TVNZ reports:
Auckland Mayor Len Brown says he will start to take the train to work on a regular basis to show his commitment to public transport.
Does that mean that if he didn’t have a political motivation for taking the train he wouldn’t choose to do so for its own sake?
I was interested to read the following in this June 2009 article from the Cato Institute (via this recent blog article):
An interesting example of farmers prospering without subsidies is in New Zealand. That nation ended its farm subsidies in 1984, which was a bold stroke because the country is four times more dependent on farming than is the United States. The changes were initially met with fierce resistance, but New Zealand farm productivity, profitability, and output have soared since the reforms. New Zealand’s farmers have cut costs, diversified their land use, sought nonfarm income, and developed niche markets such as kiwifruit.
Today, data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development show that farm subsidies in New Zealand represent just 1 percent of the value of farm production, which compares to 11 percent in the United States. New Zealand’s main farm organization argues that the nation’s experience “thoroughly debunked the myth that the farming sector cannot prosper without government subsidies.” That myth needs to be debunked in the United States as well.
I couldn’t agree more. The NZ experience is a good illustration of how counterproductive US farm subsidies are. The article estimates total US farm support at between $15 billion and $35 billion per year, even though the average income of farming households is 28% higher than the average of all US households.
The article also references another from Cato published in the Washington Post in 2002 that goes into more detail on the impact of removing subsidies in NZ:
Do we need farming subsidies in order for Americans to eat? Evidence from New Zealand indicates that the answer is an emphatic no on both counts. In 1984 New Zealand’s Labor government took the dramatic step of ending all farm subsidies, which then consisted of 30 separate production payments and export incentives. This was a truly striking policy action, because New Zealand’s economy is roughly five times more dependent on farming than is the U.S. economy, measured by either output or employment. Subsidies in New Zealand accounted for more than 30 percent of the value of production before reform, somewhat higher than U.S. subsidies today.
…Meanwhile, the value of farm output in New Zealand has soared 40 percent in constant dollar terms since the mid-1980s. Agriculture’s share of New Zealand’s economic output has risen slightly, from a pre-reform 14 percent to 17 percent today. Since subsidies were removed, productivity in the industry has averaged 6 percent growth annually, compared with just 1 percent before reform.
For this improvement in economic performance we can thank (even though few do) former Finance Minister Sir Roger Douglas.
Though the amounts involved in US farm subsidies are relatively small in comparison with the Government’s budget deficit (around 1%-3% of the $1.34 trillion estimated by the Congressional Budget Office for 2010), it will be interesting to see whether the Republican-controlled House of Representatives has the courage to eliminate them as part of their much touted campaign to reduce Government spending.
Bob Herbert had an opinion piece in the New York Times last Friday lamenting the Obama administration’s lack of interest in the poor:
President Obama is redesigning his administration to make it even friendlier toward big business and the megabanks, which is to say the rich, who flourish no matter what is going on with the economy in this country… Meanwhile, we hear not a word — not so much as a peep — about the poor, whose ranks are spreading like a wildfire in a drought.
He goes on to point out that the poor have suffered more than anyone as a result of the recession and accuses both the Democrat and Republican parties of being completely unconcerned about it. He goes so far as to claim that “Our government officials, from the president on down, are too busy kissing the bejeweled fingers of the megarich.”
I think there is a lot of value in Herbert highlighting the problem of poverty, although I think it is an exaggeration to suggest that politicians don’t care about the problem at all. I think that if you were to ask them, most politicians on both sides would express concern about the poor, and I’m willing to believe they would be sincere in saying so.
However, in practice I’m sure that all of them (all of us?) tend to see the world predominantly in terms of a set of primary concerns that reflect the priorities of their own party, and I think it’s true that amongst those concerns the poor are generally not always top-of-mind. In the case of Democrats, the primary focus is arguably the middle class. And though liberals like to paint Republicans as concerned only with the interests of the wealthy, I think it is more accurate to say that their concern is minimizing government intrusion into people’s lives and giving people the freedom to achieve success on their own merits.
So Herbert’s article is a valuable reminder that poverty is real and that we should be concerned about it. However, at the same time I think the article fails on a couple of important counts. The first is that he says nothing about what should be done to help the poor. It’s easy to say that there is a problem and it’s easy to claim that the reason the problem isn’t being addressed is that other people don’t care. But if you can’t offer at least some sketch of what a plausible strategy for addressing the problem might look like, the condemnation you place on others for not pursuing their own prescription carries a lot less weight than you might want.
