatively small defense hike to cover for budgetary shortfalls that would have happened anyway.) This week he has begun publishing letters from economists urging him to, as one put it, "keep pounding on Krugman."
No, Krugman said that Bush was using the war to give money to corporations and the rich. Not how Sullivan portrayed it. Also not how Chait portrayed it.
Do these economists want Sullivan to pound Krugman because he violated their exquisite sense of journalistic ethics? Not at all. One letter complains that Krugman is "grinding political polemics instead of offering enlightening and insightful commentary." Another accuses him of becoming "intellectually slack"--the only evidence for this charge being that Krugman described "the immediate implementation of the 2001 tax cut retroactive to the beginning of 2001" as an "advance on future tax cuts." Is there a real difference between the two? No, it's just shorthand, which you'd expect from an op-ed columnist trying to reach a popular audience and facing tight space restrictions.
OK, this is just not true. I can't get to Sullivan's site right now, but at least one of the letter writers said that what he objected to was Krugman's violation of professional ethics by egregiously mis-portraying the facts in the letter-writer's field of specialization: energy economics. (Krugman's specialty is international monetary economics). The letter writer pretty much said that Krugman was lying in order to attack the Bush administration. All of them said -- and most of the economists I've talked to say the same thing -- that while Krugman is capable of very good work, his journalistic efforts have slid from good economics with a center-left slant to egregious stupidity spouted to support Krugman's political positions. Their problem with Krugman is not a semantic one, and portraying them thus is more than disingenous; it's dishonest.
None of these writers, then, have presented any decent evidence that Krugman makes economic errors in his writing.
This is a flat-out untruth, unless you choose to regard an economist saying that Krugman made serious misstatements in the economist's field of expertise as not being evidence.
Yet however weak such protestations may be, Sullivan treats them as proof positive of Krugman's general untrustworthiness. "[T]he constant chorus I keep getting from professionals suggests that the Krugman credibility problem is now much deeper," he writes. So now Krugman's "credibility problem" isn't just about Enron, but about anything he writes. Somehow I suspect that if he stopped writing influential polemics against Bush his "credibility problem" would disappear.
His credibility problem with me would disappear tomorrow if he stopped doing shoddy work. Readers on this page have seen me dismiss supply-siders as well as lefties; if my tone is more measured when I speak of Art Laffer, it's because the tone is more measured in the articles I cite. In d
