The Name of This Band is Exploding Heads

Kathy G. is ahead of you on this, and there are some good contenders in the comments to her post. But naturally I like this title better.

Its from the same commenter at Volokh, but I just couldn’t resist:

“Milton Friedmans work completely and totally debunks all of Krugmans – the committee noted Friedmans achievements in advising world leaders and seeing the positive results his theories had when actually used – Krugman was awarded a prize for calling someone stupid since late 2000.

Friedman may also win a real Nobel prize in the future in Mathematics – something that Krugman is lacking sorely in his 1911 model T 10 pager with static labor, demand and other – almost impossible to forecast in the real world -variables.”

This is addicting!

From some Freepers:

“Did Stalin or Hitler ever get a Nobel Prize, or am I thinking merely of Time Magazine’s “Man of the Year” award?”

“The economics community has barely heard of this guy. He’s a lefty journalist!”

“They missed giving the prize to Karl Marx, so they’re making it up with Krugman.”

” ‘I’m reminded of what Tom Lehrer said about Henry Kissinger and the Peace Prize.’
For those of us who aren’t old farts, who’s Tom Lehrer? And Henry Kissinger? “

As I posted at the G Spot, here’s Roger Kimball:

[preliminary anti-Stockholm snark elided]

“[T]oday we have yet another illustration of Marx’s revision of Hegel’s version of the progress of history: things happen as it were twice: first as tragedy (Arafat) then as farce–witness this year’s Nobel Laureate for economics: Paul Krugman.

Yes, that Paul Krugman, laughing stock (well, one of them) of The New York Times’s editorial: the anti-capitalist, anti-American town crier whose hysterical maunderings about the economy and American society were embarrassing before they went entirely off the reservation and became merely part of the ambient left-wing static emanating from The New York Times. Krugman is not just a left-wing academic economist. He is a hard-left activist whose only claim on our attention is as a bellwether of a certain species of anti-American demagoguery.

Well, one must laugh to keep from crying. Meanwhile, Krugman will be $1.4 million richer–unless, of course, Barack Obama should be elected and start nosing around that “windfall” profit. That is not–not by a long shot–enough to make me wish for an Obama presidency, but it would be a pleasing consolation prize.

[UPDATE: It occurs to me on reflection that it would have been much more appropriate had the Nobel Prize Committee, since they were determined to honor a fantasist like Krugman, awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature. I mean, he work is not more unreadable than many recent Nobel Laureates in literature, and it is just as untruthful.]”

See also here.

LOL Rich

Oprah Winfrey is a public intellectual???!!!!

Apparently, from MSNBC:

“SCARBOROUGH: I can’t even say it with a straight face. Let’s bring in Jim Cramer, host of CNBC’s Mad Money and author of Cramer’s “Stay Mad” book. Jim, is this a joke?

JIM CRAMER: Well look, Soros is now running the banking system, so why not let Krugman be the Nobel laureate? I mean, think about it —

SCARBOROUGH: Seriously: what a joke!

CRAMER: — the left has taken over your great country. You’re completely marginalized. We are now Eugene V. Debs, Part II.

SCARBOROUGH: We’re socialists now. We’re Marxists.

CRAMER: We just don’t want to teeter to Communism.”

Rick, if you’re going to mock Freepers please don’t mangle words as badly as they do. Its embarrassing.

“This is addicting!”

Its [i]addictive[/i]. [i]Addictive[/i]. God I hate that error. Its almost as bad as people spelling “lose” “loose”.

Sorry to get so aggro about it. Pet peeve. God knows why.

Peter Englund, spokesman for the selection committee, wrote a fine book called “The Battle that Shook Europe” about the Battle of Poltava in 1709, which put an end to Sweden’s great-power hopes and put Russia on the map as a big player. He’s not a faceless apparatchik by any means.

What’s wrong with “addicting”? It seems to be in common usage. Sure, it’s a back formation, but so what? Plenty of words started out that way.

