“Paul Krugman”:http://www.pkarchive.org/ and “Fernando Cardoso”:http://www.harrywalker.com/speakers_template.cfm?Spea_ID=624 were the final plenary speakers yesterday evening at the “American Sociological Association Meetings”:http://www.asanet.org/convention/2004/ in San Francisco. The topic under discussion was “The Future of Neoliberalism,” and both of them did a pretty good job. The panel was introduced and moderated by “Juliet Schor”:http://www2.bc.edu/~schorj/, who spoke for twenty-odd minutes at the beginning and seemed just a tiny bit reluctant to give up the mike. That was understandable, I suppose, as the ballroom was jammed — standing room only and spillover into the hallways outside, and it’s hard to resist a crowd that big. 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.
Krugman made a passing reference to Enron and wondered whether Homeland Security was responsible for the intermittent problems with the lights and sound, but otherwise stuck to the topic at hand, arguing that “neoliberalism” could and should be decomposed into policies that ought to be evaluated independently. So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten _much_ better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established. He emphasized the complexity of the problems at issue and the dangers of hubris in development policy. He came across, in other words, like a theoretically-driven social scientist determined to learn from the data and looking for the answer to the question “How can we make as many people as possible better-off?”
All of which made some of the questions from the audience (passed up on cards and read out by Schor) more than a little irritating. The worst one, stupid as well as rude, asked whether economics was “too mired in the muck of right-wing thought” to do any good in the world. (I should say that no-one clapped at that one, and a lot of people were clearly embarrassed: in many respects this was the friendliest of all possible audiences.) Krugman politely stood his ground. Whoever submitted the question is probably well-used to (correctly) arguing that the horrors of Stalin don’t invalidate the fundamental insights of Marxists. How hard can it be to apply the same basic point to the WTO and the neoclassical toolkit?[1] Questions like that are the bobblehead left-wing analogue to the pez-dispenser right-wing trope that if only you understood “Econ 101” or “the basic laws of the market” you’d agree with every wingnut idea put to you. I have all kinds of criticisms and qualms about economics as a body of knowledge and a professional enterprise, and naturally I’d like to be right about all of them all the time. But, sadly, easy certainty is continually frustrated by the fact that many of the economists I know are much smarter than me and have the irritating ability to make good arguments for their point of view. And so even though I will of course prevail in the end I can’t just dismiss them out of hand. I expect the same consideration in return, the odd snotty economist (or, more often, their camp-followers in political science and law) notwithstanding.
Anyway, if you get a chance to see Krugman at a book-signing or whatever — especially of the topic is international macroeconomics — take it. He’s good value.
fn1. Comments to the effect that I am implying that the WTO is as bad as Stalin here will be ignored.
{ 35 comments }
eszter 08.18.04 at 4:29 pm
Don’t get me started about some sociologists and the chip on their shoulders when it comes to addressing work in some neighboring disciplines. Some of the most helpful preparation for my General Exams in economic sociology came from discussions with friends in Econ (special thanks to this one). These friends challenged me to explain various positions in much more detail than preaching to the converted would’ve inspired. It also helped me understand that too often we (sociologists) refer to economists and their approaches in a very simplistic strawman type of way, which really doesn’t do any good for anybody.
dsquared 08.18.04 at 4:32 pm
Mind you, this reflects age and status more than any systematic issue. If you’d caught Krugman ten years ago you would have been flat out amazed that he could walk normally with a chip on his shoulder that big.
Henry 08.18.04 at 4:33 pm
In fairness, though, the attitude goes both ways. I was at a meeting of the International Society for the New Institutional Economcs a few years back where Avner Greif (well respected game theorist) gave the keynote. When he started telling the audience that they should go back and read Weber and Durkheim, the suggestion was not well received.
Ted Barlow 08.18.04 at 4:42 pm
Wait, are you implying that the WTO is as bad as-
Oh. DAMN YOU, FOOTNOTE 1!
dsquared 08.18.04 at 4:47 pm
I’ve got a post next week defending the proposition that the WTO is at least as bad as Pol Pot and probably as bad as Stalin, so if anyone wants to have that argument they can rest assured that the time will come.
oneangryslav 08.18.04 at 5:03 pm
“So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten much better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established”
Kieran, paraphrasing Krugman.
