Kevin Williamson aims his latest National Review Online column at the flawed economic thinking that motivates people like Paul Krugman.
Econometrics and mathematical modeling are enormously valuable, but they also contribute to the pretense of knowledge, which is a lethal intellectual epidemic to which the scientist manqués of the economics world are especially vulnerable. There are competing factions and schools of thought within the proper sciences, of course, but the outsize role played by economic schools — from New Keynesians to Austrians — is evidence of the corrupting influence of politics, which distorts economic analysis in both its weak form (simple political affiliation) and its strong form (servile political advocacy). And as with the scientific case of freelancing gadflies such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, economists damage their individual and corporate credibility the farther they stray from their fields of genuine expertise. It is no surprise that, e.g., purported science guy Bill Nye until recently held foolish and ignorant views on genetically modified crops, views of which he has, to his credit, repented. Nye, who holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering, is more a science enthusiast than a scientist, much less a scientist with any particular expertise in agricultural genetics. …
… Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who used to be a famous economist, is on his way to becoming the Bill Nye of the economics world — minus the admirable frankness about changing his mind. Niall Ferguson, a Harvard history professor affiliated with the Hoover Institution, took to the pages of the Financial Times to woodshed Krugman over his relentlessly hostile account of the United Kingdom’s economic situation under the Conservatives. Krugman has a bug up his parietal lobe about so-called austerity policies, and insisted that the United Kingdom was hobbling itself by failing to follow his own pump-priming preferences. …
… Krugman’s account is vintage Krugman: The Conservatives didn’t ruin the United Kingdom’s economy, he insists, because they were covertly slathering the economy with Krugman’s secret sauce when it really mattered: “Cameron and company imposed austerity for a couple of years, then paused, and the economy picked up enough during the lull to give them a chance to make the same mistakes all over again.” There are some interesting assumptions in that, one of which is that Krugman is able to say with a high degree of accuracy what sort of time lag exists between policy changes and economic outcomes in a particular national economy during a very small slice of time, based on . . . not very much evidence.