That’s the problem with pedantry, man: once you start it’s real hard to get off it.

“As Kieran notes in comments below” was quite confusing; I thought Kieran was commenting on this very post of Henry’s. Which would have caused the universe to annihilate itself in a time paradox.

From quoted comment in 3: “Friedman may also win a real Nobel prize in the future in Mathematics…” Of course, there is (infamously, at least to us mathematicians) no Nobel prize in mathematics.

Several quoted comments talk about the taxes Krugman might have to pay on his winnings. But unsolicited prize money is not taxable income.

“Powerline – “The Nobel Prize is just another example of an institution whose veneration once crossed ideological lines, but that the left has long since captured. Other such institutions include the NAACP, the New York Times, Amnesty International, and (though it was never really venerated) the American Bar Association. The left’s “long march” through these institutions has deprived them of their credibility and their status as honest brokers.”

Cafe Hayek – “I’ve talked to a number of people who are depressed and angry at Krugman’s prize.
For me, it is just another reminder that those of us who believe in liberty are in for a long time in the intellectual wilderness.”

Austrian Economists – “I have to get over my shock and horror and write a commissioned piece on this. But today I would say is a sad day for economics, not a day to be celebrated.”

“Jules Crittenden – “I’m afraid I have zip to offer on that, except to say if the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences likes it and it isn’t about DNA, it must either support terrorism, hate America or be completely absurd.”

William Anderson at Forbes – “If Obama is elected and Krugman receives a high position in his administration, we shall see if Krugman becomes the first commissar who makes socialism work. I’ll be betting against him.”

[HF ed- HTML cleaned up at commneter’s request, and names of wingnuts added on my own initiative]

Hmm, if the earlier poster was correct in saying that Krugman’s Nobel is really honoring Keynes, doesn’t that increase the standing of Krugman rather than diminish him?

The main reason that the Economics Nobel is considered second rate is that none of the recipients have had a popular reputation to rival Einstein or Currie or Rutherford or Churchill and the rest. The awards to Hayek and Friedman brought into question the credibility of the prize itself rather than enhanced it. Friedman was particularly laughable, a man who prated the virtues of freedom while working for a blood soaked dictatorship that had murdered the democratically elected leaders of the country.

At root, the bigger problem is that there really hasn’t been an economist of the stature of Einstein since Keynes and before him you would probably have to choose Adam Smith or maybe Riccardo.

And that is what I suspect really gets up the noses of the wingnuts. The award to Krugman can be interpreted in several ways but one in particular is to enhance the reputation of the prize itself. Krugman was probably the most famous living economist before he won the prize. In any given year there are probably ten or so strong contenders to choose from. Awarding the prize to the person most respected in the field would be safe but do little to enhance the reputation of the prize as a pseudo-prize originally invented to honor the Austrian school. Awarding it to Krugman while Bush is still in office is much more high profile.

And at this point, honoring Bush’s critics is surely a safe proposition. It is very hard to imagine any circumstance in which Bush’s reputation will be rehabilitated amongst the right, let alone amongst the population in general. Its not like Saddam Hussein is going to come back from the dead to prove Bush right. Even if Iran gets a nuke and destroys Tel Aviv the criticism is still going to be made that Bush invaded the wrong country.

This is the first draft of history’s verdict on the Bush Administration: Fail.

