Niall Ferguson, expert on everything, including Paul Krugman’s psyche, has some hurt fee-fees:
In my view Paul Krugman has done fundamental damage to the quality of public discourse on economics. He can be forgiven for being wrong, as he frequently is–though he never admits it. He can be forgiven for relentlessly and monotonously politicizing every issue. What is unforgivable is the total absence of civility that characterizes his writing. His inability to debate a question without insulting his opponent suggests some kind of deep insecurity perhaps the result of a childhood trauma. It is a pity that a once talented scholar should demean himself in this way.
What a pathetic response. Notice that he is doing precisely what I never do, and making it about the person as opposed to his ideas. All I have ever done to him is point out that he seems to not know what he is talking about, and that he has been repeatedly wrong. I would never stoop to speculating about his childhood! If he can’t handle professional criticism — which is all that I have ever offered — he should go find another profession.
This all stems over a big pissy fight on Twitter because Krugman called out the European austerity bombers, specifically the European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affars, Olli Rehn:
What you would never grasp from those outraged tweets is that all my criticisms have been substantive. I never asserted that Mr. Rehn’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries; I pointed out that he has been promising good results from austerity for years, without changing his rhetoric a bit despite ever-rising unemployment, and that his response to studies suggesting larger adverse effects from austerity than he and his colleagues had allowed for was to complain that such studies undermine confidence.
Brian R.
Nice FOTC reference.
Roger Moore
It’s always projection with these fuckers. Always!
StringOnAStick
Krugman rules, Ferguson drools*.
* Just trying to keep with the same level of intellectual discourse as Mr. Ferguson displays here.
bemused
When someone resorts to calling you a doodyhead, you know you’re dealing with a person who has no coherent arguments and is prevalent in the extreme right.
Maude
The 1 per centers don’t like Krugman.
The Euro Austerity if for the banks there, not the people. Krugman was good at pointing this out. No wonder he’s getting attacked.
Petorado
How can anyone dislike an economist that can use a Monty Python quote to great effect in a discussion about austerity policy?
Maude
@Maude:
is for the banks
Roger Moore
@Petorado:
Paul Krugman is aware of all internet traditions.
BGinCHI
What I love about Kthug, in addition to his economic mastery, is his sense of humor, awareness of pop culture, and taste in music.
I’m the one who turned him on to Wye Oak, so I have some skin in the game.
Wiesman
This is all too common on the right. I recently had a discussion with a conservative friend who had been a global warming denier for years. He went through all the stages: first, warming wasn’t happening. Second, it wasn’t man-made. Third, well, maybe warming will be a good thing. And finally, it’s too late to do anything about it. When I pointed out how wrong he had consistently been he told me it was Al Gore’s fault for politicizing the issue back in the 90s.
Same thing with the Iraq war. You talk to conservatives about it now and those that will admit it was a mistake find some way to pin the blame for how wrong they were on those dirty fucking hippies who were protesting with “Bush = Hitler” signs.
It seems that to a conservative you can be really really spectacularly wrong, but if you can ever point to a time when a liberal was impolite to you, it’s not your fault.
Scamp Dog
What you libs don’t understand is that saying that a Very Serious Person is wrong IS insulting, and should never be done in public to a VSP. Dirty hippies and liberals deserve all the abuse they get, and more, of course.
handsmile
Ferguson and Paul Krugman have been feuding in print for years. It goes back at least to a 2009 Financial Times column in which Ferguson wrote, “President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat.” To which, Krugman responded in part, “I don’t think Professor Ferguson is a racist. I think he’s a poseur.”
Their mutual contempt was revived last summer with Ferguson’s notorious Newsweek cover story, “Hit the Road, Barack: Why We Need a New President.” Krugman, Brad DeLong, James Fallows, and a host of other policy analysts absolutely pilloried Ferguson for the distortions and outright misrepresentations that littered that hatchet job. In the ensuing dust-up, Newsweek had to admit that it had not fact-checked Ferguson’s article. Here are a couple of links to that contretemps:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2012/08/niall-ferguson-vs-paul-krugman.html
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/a-last-note-on-niall-ferguson/261415/
I guess now that the buffoon Joe Scarborough is boasting how he got the better of Krugman in their recent “debate,” Village fave Ferguson must feel that now he too can get in a lick. Pathetic, but unsurprising given Ferguson’s hackery.