However there is another, and I think perhaps more serious, weakness in the article and that is a failure to look more deeply at the scale and cause of the problem. Herbert has this to say about the extent of poverty in the US:
Nearly 44 million people were living in poverty in 2009, which was more than 14 percent of the American population and a jump of four million from the previous year. Anyone who thinks things are much better now is delirious. More than 15 million children are poor — one of every five kids in the United States. More than a quarter of all blacks and a similar percentage of Hispanics are poor.
He also quotes Peter Edelman from Georgetown University Law Center:
“There is this astonishing number of people all the way down there at the bottom that we just don’t talk about,” Mr. Edelman said, “and they’re in very big trouble.”
The concern I have is that there seems to be no consideration at all given to the possibility that some of these people may bear responsibility themselves for the situation they are in. I’m not at all suggesting that that this applies to everyone (I don’t agree with this generalization for example), but it seems to me that an understanding of the distinction between those who fall on hard times despite their best efforts and those who fail to make best efforts is a factor that should affect the way you choose to respond to poverty.
Herbert references a claim by Edelman that there are 17 million people in the US living on the equivalent of a family of four on $11,000/year – half the official poverty level. But wait. People don’t end up supporting a family by accident. It happens because of decisions they make, and their capacity to support a family is also a consequence of decisions they make. So if we are concerned about difficult circumstances people find themselves in, shouldn’t we also want to understand how they got there, and particularly what choices they made that led to that situation?
Amongst the adults within those 17 million people, what choices did people make before they had children to equip themselves to be able to meet their families’ financial needs? What educational opportunities did they pursue? What work experience did they gain? What was the financial position of the people they chose to marry or to have sex with? What skills that would enable them to make an economic contribution to society did they acquire while they were still unattached and had greater freedom in the choices they could make about where they would live and work or how they would spend their time and money (or even their parents’ money)?
Let me stress what I’m not getting at here. I am not trying to condemn people who make mistakes and find themselves in situations they regret. We have all made our own, even if we are fortunate enough that they haven’t made us poor. And as I’ve said, I’m not questioning the fact that people can fall on hard times despite their best efforts. Nor am I suggesting that everyone gets the same opportunities in life to develop their earning potential.
What I am saying is that those who care about the poor need to be honest and realistic about the nature of the problem. Bob Herbert invites us to attribute responsibility for the problem to just one group of people: politicians. Well ok, but I think it’s important for us to acknowledge that in reality responsibility goes well beyond that. I believe it’s reasonable to think that for many, many people, the circumstances they find themselves in are a consequence of choices they make. And so if we don’t consider questions like those above, we can’t hope to have a complete picture of the problem. That kind of analysis, or at least some reference to it, is simply missing from Herbert’s article.
Unfortunately, it seems rare to hear discussion about social problems from this perspective. I fear that the reason may be that our society as a whole has greatly loosened its grip on the whole notion of personal responsibility (a theme that I also mentioned here).
I’m still very absorbed in studying the Rails codebase, and that has been limiting the amount of time I’ve been able to spend in the past week thinking about blogging. However… TVNZ ran an item a few days ago about a challenge New Zealand’s blueberry industry expects to face next year from imported berries from Chile. The article notes that Chile exports 30,000 tonnes of blueberries a year compared with the total NZ crop of 1500 tonnes, and says that Chilean pickers are paid “much less” than the $20/hour NZ workers earn. The clear implication is that NZ growers don’t think they are going to able to compete on price in future years.
The item ends by quoting North Auckland blueberry grower Robert Auton, who employs visiting workers from the Czech Republic, Hong Kong and Japan to process his crop:
“I think we need to be aware that a lot of smaller industries do exist out there which provide a lot of jobs and we need to protect that”
Auton’s self-interest is understandable, but I find this kind of thinking disturbing. Protectionism is a bad deal for just about everyone:
Really the only people who would benefit would be NZ growers, and the visiting workers from overseas they pay to work for them (Auton doesn’t say why he thinks the jobs of those foreign workers are more important than those of the foreign workers living in Chile).
The other issue is consistency – if you support protection of NZ industry then you could hardly complain if other countries restrict their imports of New Zealand produce, which could have a tremendously negative impact on the New Zealand economy. Of course NZ had a very long and complex history of industry protection prior to 1984, and I think most people would agree that it created enormous distortions in the economy that were ultimately to the country’s detriment.
