Bloggasm

I sent an email to conservative Power Line blogger John Hinderaker last night asking for comment on a 2005 post he made criticizing economist Paul Krugman. I have yet to receive a response. Here is the email:

Hey John,

I’m working on a blog post juxtaposing this piece written by you in 2005:

http://powerlineblog.com/archives/011291.php

With this post written by one of your co bloggers today:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/10/021766.php

I was hoping to get a comment from you about the two posts. Would you say, given current events in the market, that your criticisms were wrong about Krugman’s column? Do you plan to write a follow-up post that addresses your 2005 blog post? Do you feel that the fact that you criticized those who predicted a coming financial crisis affects your credibility on your current coverage of the crisis, particularly in blog posts like this one:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives2/2008/10/021764.php

Thanks, and I look forward to hearing your thoughts,
Simon Owens

If you don’t feel like following all those links, here’s what John wrote in 2005:

It must be depressing to be Paul Krugman. No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman’s bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds. With the economy now booming, what can Krugman possibly have to complain about? In today’s column, titled That Hissing Sound, Krugman says there is a housing bubble, and it’s about to burst…

There are, of course, obvious differences between houses and stocks. Most people own only one house at a time, and transaction costs make it impractical to buy and sell houses the way you buy and sell stocks. Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn’t buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman’s article on the subject, you’ll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices.

Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism.

And then yesterday, Power Line had the nerve to publish this:

Paul Krugman has won the Nobel Prize in economics. In the 1980s and early 1990s, I read plenty of what Krugman had to say about economics. It struck me as first-rate. In fact, Krugman’s reputation as an exceptional economist is what caused me to read him in the first place. I’m in no position to judge whether Krugman’s work from that era merits a Nobel Prize, but I suspect it makes him a colorable choice.

Eventually, Krugman veered off into left-wing commentary (I’ve always wondered whether it was President Clinton’s decision not to make him head of the Council of Economic Advisers that pushed Krugman in these directions — punditry and hyper-leftism; he wrote somewhat bitterly about that snub at the time). The economic analysis Krugman serves up in his New York Times columns is often an embarrassment. Obviously, op-eds are not the best format for sophisticated analysis, but there is no excuse for Krugman’s persistent fudging of data and inability to distinguish economc fact from partisan desire that Donald Luskin and others have chronicled over the years.

Unfortunately, it may well be the case that Krugman won his award due at least in part to his left-wing, anti-Bush commentary. Every year, we have occasion to note the leftist bias of the Nobel awards. The prizes seem to have become, in part, a method of rewarding Bush’s harshest critics, Al Gore and Jimmy Carter for example. If there’s a chemist out there who has written an anti-Bush op-ed, there may well be a Nobel Prize in his or her future.

The Nobel Prize is just another example of an institution whose veneration once crossed ideological lines, but that the left has long since captured. Other such institutions include the NAACP, the New York Times, Amnesty International, and (though it was never really venerated) the American Bar Association. The left’s “long march” through these institutions has deprived them of their credibility and their status as honest brokers.

In the case of the Nobel Prize, the money must be welcome. But as honors go, a Nobel Prize in anything relating to public policy is not much more meaningful than praise from the Daily Kos.

As I mentioned before, conservatives attack journalists, PhD academics and scientists as having a liberal bias. Now add Nobel prize winners to the list. When are they going to put 2 and 2 together that perhaps the reason that these immensely intelligent and talented people prefer liberalism is simply because reality favors liberalism.