For a more rarified form of scholarly bitchiness, while Greg Mankiw doesn’t say a bad word about Krugman on his blog he does link to a nice little hatchet job on Krugman’s popular writing authored by the same GMU economist Klein quoted by Righteous Bubba above, which concludes with the following impressive piece of amateur evolutionary psychology:

Robert Nozick (1986) has suggested that “[t]he intellectual wants the
whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he did
so well and was so well appreciated.” Nozick suggested that “wordsmith” intellectuals
resent “capitalism” for not according them the high status they come to
feel entitled to from their experience in school. I am inclined to see such highstrata
statist intellectuals as indulging the mythology of society as organization
because that mythology gives structure and vision to the yearning to see oneself
as part of the governing set—a mentality betokened in phrases like “the best and
the brightest.” It is a mentality of those whose selfhood places them “near the
top,” and who from such high station gaze upward. That such a penchant would
be selected for in the environment of evolutionary adaptation is certainly plausible.
It’s good to be the alpha male or one of his close companions. To my mind,
Krugman typifies the profile. I find especially telling the enmity he holds toward Republicans in power. He seems to resent not being among or not being able to
identify with the people at the top. I suspect that Krugman’s ideological direction
has been determined more by a will to see oneself a part of what one perceives to
be society’s leadership than by infatuation with the people’s romance. That penchant
contributes to his dedication to a kind of politics that, given his setting and
personal history, serves him in pursuing such sense of self and that, by delineating
and inculcating a “society” that like an organization has and requires “leadership,”
accommodates the governing-set mentality itself.

(link)

“Alleged economist wins Nobel Prize”: non-ironically collects a lot of the stuff you’re looking for.

I am inclined to see such highstrata
statist intellectuals[…]

Does anyone else just tune out completely at the sight of the word “statist?” Is there a word that more strongly correlates with boilerplate sub-Rand libertarian drivel?

Those guys are so pathetic. On the one hand, they’re obsessed with the money. On the other, they assume that Krugman is a radical egalitarian, which he’s not at all. And on the third hand, they assume that he’s going to spend that money on hookers and blow the way they would if they got it themselves. Something that strikes me as unlikely — not that there would be anything wrong with that.

OK, it’s lame to follow up a post like that with a link, but here it is:
http://faculty.chicagogsb.edu/richard.thaler/research/articles/1-Saving_Fungibility_And_Mental_Accounts.pdf

(Whatever happened to preview?)

Emerson, you got the wrong Peter Englund.

[aeiou]The choice was a blatant attempt to influence the US elections in favor of “The One.”

In this field, my favorite is the regular pre-US election Lancet feature on how 100 million Iraqis were killed and ten billion displaced by the invasion, etc (and don’t you, for a moment, believe these numbers are exaggerated!).

It should come out in the next issue, as they like to have about 2 weeks of incubation time in the MSM before Election Day.

Who would even go and mention the Lancet around here? I’d sooner go look in a mirror and say “candyman” a bunch of times.

I must say, there’s an impressive irony in the use of the ‘nym Order of Magnitude here. Perhaps you could adopt ‘Economic Reality’ as a sock puppet.

John Q: I adopted Order of Magnitude after reading a howler by Henry when he was wrong by about an order of magnitude comparing the wars in Iraq and Vietnam.

[HF ed: as I have never written a post comparing the magnitude of the wars in Iraq and Vietnam, I am leaving this troll-comment undisemvowelled, the better that it may be cherished by Posterity.

OoM, ok so i get the wingnut critique of the timing of the lancet piece, in that it did come out shortly before the election. but isn’t the nobel for economics always announced at this time of year? i’m not sure i get your point.

also, how many undecided voters will be all, since krugman won the nobel in economics, i must now vote obama? seems a tad unlikely. possibly they gave krugman the nobel simply because he deserved it.

To 42 and 44:

Wow, when I took tax law, Nobel prizes were not taxable, but they seem to have changed the law in 1986:

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1200/is_/ai_4245547

“here were problems with their sampling methodology etc”

After looking up “methodology” in a good dictionary, you might want to read a few threads here and realise what a fool you’re making of yourself (though that has been pretty much par for the course since you started).

“[T]he terror attack could even do some economic good. Now, all of a sudden, we need some new office buildings. … Rebuilding will generate at least some increase in business spending. (New York Times, September 14, 2001)”

Yeah, I think ‘alleged economist’ isn’t too far off the mark.