In fact, this is exactly the argument that Bhagwati makes in his recently published, _In Defence of Globalization_.
We shouldn’t conflate capital flows with free trade.
Brian 08.18.04 at 5:13 pm
Surely you’re being facetious when you say you are sad and irritated by smart economists. Sadly, at least to me, I sense that you’re being genuine because you go on to tell us that you will prevail [despite the data]. You praise Krugman for diligently and honestly looking at the data but you seem to place yourself above all that.
alpha 08.18.04 at 5:25 pm
Whoever submitted the question is probably well-used to (correctly) arguing that the horrors of Stalin don’t invalidate the fundamental insights of Marxists.
How about the horrors of Lenin, Trotsky, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, Kim Il Sung, Kim Jong Il, Ho Chi Minh, Nicolae Ceauşescu…do they invalidate the “fundamental insights of Marxists”?
By the way, given the recent post re: Islam, I’d also like to ask how you and others feel about Marx’s recommendation that religion should be eliminated from a communist state.
LowLife 08.18.04 at 5:52 pm
brian – allow for the possibility that Kieran is making a joke.
alpha – you are almost alone is taking Kieran point as anything other than a characterization of a questioner. BTW, some of the fundalmental insights of Marxists are so much apart of modern social and economic thinking that you may be surprized at their source. Funny you should ask the last question about religion as I’m fially reading Ghost Wars. Seems like the Russians were trying to get the Afgani communists to be more tolerant of religion there. So apropos your question Andropov felt that religion should not be eliminated.
HP 08.18.04 at 6:27 pm
I’m an essentially passive consumer of economics news and information, and a couple of things seem painfully obvious to me:
1) Sometimes some economic policies work in some places.
2) No package of policies works everywhere all the time.
Admittedly, most of the economics information I get is filtered through politicians, think tanks, and journalists (although I get more direct information lately through blogs), but the overarching narrative I hear is always along these lines: “Ideological package of policies X is THE way to go, now and forever.”
It’s interesting to me that Krugman’s statement of the obvious is considered blogworthy. Is there any truth in the impression that the typical economist is engaged in some kind of search for economic “truth”? Would it not be more productive to develop a predictive model for why even contradictory policies might or might not be appropriate in any given situation? Or is that in fact what economists actually do? (That is, have I been misled by the popular presentation of economics?)
p. davanzo 08.18.04 at 6:28 pm
Glad to see you admit that you are a Marxist loser. Penalizing the productive sector of the economy to “make as many people as possible better off” will kill the goose quickly and lead us into the same nightmare the Russians endured for 70 years after the Russian Revolution. It’s helpful to know who our Marxist enemies are. You will not prevail. You will die in ignomy.
p. davanzo 08.18.04 at 6:28 pm
Glad to see you admit that you are a Marxist loser. Penalizing the productive sector of the economy to “make as many people as possible better off” will kill the goose quickly and lead us into the same nightmare the Russians endured for 70 years after the Russian Revolution. It’s helpful to know who our Marxist enemies are. You will not prevail. You will die in ignomy.
p. davanzo 08.18.04 at 6:28 pm
Glad to see you admit that you are a Marxist loser. Penalizing the productive sector of the economy to “make as many people as possible better off” will kill the goose quickly and lead us into the same nightmare the Russians endured for 70 years after the Russian Revolution. It’s helpful to know who our Marxist enemies are. You will not prevail. You will die in ignomy.
Keith M Ellis 08.18.04 at 6:31 pm
So whereas free-trade and export-led growth has clearly gotten much better results than tariffs and import-substitution, the benefits of unrestricted capital mobility or gung-ho privatization aren’t as well established.
This has been one of Krugman’s key points for, oh, eight years at least. He’s written a lot of good popular stuff on this topic.
I’m not certain, but I can guess what dsquared is referring to. I know that six years ago Krugman would likely have been more combative. For some strange reason, USA lefties don’t seem to know that their current hero was their bitter enemy back around the time of the Seattle meeting. But I’ve come across people who only know that Krugman is a NYT columnist and not that he is an economist. So what are you gonna do?
