Benjamin Wallace-Wells profiles Paul Krugman:
I brought up the work of the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, now with the Obama administration, who has studied the radicalizing effects of ideological isolation—the idea, born from studies of three-judge panels, that if you are not in regular conversation with people who differ from you, you can become far more extreme. It is a very Obama idea, and I asked Krugman if he ever worried that he might succumb to that tendency. “It could happen,” he says. “But I work a lot from data; that’s enough of an anchor. I have a good sense when a claim has gone too far.” This is the claim of a supreme self-confidence. To say “I am anchored in the data” is really to say “I understand exactly what the data mean.” But it is also the logical extension of a particular view of human nature, one equipped with such a clear view of the way society should be arranged that it can’t comprehend the greed, weakness, and compromise that forestall it. There is society, beautifully. And then there are people.
Yglesias hones in on the differing opinions of Larry Summers and Krugman:
I’ve come to think this reflects the difference between people who write about policy (people like me!) and people who do policy. Practical policymakers seem averse to the idea that first you try to decide what the right diagnosis is, and then you try to implement the solution implied by your diagnosis. The disposition to act that way cuts against the dispositions you need to be a successful coalition-builder, and a successful coalition-builder is what you need to be to ever become a high-level policymaker.
Andrew Leonard finds Obama recently acknowledging Krugman’s side of things, but insists:
Obama’s tragedy may be that he is by nature a conciliator and a compromiser in an era that brooks no accommodation. But true disillusionment would require confidence that a different leader could have achieved much more. I think the opposite is more likely true — a different leader could have dug us into an even deeper hole.
I agree. I also believe that the ability of Obama to resist the hysteria on the current right with calm empiricism and a refusal to take the red-blue bait may be the sine qua non of national reform and recovery. But these things take time. If he survives to defeat the GOP in 2012, a lot could happen.
(Photo: By Paul J Richards AFP/Getty.)
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