So Paul Krugman has a blog. So far, disappointing mission statement instead of fun, meaty blogwars with opposing economists. But perhaps he is merely gathering his strength. Mr Krugman doesn't seem to have learned the first rule of blogging, which is that you need a post every day to drive traffic.
« What you see is not what you get | Main | Which half? » PKBlog!19 Sep 2007 01:23 pm Comments (14)
Amazing...he manages to attribute "the great compression" to FDR and the New Deal, somehow ignoring the effect of WWII including women entering the workforce en masse and the United States' unique position as an unrivaled powerhouse in the petrochemicals revolution and industrial supply that followed the war. Then, instead of spending some profitable time on the economic impact of that, he attributes the stability of income disparity from 1942-ish to 1970 to labor unions and other leftish pets. Finally, without any comment on the embargo and failure of unions et al to react gracefully to an economic downturn, he attributes increasing wealth disparity since the 1970s to conservative policies. The words "technological change" and "globalization" appear all of once in the post, mostly so that they can be dismissed quickly. Evidently Mssrs. Krugman and Friedman dont' spend too much time together at the water cooler. Fortunately, Krugman gives us fair warning where this new blogspace is going: "On the political side, you might have expected rising inequality to produce a populist backlash. Instead, however, the era of rising inequality has also been the era of “movement conservatism,” the term both supporters and opponents use for the highly cohesive set of interlocking institutions that brought Ronald Reagan and Newt Gingrich to power, and reached its culmination, taking control of all three branches of the federal government, under George W. Bush. (Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.)" So, not only is the personal the political now, but the political is everything. Goodbye, sweet economics prince... 
you need a post every day to drive traffic Is this still true with RSS?
Since the late 1970s the America I knew has unraveled. We’re no longer a middle-class society, in which the benefits of economic growth are widely shared... This says a great deal about what Krugman values. The rich are better off than they were 40 years ago and so are the poor--in absolute terms. But Krugman seems to care chiefly about relative performance. Thus, if the rich are getting richer at 3% a year and the poor are getting richer at 2% a year, Krugman will say that the poor are worse off than they used to be. That's a very strange worldview. Presumably he would be happy if the wealth of the poor were declining, so long as it were declining at a slower rate than the wealth of the rich.
Isocrates -- the correct observation is not that the poor are getting wealthy at 2% a year. Rather it is that they are getting wealthier at 0.2% per year, a little different. Moreover, like most indicators the rate of growth has been much slower in the era of growing inequality then it was in the previous era. I can find numerous Krugman quotes that rising inequality has slowed the rate of growth of the lowest income group. I challenge you to show me a single quote where he said they are worse off than they use to be. You are entitled to your opinion, but not to your own facts.
I don't drive traffic; I drive _in_ traffic.
"I don't drive traffic; I drive _in_ traffic." But, when in traffic, do you drive on a parkway? Sorry, sorry sorry it's late I'm bored...
anony-mouse: I was born in 1936, and the attitudes people developed then lasted long enough for me to remember them. Rewarding executives with stock options during the 30's and 40's would have been a cruel joke, and paying them big salaries would have caused a public storm. Present day practices, like paying the outgoing head of Home Depot a big going away present as a reward for poor performance, would have been unthinkable. I think it was the spirit of the times that caused the 'great compression' and made the New Deal possible.
stan wrote: Rewarding executives with stock options during the 30's and 40's would have been a cruel joke, and paying them big salaries would have caused a public storm. Present day practices, like paying the outgoing head of Home Depot a big going away present as a reward for poor performance, would have been unthinkable. I think it was the spirit of the times that caused the 'great compression' and made the New Deal possible. I really wouldn't argue with that. What I would argue, though, is that Krugman has his correllation and his causation somewhat conflated -- or possibly even twisted. The history of then until now is a varied and complex mixture of changing social attitudes, changing economic structures, and a couple severe jolts that served to massively reorient things in about a decade each (roughly, Depression/WW2, mid-1930s to 1947; and Recession/Embargo, 1973 to 1980). If Krugman really wanted to share something interesting about how these came to pass and what the real root causes of them are, he could have swept the topic into a cocked hat of reasoned policy goals with about three rich, informative paragraphs. Instead, he went out on his usual bender of a Captain Ahab/Don Quixote political theorist.
anony-mouse You misunderstand my post. I agree with you, but you said it better.
Even if he writes every day, he'll never rope in the traffic you get after Sadly, No! snarks your post. It's a brilliant ploy, Megan-- Ann Althouse's traffic has taken a hit because of it.
His post also includes the curious statement: "Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty," So the Jet Set didn't exist? The "Other America" that served as the justification for The Great Society was just a figment of Michael Harrington's imagination? Is that hyperbole? Or just a lie?
"Middle class America: That’s the country I grew up in. It was a society without extremes of wealth or poverty," Also a country without significant foreign competition, as the rest of the world was still recovering from WWII, so that American workers could earn a premium wage without really being either efficient or better educated. Those days are gone, not because rich people are stealing something, but because foreign competition has eaten into the wage and salary premium for an ever larger numbers of Americans and the rich are by and large the ones for whom it hasn't happened yet. Also, his opening excerpt is full of this kind of simplistic, infantile nostalgia, trumpeting "I want to go back to my childhood" - I think the guy is just having issues.
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Somehow I don't think the Krugster will have any problems getting traffic driven to his blog, especially with the Select wall being taken down.
It's kind of like the Berlin Wall falling, isn't it?
Posted by liberalrob | September 19, 2007 1:55 PM