Mankiw on Clueless Pundits
Greg Mankiw interviewed in Fortune:
There are a lot of preconceived notions from people in the media who write stuff based on no knowledge at all. There are a lot of people who just make stuff up…Let me give you example. This is as I was arriving [as the new chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers]. Glenn Hubbard, my predecessor, was leaving. I read one of Paul Krugman’s New York Times’ columns, and he said something like, “Hubbard said he was leaving to be with his family, but you could see the knives sticking out of his back.” The suggestion was that he’s being kicked out. I knew that wasn’t true. I knew I got the job in large part because Glenn recommended me. So here we have Krugman sitting in some office in New Jersey making a supposition about what’s going on in Washington and then writing for the New York Times, with readers presuming that he knew something.
posted on 25 May 2005 by skirchner
in Economics
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Comments
It would be nice if public criticism of intellectuals was confined to their professional, rather than personal, shortcomings. Krugman’s pessimism about Bush’s economic and financial policies has so far been confounded. The US economy has absorbed the recent series of massive financial and martial shocks (dot.coms, 911, tel-coms,) with only a minor shudder. Bush has promoted an expansive production of output, powered by a high rates of industrial productivity and an insatiable appetite for asset investment. Krugman has been correct to criticism Bush for engineering a regressive distribution of income, through elitist financial and fiscal policies.
Krugman is undoubtedly a spiky contestant but he does, for the most part, play the ball rather than the man - at least in basic scientific matters.
Posted by Jack Strocchi on 05/27 at 05:32 PM