Krugtron the Invincible, Part 1
It's an ill wind that blows no one any good. The financial crisis that came to a head five years ago with the failure of Lehman Brothers has been especially beneficial to the economist Paul Krugman. In his widely read
New York Times column and blog, Krugman regularly boasts that he has been "right" about the crisis and its consequences. "I (and those of like mind)," he wrote in June last year, "have been
right about everything." Those who dare to disagree with him -- myself included -- he denounces as members of the
"Always-Wrong Club." Readers of his blog have just been treated to another such
sneer.
"Maybe I actually am right," Krugman wrote back in
April, "and maybe the other side actually does contain a remarkable number of knaves and fools. ... Look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I'm Krugtron the Invincible!" That last allusion is to the 1980s science fiction superhero, Voltron. The
resemblance between Krugman and Voltron was suggested by one of the gaggle of bloggers who are to Krugman what Egyptian plovers are to crocodiles. Yesterday one of these thought,
wrongly, that he had caught me out. Unwisely, the crocodile snapped its jaws shut.
As a Princeton professor and Nobel Prize winner, Krugman is indeed widely believed to be intellectually invincible. He himself acknowledges having made
only two mistakes, both predating the crisis: the impact of information technology on productivity, which he underestimated, and the significance of the federal deficits of the Bush administration, which he overestimated. "In the Great Recession and aftermath, however,
I went with [my] models -- and they worked!"
"Let those who are without error cast the first stone," Krugman wrote back in 2010. Unfortunately, this is not an injunction he himself has heeded. Repeatedly, over the last five years, he has heaped opprobrium on others. His latest performance is characteristic; perhaps not quite intentionally he even refers to "my own unpleasantness with Ferguson".
Let us leave -- for the moment -- the question of the future size of the federal debt, which I have dealt with
elsewhere and shall return to in a subsequent article. My purpose here is simply to challenge Krugman's right to behave in this way. Even if he were nearly always right, there would be no justification for his lack of civility. But he is not nearly always right. There is therefore no justification for his unshakeable certainty either.
Krugman reserves a special contempt for people who, in his words, "take a position and
refuse to alter that position no matter how strongly the evidence refutes it, who continue to insist that they have The Truth despite being wrong again and again." He calls this "derping." The awkward thing for Krugman is that "being wrong again and again" perfectly characterizes his own commentary on what proved to be one of the crucial issues of the financial crisis: whether or not Europe's monetary union would survive it.
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