Does he remember what he wrote yesterday?
Update from a dissenting reader:
In his August 15 posting “The Good Web”, Krugman states, “we are living in a golden age of economic discourse”, and he lauds “the amount of good stuff — stuff delivered in real time, on blogs open to anyone who wants to read rather than in the pages of economics journals with a few thousand readers.” Krugman’s sole point is availability: good economic discourse is available online and free “to anyone who wants to read” it. Krugman did not say that the public had absorbed the good economic discourse, that politicians based their public statements on it or that watchdogs like the quality press and PoliFact called politicians to account for making false and misleading statements on fiscal and economic issues. All Krugman said is that good economic discourse is more widely available than ever. Period.
Krugman’s August 16 “Moment of Truthiness” column cites a Google Consumer Survey on the question “How do you think that the federal government’s yearly budget deficit has changed since January 2010?” In an August 13 posting Krugman cited a CBO graph showing that the annual federal deficit has dropped from 9% to 4% of GDP so the correct answer is “decreased a lot” but only 11.8% of people chose that answer. The wildly wrong answer “increased a lot” was given by 39.5% and the nearly-as-bad answers “increased a little” (12.3%) and “stayed about the same” (24.7%). This means that three-quarters of the American electorate is operating under a gross misapprehension about the direction that the federal deficit is moving.
Krugman goes on in his August 16 column to state that average voters “are not going to sit down with CBO reports” – making the distinction between good economic discourse being available online and it being actually absorbed by the public – and that “they rely on what they hear from authority figures . . . much of what they hear is misleading or outright false.” Krugman points out that Eric Cantor said on Fox News on August 4, 2013 that the U.S. has a “growing deficit” and that “PoliFact rated this flatly false statement ‘half true.’” A link on Krugman’s August 13 post to a CBO report shows that the federal deficit fell from over $1 trillion to $642 billion between FY 2012 and FY 2013 so to call the deficit “growing” is indisputably incorrect.
I recognized that “Krugman’s Own Moment of Truthiness” links to and relies on an Xpostfactoid post. But the title you gave your posting and your brief comment, “Does he remember what he wrote yesterday?” convey a confidence that Krugman has contradicted himself that borders on scorn. Yet your confidence was misplaced. Krugman had not contradicted himself in the least. There is no contradiction between:
(i) good economic discourse being more widely available than ever because of the internet; and
(ii) three-quarters of the American electorate holding a grossly erroneous understanding about the direction in which the federal deficit is moving, politicians making flatly false statements about the deficit and watchdogs like PoliFact rating the falsehoods half-true. Technology makes good economic discourse available even though the standard of behaviour among politicians and watchdogs is very low.
I hope you re-read Krugman’s August 15 posting and his August 16 column and then give some fair-minded second thought to whether you ought to have accused Krugman of “truthiness.”
Krugman’s August 16 column did contain a small error. It referred to Cantor as the third-ranking, not second-ranking, House Republican but by this morning the New York Times had posted a correction at the bottom of the column. Those are the standards that prevail in the best sections of the old-style media. You inhabit the best section of the new media. If you come to agree that Paul Krugman did not exhibit any truthiness August 15-16 I hope you will hold yourself to the standards which the Times applies to itself.
The Dish 