Apart from all that, I also have a philosophical bias that I realize not everyone may share – I am generally uncomfortable about the government trying to micro-manage the economy at the cost of freedom people have to buy and sell what they want, from and to who they want, and at prices that they decide themselves are acceptable. I think this kind of freedom is important. But even leaving philosophy aside I think that the potential benefits of protectionism are far too narrow to be considered seriously.
I realize that Auton is just one individual, but it makes me nervous when the media gives time to these kinds of ideas without looking seriously at their real implications. Although it is pure speculation on my part, I can’t help wondering if perhaps they see it as being in their own commercial interest to tap into latent nationalistic impulses that a story like this may stimulate.
It’s been over a week since my last post, though I have been far from idle… I’m in the process of writing a fairly detailed description of how the Rails 3 web framework works internally. Enjoyable work, but time-consuming. I will post the result online in the fullness of time.
Apart from that, I mentioned on my twitter feed that I had posted a comment on Brad DeLong’s blog and was waiting for it to be moderated. Well it’s clear after five days that he is not going to publish it. After my last experience I can’t say I tremendously surprised. However, let me make my point here instead…
DeLong’s post was a swipe at David Brooks from the NY Times, who had written what I thought was a fairly unremarkable article about a woman he met who was teaching Jewish philosophy in adult education classes. DeLong quoted some uncharitable remarks by someone called IOZ who said this about Brooks’ article:
David Brooks[‘s]… wide-eyed astonishment at the most basic principles of Jewish thought is actually incredible. Has no one ever taken this guy to shul before?…. A commenter notes, and la wiki confirms, that Brooks is, in fact a Jew. Well, Jew-ish. At this point, I really don’t know what to say. This is like a Catholic expressing surprise at the trinity.
DeLong then put his own boot in:
‘Let me second Ioz. It is remarkable–as if somebody got a Ph.D. in physics and then said with wonderment: “You know, you can make light go around corners if you force it through a narrow enough hole!” There is a strong sense of somebody having spent their life simply missing the point of something they were supposed to have understood before puberty…
Both of these comments struck me as just nastiness for the sake of being nasty, which sadly reflects a common tone in DeLong’s writing towards anyone who doesn’t measure up to his own view of liberal orthodoxy. I thought there was no good reason to slam David Brooks. So what if he has a Jewish background but is not deeply familiar with Jewish culture? It really doesn’t affect the point of his article. So I posted the following comment on DeLong’s blog, starting with a quote of part of what he himself had written:
‘It is remarkable–as if somebody got a Ph.D. in physics and then said with wonderment: “You know, you can make light go around corners if you force it through a narrow enough hole!”‘
No, it’s plainly nothing like that at all. For one thing, it’s quite possible that Brooks is deliberately writing from a non-Jewish perspective for the sake of those who make up the bulk of his readers. It’s pretty clear that his point (at least a large part of it) is to contrast the Jewish thinking taught by Brown with philosophies of life more common in modern society. For that purpose, whatever his own background, beliefs or personal knowledge of Jewish thought are is not particularly relevant. So it wouldn’t be a complete surprise if he deliberately avoided reflecting that background in the way he wrote the piece.
But even if that is not the case, if he is indeed ignorant of things you and Ioz apparently think should be well known to all Jews, a more natural interpretation is simply that his Jewish background is just not as deep as you’ve decided it must be. Is that the reason you’ve chosen to mock him? Or did you simply feel a need to be “just plain unpleasant.”
The final sentence was a not-too-subtle reference to DeLong’s own comments policy.
The L.A. Times reports –
The Center for Science in the Public Interest has filed a lawsuit against McDonald’s Corp., claiming that the company’s meals with toys unfairly entice children into eating food that can do them harm…
The lead plaintiff in the suit is Monica Parham, a mother of two from Sacramento who said the company “uses toys as bait to induce her kids to clamor to go to McDonald’s,” the organization said.
It’s a little hard to know what to say about this… On one hand, frankly, I think it’s absurd, and it makes me a little mad just to read it. On the other hand, the fact that someone feels compelled to go to court over something like this makes me think their mind is unlikely to be swayed just by me saying so. I have to guess that they look at the world with a very different set of assumptions from me – which is perhaps the more interesting point.
I can sympathize with the challenges parents have raising their kids, but like most people I suspect (or hope?), I believe that the responsibility for managing kids’ behavior does lie ultimately with parents, even in situations when that’s difficult.
