Yes, libertarians, Paul Krugman is a better economist than Murray Rothbard.
My comments.
1. I agree with Brennan that Krugman’s scholarly work is more important than Rothbard’s.
2. On matters of economic analysis, I have serious disagreements with both. Krugman on the liquidity trap. Rothbard on banking.
3. I think that a point of similarity is that both Rothbard and Krugman attract devoted fanatical followers who are unable to appraise their hero objectively and instead are sentimentally loyal. I am not sure, but I think that may be what Tyler Cowen means when he uses the phrase “mood affiliation.”
4. I think that at his worst (and he is often at his worst), Krugman reaches intellectual lows in terms of straw-man arguments and asymmetric insight (the claim that you understand your adversary’s motives better than the adversary understands himself) that I suspect are lower than Rothbard’s intellectual lows. Perhaps I am being charitable to Rothbard, because I have almost no first-hand acquaintance with his work.
Krugman explains his approach here.
Politics and policy are overwhelmingly dominated by what I call the Very Serious People — people who insist that deficits are our most pressing problem, that high unemployment must be a matter of inadequate skills, that low marginal tax rates on the rich are essential for growth. Behind the conventional wisdom of the VSPs lies a vast mass of power and prejudice.
Pointer from Tyler Cowen. Read the whole thing. I see this as pretty much standard Krugman. He takes the least charitable view of those who disagree with him, and he makes that the core of his argument. I think that this approach mostly inflicts damage, not so much on his enemies as on his friends. I think it brings down both their cognitive ability and their emotional intelligence.
Let me illustrate my estimation of the question.
Let’s say I thought climate change was important. I could direct my efforts to improving the climate models and make some pretty fancy progress. I actually could, I think.
Or, I could say “well, the real problem is the non-existence of a solution to solar power” and I may or may not have the idea that ended up being the ultimate solution.
Further. How important is Steve Keen? How important is Krugman’s past work if he is now writing papers on debt deflation? Why can’t I get anyone to discuss this?
Have you considered this might be the most charitable view? People often believe what they want to believe and are immune to contrary information, refusing to accept it. ‘I am tired of having to reason with you people’ is blunt and though the intent is not to offend but circumscribe, these are not open nor will be opened. It is an invitation to discuss and a defense of discussion by rejecting meaningless chants.
Surely Rothbard’s intellectual lows of racism, sexism, and homophobia are lower than Krugman’s straw man arguments.
Or are they the same thing? And I don’t mean equivalent.
I’m afraid I don’t understand.
I’m calling your claims strawmen. Krugman doesn’t often resort to calling people racists, but close enough.
I’m politically a libertarian, but Rothbard has a lot of problems. I’ll start with the milder ones first and move on to the outrageous ones.
Rothbard started as a marxist. He might have said “commie” in a half-joking fashion; he seems to have been very jovial in person. He explicitly retained the class struggle analysis. This means that people who disagree with him are classified as statists and are automatically the bad guys. The class struggle analysis really leaves me empty because, besides being factually and philosophically wrong, its outlook boils down to saying that all the problems in the world are due to people not agreeing with me. “People who disagree with him” includes both actual statists and, say, Milton Friedman. I should hasten to add that I think Rothbard was far better about this than, say, Ayn Rand, but it’s a good thing that this aspect of Rothbard wasn’t too influential on the fledgling libertarian movement.
Speaking of Milton Friedman, Rothbard had some huge beef with Milton Friedman. The two basically didn’t interact at all, but Rothbard made a special effort to attack him and blatantly misrepresent his views. Now, Friedman of all people loved civil debate and was quite accustomed to being disagreed with, even in a rude and unfair fashion. Rothbard seems to have been one of the minority of economist Friedman critics who managed to just make Friedman sick of him. It is fair to assume that Rothbard’s special attention to Friedman is actually an attempt to gain share of libertarian followers.
Rothbard’s practical politics were just god-awful. In the 1960s, he was all about the “new left.” The “new left” was mainly not old school institutional socialists, which seems good, but it was dominated by baby boomer hippies who were much more interested in putting on shows than understanding anything about economics, which seems bad. What else seems bad is that Rothbard’s new-left bridge building seemed to consist of offering defenses for anything the soviets (or other communist powers) did foreign policy wise. For instance, Rothbard is probably the only non-communist to ever claim that South Korea was at fault for initiating the Korean war. The rest of his analysis was often literally pro-Soviet. I’m not just talking about standard and totally reasonable criticisms of US interventions, which were sometimes very troubling even to cold warrior libertarians. He had positive defenses – well, evasions really – to explain how practically nothing was ever the Kremlin’s fault.
It gets worse. When Rothbard gave up on the new left – perhaps because the non-frivolous parts of it were actually marxist – he and Lew Rockwell decided they were now “paleolibertarians.” Those of us who aren’t “paleolibertarians” strongly suspect that it was a calculated strategy that was supposed to suck in all the disaffected racists who were left stranded after the civil rights era. If you just go by their writings, paleolibertarianism seems to combine skepticism of government with a totally unnecessary emphasis on blaming social problems on black people. It was Rockwell who wrote the “fleet footed” newsletter article that got Ron Paul in so much trouble. Because Ron Paul is a man of integrity, he did not take the initiative to out his former subordinate by blaming the article on Rockwell. Because Lew Rockwell is NOT a man of integrity, he avoided claiming credit for the article even though he must have known it would practically absolve Ron Paul of accusations of racism.
I’m really glad Rothbard is out of the movement. He was very smart – smarter than me, for sure – and a rather productive researcher. Which is too bad because you often have to be smarter than he is to figure out when his writing on a subject is deeply deceptive. Based on videos and personal accounts, he was nice and jovial in person, so perhaps that counts against the nasty things I said about him above. On the other hand, he may have just been a charming phony.
I respect Krugman more.