Friday, November 21, 2003
Brad defends Krugman
I had posted the link to the Economist's profile on Krugman last week, a profile in which the Economist tried hard (and unsuccessfully) to take some cheap shots at Krugman, with very little evidence. The current issue of the Economist carries a letter from Brad DeLong vigorously defending Krugman. I reproduce the letter in full here.
So Paul Krugman is a partisan hack (Face value, November 15th)? Did you not have the time to find out what Mr Krugman has also written about prominent Democrats like Robert Kuttner, Lester Thurow or Robert Reich? Mr Kuttner, proprietor of the American Prospect, believes that Mr Krugman is a right-wing mole: “far more charitable to very conservative fellow economists [like] Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Martin Feldstein...than to fellow liberals...whom he dismisses as pseudo-economists and mere ‘policy entrepreneurs'.”
Mr Krugman wages, and always has waged, intellectual thermonuclear war against all whom he regards as denizens of the pit and carriers of error. He's usually right (80% of the time?); he's sometimes wrong. The interesting question—which you did not pose—is what has the Bush administration done over the past three years to draw such a concentration of Mr Krugman's intellectual fire? It is odd that you name only one critic, lyinginponds.com, but mention unnamed “people” and “critics” who “cannot all be easily dismissed”, “game theorists” who were “not convince[d]”, “fellow economists, jealous”. Perhaps this is because laudably you do not want to give public prominence to unbalanced loons.
J. Bradford DeLong
So Paul Krugman is a partisan hack (Face value, November 15th)? Did you not have the time to find out what Mr Krugman has also written about prominent Democrats like Robert Kuttner, Lester Thurow or Robert Reich? Mr Kuttner, proprietor of the American Prospect, believes that Mr Krugman is a right-wing mole: “far more charitable to very conservative fellow economists [like] Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, Martin Feldstein...than to fellow liberals...whom he dismisses as pseudo-economists and mere ‘policy entrepreneurs'.”
Mr Krugman wages, and always has waged, intellectual thermonuclear war against all whom he regards as denizens of the pit and carriers of error. He's usually right (80% of the time?); he's sometimes wrong. The interesting question—which you did not pose—is what has the Bush administration done over the past three years to draw such a concentration of Mr Krugman's intellectual fire? It is odd that you name only one critic, lyinginponds.com, but mention unnamed “people” and “critics” who “cannot all be easily dismissed”, “game theorists” who were “not convince[d]”, “fellow economists, jealous”. Perhaps this is because laudably you do not want to give public prominence to unbalanced loons.
J. Bradford DeLong
