numbskulduggery

Less than a decade later, the mill was padlocked and some 750 people lost their jobs. Workers were denied the severance pay and health insurance they’d been promised, and their pension benefits were cut by as much as $400 (258 pounds) a month.

What’s more, a federal government insurance agency had to pony up $44 million to bail out the company’s underfunded pension plan. Nevertheless, Bain profited on the deal, receiving $12 million on its $8 million initial investment and at least $4.5 million in consulting fees.

Now, what about people like Cochrane? You need to bear two things in mind. First, he and his friends entered this whole debate by declaring that Keynesian economics of any stripe was total nonsense, “fairy tales” that nobody serious believes. Then they proceeded to make howling, basic errors. And I was supposed to respond politely? I’ve never gone ad hominem on them — but I’ve called nonsense and ignorance when I see them. So?

Cowen apparently wants me to make the best case for the opposing side in policy debates. Since when has that been the rule? I’m trying to move policy in what I believe to be the right direction — and I will make the best honest case I can for moving in that direction.

Krugman calls himself a Humean but has he studied and internalized the lessons from Hume’s Dialogues on Natural Religion?  Is it easy to imagine the current Krugman writing rich multi-voiced dialogues which extend both his points and those of his intellectual opponents?  Can you imagine the current Krugman writing something sufficiently multi-faceted that you might come away thinking — because of the piece itself — that the opposing point of view was the better one?

Krugman has shown a remarkable and impressive capacity to reinvent himself, more than once.  He could reinvent himself again — in a truly Humean direction — and become the most important American public intellectual — and perhaps intellectual — of his time.  Or he could keep his current status as a sharp and brilliant someone who has an enormous number of followers but relatively little influence over actual events, and perhaps, like most of us, won’t be read much fifty years from now.