Krugman's 12-Year-Old Sarcasm Eludes the Wall Street Journal

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Krugman's 12-Year-Old Sarcasm Eludes the Wall Street Journal

by Bethesda 1971

Paul Krugman v. WSJ Editor: No Contest

Bret Stephens is a Deputy Editorial Page Editor at the Wall Street Journal and appears on The Journal Editorial Report, a weekly political talk show broadcast on Fox News Channel. He has also foolishly declared war on Paul Krugman -- a war that he will win only within the friendly confines of the Fox News Channel and other precincts of the right wing epistemic closure universe. In the rational world, Stephens will be humiliated.

The story begins at the end of last year, when Bret wrote a column on inequality that began:

As he came to the end of his awful year Barack Obama gave an awful speech. The president thinks America has inequality issues. What it has—what he has—is an envy problem.

Well, that promises to be a fair and balanced analysis. Alas, the column was the standard "wealth doesn't come at the expense of the poor" apologia, and continued by wrongly accusing President Obama of making an error in his speech. But then it veered from mere invective to glaring falsehood when Stephens tried to support his attempt to minimize inequality by stating that income for the bottom fifth of the US population has actually risen 186 percent since 1979!

Enter Professor Krugman, who in his column on January 19, gently corrected Bret:

If this sounds wrong to you, it should: that’s a nominal number, not corrected for inflation. You can find the inflation-corrected number in the same Census Bureau table; it shows incomes for the bottom fifth actually falling. Oh, and for the record, at the time of writing this elementary error had not been corrected on The Journal’s website.

O.K., that’s what crude obfuscation looks like.

(well, not that gently.)

This disturbed the WSJ scribe so much that he indignantly contacted the Times to protest, pointing out that he had admitted in an online post that he was wrong about nominal incomes.

OK. Krugman's serve.

In a blog post that day titled Department of Corrections, and Not the Nobel winner instructed Stephens on what a real correction in a newspaper is:

What, after all, is the purpose of a correction? If you’ve misinformed your readers, the first order of business is to stop misinforming them; the second, so far as possible, to let those who already got the misinformation know that they were misinformed. So you fix the error in the online version of the article, including an acknowledgement of the error; and you put another acknowledgement of the error in a prominent place, so that those who read it the first time are alerted.

He added that at the Times, a statement at the end of a subsequent column is also required.

Stephens' online post, Krugman pointed out, didn't come close to this standard. Most egregiously, someone reading the original offending post would find no change at all, with the phony statistic remaining!

Cornered, Stephens tried to go on the offensive, and prefaced his next column about Iran by writing about a "bearded bully, closer to home," obviously, the man from Princeton. Then he dredged up yet again a zombie quote that right wingers over the years have tried to use to "catch" Krugman: a comment in his column from 2002:

To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

Aha! Gotcha! This egghead wanted a housing bubble! What a maron!

Enter Dean Baker, another economist whose Beat the Press blog should be required reading. Dean saves Paul the trouble of have having to explain (yet again), that in his 2002 column, Krugman was being sarcastic. Baker's post is titled:

When Someone Says Paul Krugman Called for Greenspan to Create a Housing Bubble Back in 2002, They are Trying to Say That They are Either a Fool or a Liar

As Baker explains:

The point was that we needed some additional source of demand and Krugman did not see where it would come from. In this respect, it is worth noting that two weeks later, partly at my prodding, Krugman wrote a column explicitly warning about the dangers of a housing bubble.

So today, Krugman is content with posting Bubble Canard, a short post linking to Baker's defense, with one caveat:

I’d quarrel with his “either a fool or a liar” line; why not both?

Game, Set, Match to the Shrill One.

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/01/23/1271813/-Krugman-s-12-Year-Old-Sarcasm-Eludes-the-Wall-Street-Journal

Delicious post!









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