Evidently the complaint here is not that McDonald’s sells unhealthy food, but rather the fact that they make the product even more appealing by adding the toy. So presumably the Center for Science in the Public Interest is not saying it’s wrong for kids to ever eat foods with high sugar and fat content. But if it’s not inherently wrong to sell something, at what point does it become wrong to make the product more attractive to your customers?
I can understand that kids are potentially more vulnerable to clever marketing than adults, but I’m not convinced that prohibiting that would be doing them a favor, even if it would make life easier for their parents and even if doing so could be justified on legal grounds (though I’m sure it can’t). We all have to learn to make good choices when we would prefer not to. I’m not sure that that gets any easier as we get older, but nonetheless as adults we do have to take responsibility for our own decisions. If kids never encounter situations in which their parents have the opportunity to train them to do that, will they learn to make good choices when they get older? I’m not so sure.
But then again, I’m not a parent. It would be interesting to hear what people with kids think about this. Incidentally, I was pleased to find that some other people also think this is absurd, and have said so far more eloquently than me – Walter Olson at the NY Daily News and Megan McArdle at The Atlantic. They are both worth reading.
Slate had an article yesterday by Libby Copeland discussing the significance of some recent episodes in which incoming House Speaker John Boehner has cried in public. Her interest follows an emotional speech Boehner gave on the night of the election a few weeks ago and more recently a series of conversations Leslie Stahl had with him in a CBS 60 Minutes profile in which he broke down several times:
Unfortunately I found Copeland’s analysis disappointing. She has chosen to look at the question through the lens of just two possible interpretations, both concerned with attitudes toward gender. Her concern is to decide whether Boehner’s crying reflects either:
As she tells it, these two interpretations are the dominant ways in which people are viewing Boehner’s behavior, and her conclusion is that the second is the one that is largely correct, not the first.
Her argument, however, is thin. She cites a Yale psychologist who claims that men more often cry for reasons of ‘sentimentality’, while women rarely do so. She defines sentimentality as reflecting things we care about – “flag, apple pie, children and family” and claims that this “is not a core emotion like sadness or anger.” Consequently, in her view Boehner is “crying from the strength of his convictions,” and this makes it socially acceptable.
To me, the first indication that the argument might be a little contrived lies in a comment she makes that our feelings about sports are an example of sentimentality and that “Women don’t usually cry over football games. Men do.” Men usually cry over football? Really? Perhaps the men Copeland knows are a little less representative of the overall male population than she thinks.
However she goes on to make this comment – “Sentimental crying doesn’t read as terribly personal. It’s a distanced kind of crying, an almost intellectual kind of crying.” I won’t try to argue whether there is such a thing as crying that is ‘distanced’, ‘intellectual’ and not very ‘personal’. I’m not sure I really understand what that would even look like. But when I look in particular at Stahl’s interview with John Boehner, I just don’t find it credible to view his spontaneous emotional reactions in those terms. What I see is simply someone who has genuinely deep and intense feelings about the experiences of his own life and who as a result reacts viscerally when faced with a need to talk about issues that remind him of that.
The question of whether this does or doesn’t make him a good person to be a national leader is one that others can debate if they want to. However, I think it would be absolutely wrong to suggest that there is anything negative about the emotions themselves or his inclination to express them so openly. Personally, I agree with Stahl’s assessment in a subsequent interview she did with another 60 Minutes staffer (see the clip below) that Boehner’s openness about his emotions makes him seem more likable. And I think it’s also worth noting the impression she got from spending time with him in person that he seems to be a very authentic individual and shows no sign of artifice.
As for Copeland’s assessment, she really does little to justify her conclusions. Her assertions about supposed male sentimentality are just that – assertions, and they really don’t do very much in my opinion to underpin her view that Boehner’s crying reflects some kind of male stereotype. On the other hand I think it’s reasonable to think that there has in fact been some shift over the years in public attitudes towards men showing emotion in public. Others have pointed out that what was perceived to be crying led to a significant loss of momentum in Ed Muskie’s 1972 bid for the Democrat presidential nomination. John Boehner may not have singlehandedly overturned attitudes to men crying in public but we can’t deny that (a) it’s sufficiently unusual that people think it’s something worth talking (writing) about and (b) despite that, it hasn’t prevented him from becoming arguably the second most important elected official in the United States.
As for whether there is a double standard in how society views what is acceptable behavior for men and women in public life, I think there may be some truth to that. But whether that is a positive or a negative thing is a whole different discussion.