If y’ask me, the suggestion that some Swedish dudes picking Krugman is an attempt to swing the US electorate towards Obama is prima facie evidence of mental incapacity. I mean, on what tiptilted planet is that supposed to work?

Speaking of which, I feel we need to canvass David “Co” Kane’s opinion of Krugman’s Nobel. (Because I’ve got “Co” Kane, running around my brain…)

Two from RedState (the first two!):

No Its Not Political
bobbymike October 14th, 2008 at 1:57 a.m. CDT (link)

Yasser Arafat PEACE PRISE. Ya the Nobel Committee is all about rigorous something and it is not intellectual honesty right Mr. Gore, Mr. Carter and a whole host of far left writers that even the NYT Book Review says was not deserving of winning and maybe there was a little left wing award leanings.

Please!!
=============================
yeah right…
Jack October 14th, 2008 at 6:12 a.m. CDT (link)

The Nobel Prizes were set up for a lifetime of work not just a few months here and there.

Jimmy Carter? Al Gore? now Paul Krugman? I do not believe in conspiracies, but I believe in coincidences even less.

Jack

” I do not believe in conspiracies, but …”

Volvo buys Ford?

Megan McArdle’s post is just up, expect a payoff soon.

I must admit to way to much schadenfreude about the reactions of cowboy apitalists about both current mess and Krugman’s prize. I’ve been trying to find the cell number of a libertarian programmer I used to work with who had a degree in economics and would patronize me terribly when I railed against Friedman and said Keynesian ideas would eventually be required to fix up the mess left by excessive deregulation and monetarism, just so I can tell her “I told you so”. Childish, I know.

First of all, there is no “Nobel Prize in Economics” contained in the will of Alfred Nobel. The prize awarded was set up by the Swedish central bank and named in honor of Nobel. It’s called “The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel”. To call it a “Nobel Prize” is to sully the name of the honored.

Secondly, while Krugman did good work in the seventies (trade theories otherwise known as mercantilism), which is mainly what won him this prize, he’s now a columnist and has become little more than a low-life, two-bit political hack.

To paraphrase Ghostbusters: “…[his] theories are the worst kind of popular tripe, [his] methods are sloppy and [his] conclusions are highly questionable…”

Unfortunate that he should win now because it may lend credence to his soc1alist arguments many of which are what got us into this mess in the first place.

Posted by Nick | October 14, 2008 10:56 AM

In the small but (relatively) righteous Wittgenstein-scholarship community there are two David M. Finkelsteins, and I think they both went to the same school (one is older though).

Also, I think that if I were to inject you with heroin at regular intervals, eventually I would thereby addict you to heroin. But that would be mean.

All your economist are belong to us.

Some bozo at TownHall (more craziness at the link)

Krugman Receives the Ultimate Insult: The Swede’s Bozo Prize for Leftist Stooges.
Posted by rycK on Tuesday, October 14, 2008 12:03:34 PM

The New York Times—aka the Walter Duranty Papers [1] has a 90+ year history of apologizing for Communism, propping up losers, dictators and despots in their opinion columns and scrounging for new ways to reinvent Marxism. The Times has praised a swarm of disgusting parasites who parade as ‘leaders’ in the world and issues ‘prizes’ in many fields for practicing far leftist politics. Today, Paul Krugman is disgraced, internationally, and anointed with the Mantle of Stooge as defined by the Swedish Academy.[2] This Academy is besotted with political choices for prizes. [3]

I’m just surprised no one’s suggested invading Sweden yet. Surely, it’s the free world’s last hope!

I’m fascinated by the need that so many in the wingnutosphere apparently feel to label Krugman an anti-capitalist / socialist. Krugman is, of course, a Keynesian. Why isn’t that a sufficient term of abuse for wingnuts?

Because they’re idiots, morons, incredibly clueless about everything and everyone, intellectually incurious, just not very bright.