For the record, it was not only right-wing partisans who thought that Krugman’s NYT were “shrill”. I did. I haven’t liked his NYT persona because a) he’s better as a serious and respected economist and popularizer of economics (the two in combination is no small feat) than he is as a political ideological columnist; and, b) whether he was right or not (he most certainly was and is) and whether he was justified in his anger (he most certainly was and is), that was not politically effective rhetoric for that place and time. The swing voters are going to decide this election—the swing voters have always been going to decide this election. They liked Bush, they distrust “shrillness” and overt partisan attacks. This is true when the political roles are reversed—ask Gingrich. The same people most loudly cheering Krugman on were the same people that thought that Dean’s “fire up the base” appeal was going to win back the Presidency.
I’m tired of being hit over the head here, and by DeLong, with the “shrill” issue because while it was, as a practical matter mostly a right-wing meme; it wasn’t entirely so and there were a few of us on the left that think that “shrillness” is just (usually) counter-productive US national politics. I’m a pragmatist. I want to win, not feel good knowing that I fought “the good fight”. Now, I think Krugman can tear into Bush as viciously as he (and I!) want. The mood now will support it, it’s effective. I know that people will argue that Krugman paved the way for this mood change—but that’s wrong. Bush paved the way for this mood change. By this administration’s idiotic actions, the public was inevitably going to sour on Bush. They just needed time. It’s like talking your teenage daughter out of her crush on the bad-boy dropout. It takes tact, not anger. Anger is, for a while at first anyway, counterproductive.
jdw 08.18.04 at 6:55 pm
_“neoliberalism†could and should be decomposed_
Speaking of Marx…
p.davanzo — the productive
sector of the economy only hits the post button once.
Barry 08.18.04 at 9:15 pm
Keith, aside from the fact that you’re disclaiming right-winghood, do you have any proof for the assertion ” that was not politically effective rhetoric for that place and time.” Keeping in mind that somebody has to be first.
John Quiggin 08.18.04 at 9:43 pm
“If you’d caught Krugman ten years ago you would have been flat out amazed that he could walk normally with a chip on his shoulder that big.”
Australians are well-balanced – we have chips on both shoulders!
Keith M Ellis 08.18.04 at 9:45 pm
Can’t prove it, of course. But as a moderate liberal, I’m far more inclined to listen to an argument from a mild-mannered, reasoned, tempered conservative than I am from, say, any of the conservative pundits that the conservatives love so much. I detect frothing at the mouth, I tune out. Instantly. Undoubtedly, sometimes, some of those people must be right. But I’m not listening.
rd 08.18.04 at 11:55 pm
Did Cardoso say anything interesting?
a different chris 08.19.04 at 1:20 am
>The worst one, stupid as well as rude,
I always feel like I come off that way on DeLong’s blog, much to my embarrassment. But it’s so hard to work in these tiny comment boxes.. arrghh… I’m really quite reasonable, it’s the arrogant correctness of the neo-lib position that makes me insane.
Which leads me into “hp”‘s comment- that’s pretty much my position. But if you believe that, then you surely should get very nervous about the onward march of the “Washington Consensus.”
Look, we mammals have been evolving for an ungodly (pun not intended) number of years, and the little simpleton virus guys still regularly come up with new ways to get us sick. Sometimes dangerously so.
I find it unlikely that the DNA of the Washington Consensus, created by humans over a couple of centuries at best, is tight enough to avoid any possible “viral” attack from the unknowable financial interactions of 6, 7, maybe 8 billion people.
Right now we have a “genetic diversity” of economies.. but they are adamant about eliminating that. That truly scares me. Especially when one of their early targets is how we pay for our food supply.
They didn’t call it the Asian flu for nothing.
praktike 08.19.04 at 1:33 am
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!
Phill 08.19.04 at 1:33 am
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.
dsquared 08.19.04 at 1:36 am
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!)
Zizka 08.19.04 at 2:47 am
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.
Robert Vienneau 08.19.04 at 3:31 am
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.
Walt Pohl 08.19.04 at 3:44 am
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.
brian 08.19.04 at 4:41 am
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.
JP 08.19.04 at 5:52 am
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.
woodturtle 08.19.04 at 8:53 am
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.
Andre 08.19.04 at 7:39 pm
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”?
fling93 08.19.04 at 11:11 pm
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.
Jmote 08.20.04 at 2:01 am
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.
cbu 08.20.04 at 4:38 pm
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.
Robin Green 08.20.04 at 5:45 pm
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?
burritoboy 08.20.04 at 10:43 pm
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”.
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