Overall, I think what I find disappointing about Copeland’s article is that while she musters weak arguments to support a conclusion framed by her own assumptions about what the important questions are that Boehner’s crying raises (attitudes about gender), she seems to have gone out of her way to avoid even considering what I think is a more interesting, obvious and relevant issue: John Boehner gives the appearance of being a person who is motivated by a very deep and sincere desire to give all Americans an opportunity to live rich, full and prosperous lives regardless of where they come from.
Why is this important? Two reasons: Firstly, it stands in stark contrast to the stereotype that Democrat activists try to pin on Republican politicians – that they are motivated primarily by their connections to people of wealth and power. Secondly, it highlights what I think should be viewed as a potential basis for a more constructive approach to political dialog in this country. If it’s true that John Boehner really cares about ordinary people in the way that he appears to on the surface, and if there are Democrat members of Congress who really want to work constructively to advance the interests of all Americans, without being being locked in to a purely partisan model of political action (‘network liberals’ to use the term David Brooks suggested last week), shouldn’t they see Boehner as someone worth at least trying to sit down and work with to develop a more open and collaborative relationship in an effort to find common ground to solve the serious problems facing the country?
Yes, it’s true. I’m an idealist. But frankly there is an awful lot of cynicism in and about American politics today and I would argue that cynicism largely reflects a defect of leadership. In this environment, I think the country could do with a dose of idealism. So much of the dynamics of politics these days is framed around the notion of ‘fighting’, and for sure there are times when that is the right thing to do. But in my opinion, conflict is not a good context for doing difficult things in difficult times. And these are difficult times.
Yesterday msnbc.com yesterday carried an article by Jennifer Viegas of Discovery News about new research on the medieval legend of St Ismeria. The article referenced a paper by Dr Catherine Lawless from the University of Limerick that examines the story of Ismeria contained in 14th and 15th century manuscripts from Florence, Italy.
The article was published by msnbc.com under the headline “Medieval work reveals Jesus’ great grandmother” and by Discovery News under the headline “Jesus’ great grandmother identified”. In it, Viegas states that “The legend of St. Ismeria, presented in the current Journal of Medieval History, sheds light on both the Biblical Virgin Mary’s family and also on religious and cultural values of 14th-century Florence.”
The plain implication of the article is that Dr Lawless’ work tells us something meaningful about real people and events in first century Palestine. The idea that those kinds of conclusions can be derived from a legend written (I believe) some 1400 miles away and 1300 years later, apparently absent any corpus of corroborating evidence, struck me as a little hard to swallow.
So I did what Jennifer Viegas apparently didn’t: I emailed Catherine Lawless and asked her directly if the way Viegas has characterized her paper actually represents her real views about the significance of the manuscripts she studied.
Her response: it doesn’t. Specifically, the manuscripts “tell us nothing at all about 1st century Palestine, but quite a lot about what Florentine beliefs and religious practices in the fourteenth century.”
Which is what I suspected. The conclusion? Accuracy in reporting appears to be less important to Discovery News than headlines that satisfy their need to provide exposure for their advertisers, including Craftsman, Lincoln, Chevrolet, Shell, GE & Nissan.
I am somewhat astonished to read the following that Paul Krugman wrote yesterday, regarding what he says is President Obama “lashing out” at liberal critics of his compromise with the GOP –
Leave aside the merits for a moment: what possible purpose does this kind of lashing out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent.
And here’s some of what I wrote about him a few days ago –
… rhetoric like Krugman’s simply doesn’t do anything useful. I know that it’s natural to feel antogonism towards people you disagree with and I understand well enough the impulse to vent, but it just doesn’t do anything to help people like me actually understand critical and complex issues more deeply.
It’s almost as if he read what I wrote!
One of several blogs that I follow on a fairly regular basis is Grasping Reality with Both Hands, by Brad DeLong, Professor of Economics at UC Berkeley. The subtitle of his blog is “The Semi-Daily Journal of Economist J. Bradford DeLong: Fair, Balanced, Reality-Based, and Even-Handed“, which I guess is to say that he sees himself in pretty much the same way that most people see themselves. I think it’s also fair to say that Prof. DeLong has a liberal view of the world and that he is inclined to take a pretty acerbic tone when it comes to commenting on people and policies he doesn’t agree with. Another blog he writes claims to offer “punchy liberal analysis and evisceration–especially evisceration“.
