Thursday, November 13, 2003
The economist as superstar
You know you're a superstar when both the New Yorker and the Economist carry stories/profiles on you in the same week, for reasons other than your academic genius. The New Yorker story if a follow-up on the Don Luskin stalker controversy that has been floating in Blogistan for sometime now. The Economist profile is the more intriguing one. They clearly accept the genius of Krugman, unlike the various fools on the right who try fruitlessly to tear Krugman down. What to do then when Krugman consistently attacks your boy emperor? How about a comparison with Ann Coulter?
What is beyond dispute is that Mr Krugman is the finest economist to become a media superstar—at least since Milton Friedman or, earlier, John Maynard Keynes turned to journalism. Mr Krugman's work on currency crises and international trade is widely admired by other economists. He holds the John Bates Clark medal in economics, which is slightly harder to get than a Nobel prize. As for popularity, his new book, “The Great Unravelling”—his eighth aimed at a broad, non-academic readership—has spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Economist, which itself has been known on occasion to clamber off the economic fence, can hardly criticise anybody for writing hard-hitting (yet engaging and accessible!) economic analyses. But, increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist—most notably in recognising, long before most other commentators, that market manipulation played a role in the California energy crisis—perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.
Lyinginponds.com, a website that tracks partisanship among American political columnists, rates Mr Krugman second in the overall partisan slant of his columns, behind only Ann Coulter, a fiercely (and often incoherently) conservative polemicist.
Dear Economist, try as hard as you might, but comparing Krugman to Coulter kinda disses your credibility. True, Krugman is partisan and blasts the boy emperor day after day, but generally speaking, he also tends to be right most of the time (both on facts and analysis). On the other hand, right, wrong and facts are of no consequence to Ms Coulter.
But, the Economist being more fair and more balanced than Faux News ends the profile saying this.
Many of Mr Krugman's fellow economists, jealous of his celebrity, comfort themselves with the thought that his angry rants have hurt his reputation enough to ensure he will not now win a Nobel prize. They may be kidding themselves. The Nobel committee has not been averse in the past to giving the prize to economists who have achieved popular notoriety, as its awards to Mr Friedman and, more recently, Joseph Stiglitz show. Mr Krugman is probably still in the running.
My personal take on Krugman is that while I love reading his NYT op-eds, I think his genius is wasted on the boy emperor and his prime minister. His is a mind that should be tackling bigger picture issues. Criticising Bush can be done competently by Mike Moore and Al Franken. It does not require a genius like Krugman.
What is beyond dispute is that Mr Krugman is the finest economist to become a media superstar—at least since Milton Friedman or, earlier, John Maynard Keynes turned to journalism. Mr Krugman's work on currency crises and international trade is widely admired by other economists. He holds the John Bates Clark medal in economics, which is slightly harder to get than a Nobel prize. As for popularity, his new book, “The Great Unravelling”—his eighth aimed at a broad, non-academic readership—has spent eight weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.
The Economist, which itself has been known on occasion to clamber off the economic fence, can hardly criticise anybody for writing hard-hitting (yet engaging and accessible!) economic analyses. But, increasingly, people are asking whether Mr Krugman's success as a journalist is now coming at the expense of, rather than as the result of, his economics. For while he has had some journalistic coups during his time as a columnist—most notably in recognising, long before most other commentators, that market manipulation played a role in the California energy crisis—perhaps the most striking thing about his writing these days is not its economic rigour but its political partisanship.
Lyinginponds.com, a website that tracks partisanship among American political columnists, rates Mr Krugman second in the overall partisan slant of his columns, behind only Ann Coulter, a fiercely (and often incoherently) conservative polemicist.
Dear Economist, try as hard as you might, but comparing Krugman to Coulter kinda disses your credibility. True, Krugman is partisan and blasts the boy emperor day after day, but generally speaking, he also tends to be right most of the time (both on facts and analysis). On the other hand, right, wrong and facts are of no consequence to Ms Coulter.
But, the Economist being more fair and more balanced than Faux News ends the profile saying this.
Many of Mr Krugman's fellow economists, jealous of his celebrity, comfort themselves with the thought that his angry rants have hurt his reputation enough to ensure he will not now win a Nobel prize. They may be kidding themselves. The Nobel committee has not been averse in the past to giving the prize to economists who have achieved popular notoriety, as its awards to Mr Friedman and, more recently, Joseph Stiglitz show. Mr Krugman is probably still in the running.
My personal take on Krugman is that while I love reading his NYT op-eds, I think his genius is wasted on the boy emperor and his prime minister. His is a mind that should be tackling bigger picture issues. Criticising Bush can be done competently by Mike Moore and Al Franken. It does not require a genius like Krugman.
