Comments on: Krugman at the ASA

By: burritoboy

burritoboy — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 22:43:54 +0000

I, too, was there at the final session. Cardoso’s talk was simply a mess – I’ve been thinking about it for the past several days and I still have very little idea what his point was, if he actually had one. The thing, to me anyway, simply had no structure and partially seemed to be “Rambling Assorted Ancedotes from an Aging Politician”. You couldn’t help but notice how nerdy Krugman really is – he’s truly an unreformable geek (which is a good thing, of course). I too found his talk a bit more light-weight than I wanted. I think I agreed with everything he said, but didn’t find anything he said particularly new or surprising or deep (maybe I’m asking too much for the occasion). That question Kieran mentioned managed to be both silly and rude – and in very poor taste. Anybody’s thoughts on the jam-packed, all-star “Regulating the Corporation” session? Me, I thought the most interesting paper of the entire meeting came in Fligstein’s “Shareholder Value Society: Changes in Income Inequality”.

By: Robin Green

Robin Green — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 17:45:10 +0000

If it’s not as many as the right wing side, then the right wingers are really mired, since otherwise they would get up and move around and even up the distribution. Why would they move around? Is moving from right-wing to left-wing all that common? Do you have any evidence to support that claim?

By: cbu

cbu — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 16:38:20 +0000

I was also at the final plenary session in SF, and given that the supposed topic was “The Future of Neoliberalism” I was a bit let down that neither speaker had much to say about the politics of the neoliberal project, nor about what lies ahead. (One of Cordosa’s biggest applause lines came in his opening remarks when he excused himself from addressing the topic, stating “there is no future for neoliberalism.”) I suspected that most in the audience expected to hear Krugman the NYT columnist, but were disappointed to hear Professor Krugman instead give an economic primer designed for non-economists. Designed for non-social-scientists, as far as I could tell. Personally, I that that his talk was a little light, and could be summarized as “most people conflate neo-liberalism with these four different programs, and when examining them separately these two work seem to work and these other two don’t, but our conclusions have changed from a few years ago as we have received new data.” One of Krugman’s remarks, almost an afterthought provided in the QA section, suggested that if one wants to improve economic and social justice, one should work on programs that promote economic and social justice. Interestingly, that appeared to be a point made by Cordosa as well, though it was similar muted beneath a discussion of monetary policies and the underfunding of the IMF. Expecting any portion of the neoliberal project to produce positive results in areas of social welfare seems as genuine as implementing a tax cut in order to create working class jobs. Not to say that all of neoliberalism is evil, but that it has come to stand for a host of policies and goals and failures that have been conflated to a point where the term is so politically charged and theoretically diffuse to be nearly meaningless. While I applaud Mr. Krugman for pointing this out, I found this contribution one of the few provided in this particular talk.

By: Jmote

Jmote — Fri, 20 Aug 2004 02:01:58 +0000

Kieran, thanks for the report on the Krugman talk. I had to leave SF on Monday and missed it. I find Krugman’s relatively newfound status as mouthpiece for the left amusing. I enjoy it, but I remember having to read Krugman’s work on trade theory, and the two seem like night and day. But then again, I was a student of McCloskey’s, so I’m used to wacky conversions by economists.

By: fling93

fling93 — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 23:11:12 +0000

I crashed the thing, despite not being a sociologist. I found Krugman’s talk much more interesting. Although it might be cuz I had trouble understanding Cardoso, partially because of the accent, didn’t vary his voice a lot cuz he was reading aloud, and I am totally unfamiliar with the history and his policies. But from what I could tell, the gist of what talked about was the successes he had in taming runaway inflation with the Real Plan, and making a lot of the fact that he got good results despite not listening to the IMF. He also listed some statistics arguing that growth and social progress weren’t necessarily linked together. I brought my wife’s digital recorder, so I might be able to transcribe it later, depending on the audio quality.

By: Andre

Andre — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 19:39:00 +0000

rd: > Did Cardoso say anything interesting? How could he? Wasn’t Cardoso’s presidency based exactly on “…the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization”?