Marmot
@Wiesman: That’s a good description of that phenomenon. I find their extreme tribalism fascinating. I mean, we do it too, to some degree. But backing the home team seems to be all they actually care about.
Couple of months ago, I heard a Republican environmentalist on NPR lamenting the fact that Al Gore took up the anti-climate change cause. This dude blamed Republicans’ precipitous — and very recent — drop in climate change acceptance entirely on Gore!
Villago Delenda Est
You know, I would not object to a drone strike (or even an old fashioned Chicago Violin concert) aimed at Niall Ferguson, who is a vile sack of shit.
Marcelo
It’s really stunning how much Krugman is right, and yet how much people hate him.
My father has this nasty habit of telling people who don’t agree with his glibertarian views that they don’t know anything about economics or political philosophy, etc. He is a philosophy professor, so this immediately gives him an upper hand. When I cite Krugman I get to point out that Krugman has a Nobel Prize in econ, and then it’s all about how the Nobel is a disgrace because they gave the peace prize to Jimmy Carter, Yasser Arafat, and Obama.
It’s always something.
patroclus
Both Krugman and Ferguson can get pissy sometimes, but the difference is that Krugman’s analysis is almost always correct and Ferguson’s not so much (at least about current issues; he’s actually fairly good on economic history).
Austerity hasn’t really worked so well in Europe and Krugman is right to point that out. The main goals of economics are to promote growth, stabilization, safety and soundness, an efficient allocation of resources and an equitable distribution of wealth and income. In the EU, there is little to no growth, the 2007-08 crisis produced wild instability, which is ongoing in certain member states, the banking industry remains relatively unsafe, there is high unemployment and wealth and income have declined across the board, but especially for lower incomes. Krugman is right, so his critics criticize him personally.
Roger Moore
@Marcelo:
The don’t hate him even though he’s right; they hate him because he’s right. Pointing out that a wingnut is wrong is worse than Hitler with a side of Stalin.
Sly
Oh, media, please don’t change. Where else could a third-rate historian pretend to be a fourth-rate psychoanalyst and still be called a “global thinker?”
Here… I’ll try: “Niall Furgeson’s predilection for pro-imperialist nostalgia, combined with his quasi-erotic fixation on the illusory benefits of expansionary austerity, suggests that he liked torturing small animals as a child.”
So… how long will it take for my invitation to speak at the next Aspen Ideas Festival to arrive? And when is it, exactly? I don’t want it to conflict with my writing schedule (I’m almost finished with Bismarck Versus The Wogs, my 500-page volume on the Crimean War’s contribution to the decline of rightful European supremacy) because then I might have to cancel my engagements at Davos.
Villago Delenda Est
@Marcelo:
He is of course aware that the Peace Prize is pretty much independent of the rest of the Nobels.
Also, too, his failure to cite Kissinger’s win is damning of his bias in the matter.
Dave
Says the guy who thought the Iraq war would be a raging success and never backed off it.
gene108
@Maude:
He’s betraying his class*…why would the 1%’ers tolerate a traitor?
*Nobel prize money, book money, and whatever a prof at Princeton makes would put him in the bottom rung of the 1% pretty easily.
NorthLeft12
I recall this nearly exact same argument being made with respect to the Vietnam War and the studies, reports, and protests about it.
Shorter Olli: If you believe it will work, it will work.
Villago Delenda Est
@NorthLeft12:
Clap harder, or Tinkerbell will die!
crosspalms
If Ferguson doesn’t like being called on his bullshit, maybe he should stop serving it up.
Lizzy L
Shorter Paul Krugman: Bite me.
Except he would never be so impolite.
Villago Delenda Est
@patroclus:
In other words, if it’s static, he’s not so bad. If it’s dynamic, he’s a putz.
Does that sum it up?
Nemo_N
And yet Andrew Sullivan complains Krugman’s tone is the problem.
PeakVT
@Nemo_N: I always love it when a purveyor of lies lectures others on “tone”.
Andrew “Fifth Column” Sullivan can go die in a fire.
pseudonymous in nc
I’m only surprised that Fergie didn’t send out one of his students to insult Paul Krugman.
