Paul Krugman is a Mendacious Demagogue

[st_rev]

Journalists in general get away with a lot. When reading a report about an incident or process that they have no direct knowledge of, most people assume that the report is basically accurate--otherwise, someone would notice, right? These guys are professionals, they must know what they're talking about

Comments

[dougo]

I'd like to know what else in that column is wrong. The parenthetical does seem a little weird, but more like something that should have been excised in editing than an indication that Krugman is crazy and untrustable about every single other thing.

[st_rev]

Let me back out to the level of just that paragraph and give a quick outline of what else is wrong:

Krugman starts by saying that "actually paying for your health care is a loss from an insurers’ point of view". Well, kind of. Actually delivering a car is a loss from an automaker's point of view. Actually making your cable work is a loss from a cable company's point of view. Krugman is presenting as unusual and scurrilous a pressure that every operation, whether private or public, experiences. In practice, this pressure to minimize operating costs is balanced by a need to keep customers paying into the system. It is true that expenditures on medicine are uniquely complicated for many reasons, some intrinsic and others historical, but Krugman presents the details in a deceptive way. A lot of the complexities of health insurance are analogous to the problems of automobile insurance, and we have pretty functional market there

[dougo]

I think the gist of Krugman's point is that "function effectively" means something different for a private organization than a public one: maximizing profits vs. providing a minimum standard of health to every citizen.

[st_rev]

'Providing a minimum standard of health to every citizen' sounds good in the abstract, but founders on the question of 'how'. Economic allocation problems are incredibly hard

Scavenger says

[anonymous]

I'm going to make a kickstarter to hire a team of ninjas to steal his Nobel prize.

Journalist?

[ext_1635396]

While agreeing with much of what you wrote:

Krugman is an op-ed columnist. Is that a subtype of "journalist"? I would have thought not. My impression is that they are more-or-less explicitly a subtype of "propagandist".

Re: Journalist?

[st_rev]

I think Krugman in particular tries to have it both ways--he is after all a Nobel! Prizewinning! Economist! I dunno if journalist is distinct from propagandist in general. I think the 'check stuff you actually know, then generalize' test is valid either way. I've only seen one journalist pass the test, ever, but I don't actually know a lot.

Re: Journalist?

[ext_1635396]

Well, for what it is worth, journalism has, or used to have, proprietary standards of epistemology, which explicitly do not apply to op-ed columnists.

Wikipedia abuse reveals that op-ed was invented explicitly as an entertainment feature: "It occurred to me that nothing is more interesting than opinion... and thereon I decided to print opinions, ignoring facts."

Op-ed columnists are (notionally, at least) unaffiliated with the newspaper, and typically have no journalism background (as far as I know). Frequently they are lobbyists, with disclosed or undisclosed funding. (See the Wikipedia footnotes re NYT op-ed transparency and the case of Robert Bryce.)

Maybe this is all off-topic, because your actual point is that Krugman is a mendacious demagogue, which I agree with!

On the other hand, he's *paid* to be a mendacious demagogue. He's just doing his job, and he's good at it. The problem here isn't Krugman as such, it's structural.

Re: Journalist?

[st_rev]

Good points. It irks me that he's trading on the very scholarly reputation that he's desecrating.