By: woodturtle

woodturtle — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 08:53:30 +0000

What economists would qualify as being “mired in the mud of Left wing thought?” If it’s not as many as the right wing side, then the right wingers are really mired, since otherwise they would get up and move around and even up the distribution. Maybe something Bayesian, with fat tails. I think the pool of people who could have possibly written that note must be very very small.

By: JP

JP — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 05:52:53 +0000

Feldstein, though a conservative, was a major gadfly for the Reagan Administration back when he was at CEA, refusing to countenance their wackiest ideas. Like Mankiw and Friedman, he’s legitimately respected within academia, and not just in the political realm (though Walt Pohl may have a point about what’s happened to him the last couple of years). Krugman, who was a young economist working for Feldstein at the time, writes about the CEA experience extensively in Peddling Prosperity.

By: brian

brian — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 04:41:41 +0000

lowlife, I think Kieran was only half-joking. On this website we have recently seen economists vilified as autistics so I became wary of what I was reading. I am unabashedly humourless about epistemology because I think it’s important.

By: Walt Pohl

Walt Pohl — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 03:44:03 +0000

In recent years Martin Feldstein has really debased himself in the service of politics, but I don’t think that in that way he’s particularly typical of economists.

By: Robert Vienneau

Robert Vienneau — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 03:31:12 +0000

Brad DeLong links to this post on his blog. This is a couple of entries after he documents that Martin Feldstein – hardly an obscure economist – lies in support of a right wing ideology. Since my hobby has been studying the Cambridge Capital Controversy, I’m naturally inclined to think mainstream economists participate in a pathological community. I don’t know what to do about it. I don’t think asking Krugman about the pathologies of the discipline will lead to a productive discussion, given his past writing. About the only point is to see how far he has come, I guess.

By: Zizka

Zizka — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 02:47:54 +0000

Keith and I have wasted thousands of words arguing. I am satisfied that his mind cannot be changed, and I have no idea why he thinbks the way he does. His assertion that Krugman’s columns are politically ineffective comes from nowhere.

By: dsquared

dsquared — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:36:47 +0000

ADC: Krugman hasn’t yet gone down the path that Joe Stiglitz has and decided that the Washington consensus insitutions are so screwed up in the way you suggest that there is no redeeming them and they must be got rid of. But I’d give it only a few years (you have to be very secure in the profession to be seen with sociologists, but only a Nobelist can dare say something nasty about the IMF!)

By: Phill

Phill — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:33:44 +0000

I think that the questioner could have had a point if they had asked if economics was mired in the muck of ideological thought. The problem with ideas is not so much whether they are extreme or not, at one time opposing slavery was extreme. The real problem is when they are set up as absolute truths and are not subject to empirical challenge. I think that Krugman has a very good point when he looks at the empirical results of neo-liberal policies as the standard on which they should be judged. The problem with right-wingnuts and left-wingnuts is that they believe that they have found the solution to every problem in some trite one size fits all theory. And lets be fair to the libertarian-wingnuts who argue that there need to be more dimensions on the political spectrum, their solutions are equally trite as anything from Stalin, Mao, Bush or the WSJ editorial page. The big problem for economics is that it is the only academic discipline where politicians get to choose the leading lights of the field. Take when the Reaganites needed to justify their tax cuts and picked up an obscure Prof nobody ever heard of and heralded him as the second comming of Adam Smith because he had written a paper that said exactly what they needed to justify their policies. There is a real problem here, to get on in economics an empirically successful way to do so is to work out what arguments would be most convenient to the least scrupulous successful politicians of the day.

By: praktike

praktike — Thu, 19 Aug 2004 01:33:31 +0000

Keith Ellis- Krugman stepped up to the plate and denounced Bush before anyone else in the mainstream had the balls to do so in such “shrill” terms. Lo and behold, lots of people now understand what he was talking about and parrot his points. Meme insertion at work!