Soccer Dad

Krugman's gets criticized - in the nyt

I don't often pay much attention to the NYT book reviews. It's pretty predictable. When the Times has an axe to grind, it grinds it well.

So I really didn't see this coming. When a columnist for a news paper is reviewed in his own newspaper, I expect that the review will be positive. Especially in the NY Times.

The NYT review of Paul Krugman's The conscience of a liberal certainly made me think so, especially when it stared like this:

Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal, awarded biannually to an outstanding economist under the age of 40 — a distinction said to be predictive of, and perhaps even more prestigious than, receipt of the Nobel in economic science. His twice-weekly column in The New York Times routinely and authoritatively demystifies complex economic arcana.

(While not perfect, I thought that Krugman did a lot more "demystifying" when he wrote for Slate than since he's started at the times.)

But a few paragraphs down we read

The bulk of this book consists of a historical explanation for how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It’s a story that is as factually shaky as it is narratively simplified. (Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition; the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, not 1964.) History according to Krugman goes something like this: the nation suffered through a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss. Krugman invokes that post-World War II “paradise lost” in his first paragraph, and his yearning to restore that Edenic moment informs all the pages that follow.

Towards the end we read

A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.

Wow. I try not to read Krugman's screeds. There's a reason for that: no nuance. It's nice to see that view validated here. It's not just my imagination.

Krugman, unlike other subjects of the his paper's wrath does have the capacity to respond. (This isn't the first time he's gotten a bad notice at the Times.)

Ezra Klein doesn't think that the review was substantive.

I haven't read the book, nor do I have any intention of doing so. But it's nice to see that the Times used a critical reviewer in this case.

more via memeorandum.

paul krugman, new york times.