After all, they do all the research for his books these days.
jibeaux
@Marcelo: Of course, the Nobel Peace Prize has exactly zero to do with Nobel academic prizes. They aren’t given by the same group of people, not even the same country.
ericblair
@Villago Delenda Est:
Authoritarian thinking: usually they like to call it Will, but I’ve heard enough of it from the left and the right authoritarians. You can want shit so hard you give yourself an aneurysm, but unless you actually figure out a way to do it you’re just wasting your time.
Chris
This really does personify the entire mindset.
I mean forget whether Ferguson is right and Krugman is wrong. The man openly admits “I don’t care if he’s wrong, because being uncivil is MUCH worse than being wrong.”
Given that admission of what Ferguson’s priorities are, you’ll forgive me if I place somewhat more faith in the guy who believes the opposite. We don’t hire economists, or really anyone, to be nice.
bemused
@Marcelo:
How do Republicans answer the question of how Krugman and other savvy economists knew we were going to have a financial meltdown years before it happened? MSM ridiculed them and instead fell over themselves booking giddy bubble promoters right up until it all fell apart. My spouse and I were thinking of selling our small business in about 2005. A little later we noticed what Krugman and the others were saying and that really spurred us to move up our plans. We sold the business in early 2007. We were afraid it was going to be a troubled economy but we didn’t know it was going to be as bad as it turned out later. We were pretty happy we were paying attention.
mdblanche
@Marcelo: Nobel Prize in Economics? Never heard of it. There is a Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, so maybe you were thinking of that.
I’ve always taken that me-too piggybacking as an admission that economics can not stand on its own as a respected field of study and no economist has ever been worth memorializing.
Jack the Second
@Dave:
The Iraq war was a raging success. It made lots of military and paramilitary contractors rich and killed a bunch of people on the other side of the world while only generating quite minimal controversy in the States.
Jesus, what more do you want?
danimal
@PeakVT: Anytime I hear a conservative complain about a liberal’s “tone”, I know who’s won the argument. It’s an almost foolproof marker.
Onihanzo
Cries of ‘you’re being so mean to me’ have reliably been the foxhole of bullshit merchants who trade in perspectives devoid substance or facts. Especially the ones being paid to shovel their shit.
It’s their go-to refuge when they’ve run out of legitimate ammo, because it moves the goalposts adequately enough to keep their reputation intact.
“Your facts are errant and here’s the data that shows why.”
“What’d you just say about my wife//family//dog, motherfucker?”
Trollhattan
This is the same Ferguson whose “solution” to the LIBOR fraud scandal was a call for a “raised eyebrow” from the appropriate authority. Genius. He’s a tool with an accent, I guess that makes him a spanner, not a wrench.
Darkrose
Sadly, while Ferguson is, in fact, a prize asshole, he hasn’t realized it yet. He’s about the only one.
Joey Maloney
Is that the asshole prize, or the asshole memorial prize?
Bruce s
Niall Ferguson is the pinnacle of the “what stupid people think smart people sound like” line. This attack on Krugman is actually more half-assed, ad hominem and hare-brained than “Morning Joe’s.”
dance around in your bones
Why does Niall Ferguson’s complaint remind of some convoluted court dance in a bodice-ripper novel?
“Kthug didn’t do the steps right! Off with his head!”
ETA: I’m always struggling to keep up with threads here, stealing time from kid wrangling duty. Tardy!
arguingwithsignposts
This really needs the Paul Krugman is tired of trying to reason with you people demotivational image.
Patricia Kayden
Isn’t it hilarious when Rightwingers denounce liberals for insulting their opponents instead of addressing the substance of opposing positions? The hypocrisy is priceless.
Nutella
Ferguson came to Chicago to speak at the Humanities Festival one year during the Bush II administration. His topic, delivered in patronizing tones from the academic heights to us peons in the audience, was that ignorant liberals who were then complaining about Bush cranking up the federal deficit were just pathetically ignorant of economics and he was there to explain it to us.
Those pathetic, deluded liberals just didn’t understand the intricacies of national economic policy so couldn’t properly appreciate the economic genius of the Bush administration in vastly increasing the debt: The benefits of higher deficits were so obvious to sophisticated scholars like Ferguson and far-thinking politicians like Bush.
Unfortunately there’s no video. It would be fun to rub his nose in that now.