Paul Krugman Pwns George Will

Posted on November 16, 2008 by Jeff Fecke

That’s gonna leave a mark. Hey, George, here’s a tip for the future: don’t just yammer about economic history when you’re sitting next to a Nobel laureate. Knowing your stuff works a lot better.

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5 Responses to Paul Krugman Pwns George Will

  1. 1
    PG says:
    November 16, 2008 at 7:40 pm

    Will is just toeing ye olde supply-side line: what the government needs to do is stimulate investment. Krugman argues that there was a failure of demand remedied only by the explosion in demand created by WWII (even before American’s entrance in Dec. 1941, we were busy lend-leasing the Allies). Personally, I agree with Krugman that stimulating demand was key, but I’m sure that a competent supply-side economist — rather than a competent historian, which is more Will’s area — could make the argument for why a better environment for investment would have done the trick.

  2. 2
    Ampersand says:
    November 17, 2008 at 3:31 pm

    Frankly, I think “competent supply-side economist” is a contradiction. There are certainly competent right-wing economists, but none of them are supply-siders.

    (Which isn’t to say that a competent right-wing economist couldn’t have done a better job debating Krugman than Will did.)

    I enjoyed the clip, but I also agreed with Ezra’s take on it:

    …interesting on a meta-level, as someone who’s paid to seem like he knows these things collides with someone who’s paid to know these things. It’s expertise versus the aesthetic of expertise.

    The pity is that there’s no judge, or score sheet, so folks who wanted to agree with Will probably still do, while those find Krugman’s commentary more convenient to their biases will happily nod along. Lots of folks are applauding this video, and I do too, but insofar as there are no consequences for being wrong on TV, I think the actual takeaway is that sounding like you know things and actually knowing things are, in this forum, pretty much equal.

  3. 3
    Decnavda says:
    November 17, 2008 at 4:17 pm

    I like Krugman referring to WWII as “a giant public works program.” I have often heard conservatives say that it was not the government that got us out of the Depression, it was WWII. But they never explain *WHY* WWII got us out. In theory, WWII should be the ultimate example of the “broken windows” fallacy, where someone notes that when a window is broken, it helps the economy by causing someone to be hired to fix it, and therefore the best way to help the economy is by going around breaking windows. WWII destroyed most of Europe and significant portions of Africa and Asia, and the only things that got built were machines used to do the destroying. But it still got us out of the Depression by being an excuse for the government to put money in the hands of people who would spend it. We just need to find a way to do that without having to destroy a fourth of the world in the process.

  4. 4
    Elkins says:
    November 18, 2008 at 2:35 am

    It’s expertise versus the aesthetic of expertise.

    That’s a great analysis.

    One of the things that I found most interesting about this video was the series of expressions on Will’s face as he was being corrected by Krugman. It occurred to me while watching that to viewer who did not know which of these two men was the more respected academically, and who also held neither partisan preconceptions nor any particular knowledge of economics or US history, Will’s facial expressions were almost perfectly ambiguous. Is this a video of a knowledgable man exasperated by the ramblings of an ignoramus, or is it a video of a man who is annoyed at having been caught out in ignorance by someone with far more expertise? It can be read either way, and the readings seemed so equally balanced to me that I found it somewhat fascinating — like a relative of one of those optical illusions where two faces can with equal facility be a vase, or a woman can simultaneously be both old and young.

  5. 5
    PG says:
    November 30, 2008 at 4:57 pm

    Will doesn’t seem to have learned his lesson. He’s back at it again today in the Washington Post, conflating the effect of government spending during a Depression (which is proper Keynesianism when coupled with tax decreases — which is where FDR mucked up 1937-39) with suspending antitrust law (which almost never makes sense). Someone needs to take away his keyboard until he takes a course specifically about American economic history. A course in American legal history wouldn’t hurt, either, as it might cause him to rethink citing cases that no longer are good precedent, as he did at the beginning of last week’s column.