Pundit Boxscore for Thursday 25 March 2004

Following is the fourth of a special five part series discussing the work of New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. One part will be posted on each day of this week.

BUT WHAT ABOUT SUBSTANCE AND ACCURACY? Paul Krugman is not an ordinary political pundit. He began writing about politics only after building an academic career in economics, winning the "prestigious John Bates Clark Medal, given biannually by the American Economic Association to the economist under 40 who has made the most important contributions to economics". That was in 1992, before he became more widely known through his writing in Slate and elsewhere. The value of having an award-winning economist writing in The New York Times about economic issues with substance and understanding was shown during the California energy crisis, as described by Nicholas Confessore in a 2001 Washington Monthly article:

For Krugman devotees, however, the main appeal is his proclivity for writing things before it is okay to write them. Journalists may love to break news, but they hate to contradict the narratives that crystallize around particular politicians or policies. Late last winter, for instance, the established storyline on California's energy crisis was that Left Coasters had only themselves to blame: the state had passed a flawed deregulation law, which led its utilities to rely on the spot energy market when prices were high. This neutral explanation came from the supposedly competent and disinterested Federal Energy Regulatory Committee, so reporters favored it. And while the press gave plenty of column inches to the Bush administration's preferred spin--that environmentalists had stymied the construction of needed generation capacity--few reporters gave credence to groups like Public Citizen, who blamed the crisis on market manipulation by energy companies, many of them based in Texas and enjoying close ties to the administration. But Krugman, noting that economists had long worried about the vulnerability of California's trading system to price-fixing, argued that market manipulation was the obvious culprit; otherwise, he wrote in March 2001, the power company executives "are either saints or very bad businessmen." Krugman was ignored at the time. Twenty months later--following the collapse of Enron, three federal investigations into the California crisis, and a passel of indictments against energy company officials--Krugman has been proved right.

Over the past two years, the only other Lying in Ponds pundits who have written columns as one-sided as Paul Krugman are Ann Coulter, Robert Scheer and Molly Ivins. But the other three columnists share something which Mr. Krugman does not -- they have built up such a dismal record of "manipulative political rhetoric" and "deception and irrationality" that there is a section devoted to each of them on the invaluable Spinsanity Topics page. Although Spinsanity has occasionally criticized him, Paul Krugman's writing has never descended to the absurd levels of "emotional, subrational jargon" of Ann Coulter or the "lies, spin, and jargon" practiced by Robert Scheer.

That relatively favorable assessment of Paul Krugman is certainly not shared by Donald Luskin and the so-called Krugman Truth Squad:

How does Paul Krugman do it? I have to admit he has a beguiling rhetorical style and he writes with supreme self-confidence. But more important is his limitless willingness to prevaricate, exaggerate, character assassinate, use innuendo, and scare-monger -- whatever it takes to make his case.

Mr. Luskin and his colleagues ruthlessly dissect almost every column, subjecting Mr. Krugman to what must be an unprecedented level of scrutiny. Although Lying in Ponds believes that Mr. Luskin sometimes goes too far, it strongly supports his campaign for a better columnist correction policy at the Times, a cause creatively pursued by Robert Cox at The National Debate, and perhaps also supported by David Corn in The Nation.

All columnists make errors, and most exaggerate and make bad predictions from time to time. Brad DeLong writes that Paul Krugman is "usually right (80% of the time?); he's sometimes wrong." Nicholas Confessore discusses a couple of "major errors", but concludes that "his record is nearly perfect" on "the topics he writes about most often and most angrily". Howard Kurtz and The Economist also note some missteps. Some of Mr. Krugman's predictions have been very questionable: (1) in 2002 he predicted "that in the years ahead Enron, not Sept. 11, will come to be seen as the greater turning point in U.S. society"; (2) in 2002 he predicted that a "drag on the economy" would result from a tax form gotcha: "Finally, there's line 47. You haven't heard about that, but you will"; (3) in 2002 he predicted that Trent Lott would continue as Senate Majority Leader after a "slap on the wrist" over his remarks on Strom Thurmond's 1948 presidential campaign. A common thread runs through these errors and poor predictions -- hostility toward Republicans.

Does Paul Krugman err more often than other columnists? Well, opinions vary. The Lying in Ponds view is that Mr. Krugman's gifts as an economics writer are squandered when he spends his column-space on Trent Lott and French elections. It may be theoretically possible to be both highly partisan and scrupulously factual, but in political as in all wars, truth must be the first casualty.

Tomorrow: Part 5: Conclusion