A week ago, DeLong posted an article quoting almost in full (less one paragraph) a New York Times op ed by Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize winning Professor of Economics from Princeton University (and who I’ve mentioned before). Krugman’s piece, as I understand it, essentially suggested that the success of Keynesian economic theory has itself led people to underestimate its importance. The substance of the article was interesting enough, but what caught my attention was the following comment, talking about changes that have occurred in the assumptions many economists make about how the economy works –
The result was what I’ve called the Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which large numbers of economists literally knew nothing of the hard-won insights of the 30s and 40s – and, of course, went into spasms of rage when their ignorance was pointed out.
Krugman routinely excoriates people he disagrees with, so this comment, particularly the second part, struck me as pretty consistent with his usual style, one that personally I have always found disappointing and unhelpful (for example, in an article in July this year, he described people he disagreed with as “a coalition of the heartless, the clueless and the confused“). To be fair, the latest case was just one sentence in a fairly substantial article and no doubt the way I read it was influenced by some broader frustration on my part. Nonetheless, the comment was certainly typical of a consistent tone in Krugman’s writing that I have long felt does little to move public debate in a positive direction.
So I decided to post a comment about it on DeLong’s blog. The comment sparked a number of remarks from other readers, and later on I posted a follow-up. However, Prof. DeLong evidently didn’t find my input much to his liking, as he later chose to delete both comments. I was a little taken aback, since the point I was trying to make was both serious and, in my opinion, important. DeLong has a comments policy on his site, which indicates that he will remove any post that is “offensive, upsetting, or just plain unpleasant“, so I guess he felt that mine fell into one of those categories (though not Krugman’s of course).
Of course, the blog is his – he is absolutely entitled to do with it whatever he chooses. Nonetheless I found the experience rather disappointing. Naturally, I no longer have the actual text of what I wrote. I really wish I did, but it didn’t occur to me to make a copy of it since I never imagined it might get deleted. However the gist of what I said was that Krugman’s comment illustrates why I struggle to take him seriously as a public intellectual, as the only way he seems to know how to engage with people who disagree with him is through attacking their competence, motives or morality, and now also their emotional stability.
In my follow-up I noted that there is a segment of the population, people like me if you will, who are not economists but are genuinely interested in understanding what economists try to tell us about the world, yet who insist on understanding all sides of an argument, who reject simplistic dichotomies and refuse to accept things simply because people tell us they are true. The point I made was that for these people, rhetoric like Krugman’s simply doesn’t do anything useful. I know that it’s natural to feel antogonism towards people you disagree with and I understand well enough the impulse to vent, but it just doesn’t do anything to help people like me actually understand critical and complex issues more deeply.
My point was not that Krugman is not an important public intellectual. Plainly he is, by virtue of both his academic stature and the sheer volume of public exposure given to his views (and Foreign Policy magazine have just ranked him at #26 in their top 100 global thinkers). However the way he chooses to play his role makes it impossible for me personally to take him seriously as someone I can rely on to help me develop a clearer understanding of the way the world works. The way that he engages in public with people he disagrees with (in many cases highly credentialed economists) involves painting complex issues in absolute, black and white terms, admitting no possibility of uncertainly about the impact of different approaches to policy or even a basis for reasoned debate. And by routinely ascribing dishonorable motives and culpable ignorance to his opponents, he denies any willingness to entertain meaningful conversation with those people and actively discourages people from considering the possibility that other points of view might offer useful insights. Here are a few examples of his style from just the past few weeks –
Of course there is nothing fundamentally wrong with having strong opinions about either policies or people – I have a few myself (though as I’ve said before I think attributing motives to people is a pretty lazy way of arguing). And plenty of the substance of Krugman’s economic thinking may be quite correct. But in my view, the world is a complicated place and there are often multiple competing objectives to public policy. I think it is to be expected that different people, reasonable people, will reach different conclusions about the kinds of measures that are appropriate in a given situation. And I think it’s wise to have a little humility and acknowledge that there are some things we don’t have a complete understanding of – ‘experts’ included. Opinions are important, but I, and I think many people, value opinions most when they are expressed in a way that demonstrates both careful, dispassionate analysis and a willingness to engage respectfully and constructively with people who see the world differently. We look for ‘pubic intellectuals’ who can provide that for us. However Paul Krugman is plainly not one of those people. He is welcome to take the approach he does and he is hardly alone in doing so – political operatives on all sides behave in essentially the same way. But the absolutism of his rhetoric makes it impossible for me to see him as a useful source of balanced analysis.