Kieran Healy went to the American Sociological Association meetings and got to hear Paul Krugman. He discovers what economists have known for a long time: Krugman is a very smart, very articulate, and often quite funny international trade economist. Krugman is also a very talented writer. And so Healy comes up with a non-sequitor.
I hadn’t seen Krugman speak before. He was refreshingly nerdy. His detractors work incessantly to make the “shrill” label stick, but in person he comes off more like Woody Allen’s accountant brother.
I do not know about the "shrill" label, not having used it, but I would certainly use "boring". Before Krugman started doing his New York Times column, he wrote some remarkably good stuff, for example on the intellectual mess that gets called "international competitiveness". He goes over the top sometimes, as when Kenneth Arrow once fired back at a Krugman piece with
Krugman admits that he wrote the article because he was "just pissed off," not a very good state for a judicious statement of facts, as his column shows.
(As someone who never, ever goes over the top, I can fairly criticize Krugman for this.)
What depresses some of us about Krugman is that he has become a one trick pony. He has become so unhealthily obsessive about George Bush that he cannot seem to think about anything else. George Bush has become his great white whale. Robert Solow once took this shot at Milton Friedman: "Everything reminds Milton of the money supply. Well, everything reminds me of sex, but I keep it out of the paper." Krugman is determined to blame George Bush for everything, which keeps reminding me of Joseph Schumpeter's remark that the most remarkable thing about the Japanese earthquake of 1924 was that it was not blamed on capitalism. Sometime this fanatical urge to believe that the Bush administration is alway, always wrong leads him to say things that should embarrass a professional economist.
The man has a regular column in the New York Times. Can't he think of anything else to write about? If Kerry wins, is Krugman going to give up his column because he has nothing to say?
Granted, Krugman is hardly unique. Kieran Healy should know better than to tell us that Krugman's nerdy style is somehow inconsistent with being shrill. Einstein was an apologistfor Stalin, and William Shockley's views on eugenics and Noam Chomsky's politics are bizarre. But all of them are (or were) hugely talented in their own area of expertise, and none of them were particularly worldly.
