Re: RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] Oh, that's OK then. I'll stop my carping and let PK continue his tireless task of speaking truth to power. Carl I know you're being ironic, but I'll reply in a non-ironic way: PK doesn't speak truth to power except within the usual political context of what's good for capital Seems to be bit of cognitive dissonance here. Reading Krugman's NY Times column today, I am given to understand that this whole flap over his Enron connections is really a right-wing attempt to defame Krugman because he is such a fire-breathing lefty, e.g.: ... reading those attacks [on me concerning Enron], you would think that I was a major-league white-collar criminal. It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick. [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/opinion/25KRUG.html] So, far from being a self-serving opportunist, Krugman is actually the left's last best hope. Carl _ Join the worlds largest e-mail service with MSN Hotmail. http://www.hotmail.com
Re: say it ain't so, Paul
On Fri, 25 Jan 2002, Carl Remick wrote: Seems to be bit of cognitive dissonance here. Reading Krugman's NY Times column today, I am given to understand that this whole flap over his Enron connections is really a right-wing attempt to defame Krugman because he is such a fire-breathing lefty Krugman would never say he's a lefty, and of course it isn't true. Rather he'd say he's a liberal. With a big ass rep and a column in the Times. And that that's enough to make conservatives hate him. That plus the fact that he keeps calling the Republicans charlatans and liars. It's plausible. Remember, people don't have to be far apart on the spectrum to hate each other with warmth. The narcissism of small differences often makes the opposite the case. There's no one the people from Alsace feel more distinct from than the people from Lorraine. And when they hear that outsiders refer to the place as Alsace-Lorraine they are so absolutely flabbergasted that they don't believe you. Sometimes I think Democrats and Republicans are the same way. Michael __ Michael PollakNew York [EMAIL PROTECTED]
re: say it ain't so, Paul
Carl writes: Oh, that's OK then. I'll stop my carping and let PK continue his tireless task of speaking truth to power. I said: I know you're being ironic, but I'll reply in a non-ironic way: PK doesn't speak truth to power except within the usual political context of what's good for capital he now says: Seems to be bit of cognitive dissonance here. Reading Krugman's NY Times column today, I am given to understand that this whole flap over his Enron connections is really a right-wing attempt to defame Krugman because he is such a fire-breathing lefty, e.g.: ... reading those attacks [on me concerning Enron], you would think that I was a major-league white-collar criminal. It's tempting to take this vendetta as a personal compliment: Some people are so worried about the effect of my writing that they will try anything to get me off this page. But actually it was part of a broader effort by conservatives to sling Enron muck toward their left, hoping that some of it would stick. [http://www.nytimes.com/2002/01/25/opinion/25KRUG.html] So, far from being a self-serving opportunist, Krugman is actually the left's last best hope. by the degraded standards of Washington, D.C., politics PK is a leftist or left of [a very right-wing] center. After getting rid of true left voices in public life -- e.g., making it normal to treat Chomsky as a paraiah -- the right-wingers would want to get rid of even the ersatz left. Of course, this kind of war against the left is what left much of the world outside the U.S. with only Osama bin Laden and his dreadful ilk as the opposition to the power of neoliberal globalizing capitalism. Jim Devine
Re: re: say it ain't so, Paul
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] Carl writes: So, far from being a self-serving opportunist, Krugman is actually the left's last best hope. by the degraded standards of Washington, D.C., politics PK is a leftist or left of [a very right-wing] center. After getting rid of true left voices in public life -- e.g., making it normal to treat Chomsky as a paraiah -- the right-wingers would want to get rid of even the ersatz left. Of course, this kind of war against the left is what left much of the world outside the U.S. with only Osama bin Laden and his dreadful ilk as the opposition to the power of neoliberal globalizing capitalism. Thanks. Pass me the Prozac, please. Carl _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: re: say it ain't so, Paul
by the degraded standards of Washington, D.C., politics PK is a leftist or left of [a very right-wing] center. After getting rid of true left voices in public life -- e.g., making it normal to treat Chomsky as a paraiah -- the right-wingers would want to get rid of even the ersatz left. In fairness, the Krugman of the Enron board was somewhat younger than the Krugman of today, and he has become noticeably more left-wing since a) moving to the NYT and b) getting involved in the Social Security debate. I personally think that the epiphany arrived when he finally realised that constantly rewriting ideas that other people had already had was never going to win him the Nobel Prize. And I read on my screen that former Enron vice-chairman Cliff Baxter has committed suicide dd ___ Email Disclaimer This communication is for the attention of the named recipient only and should not be passed on to any other person. Information relating to any company or security, is for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security. The information on which this communication is based has been obtained from sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice. All e-mail messages, and associated attachments, are subject to interception and monitoring for lawful business purposes. ___
Re: RE: re: say it ain't so, Paul
I don't think that PK has moved to the left. He seems to have a very narrow range of acceptable politics/economics. Anyone to the left or to the right is fair game. He can write well and is clever, so when he lashes out at the right, he can be pleasant to behold, but he often relies on rhetoric rather than political economy when making his case. On Fri, Jan 25, 2002 at 05:07:01PM -, Davies, Daniel wrote: by the degraded standards of Washington, D.C., politics PK is a leftist or left of [a very right-wing] center. After getting rid of true left voices in public life -- e.g., making it normal to treat Chomsky as a paraiah -- the right-wingers would want to get rid of even the ersatz left. In fairness, the Krugman of the Enron board was somewhat younger than the Krugman of today, and he has become noticeably more left-wing since a) moving to the NYT and b) getting involved in the Social Security debate. I personally think that the epiphany arrived when he finally realised that constantly rewriting ideas that other people had already had was never going to win him the Nobel Prize. And I read on my screen that former Enron vice-chairman Cliff Baxter has committed suicide dd ___ Email Disclaimer This communication is for the attention of the named recipient only and should not be passed on to any other person. Information relating to any company or security, is for information purposes only and should not be interpreted as a solicitation or offer to buy or sell any security. The information on which this communication is based has been obtained from sources we believe to be reliable, but we do not guarantee its accuracy or completeness. All expressions of opinion are subject to change without notice. All e-mail messages, and associated attachments, are subject to interception and monitoring for lawful business purposes. ___ -- Michael Perelman Economics Department California State University Chico, CA 95929 Tel. 530-898-5321 E-Mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Re: RE: re: say it ain't so, Paul
I don't think that PK has moved to the left. He seems to have a very narrow range of acceptable politics/economics. Anyone to the left or to the right is fair game. He can write well and is clever, so when he lashes out at the right, he can be pleasant to behold, but he often relies on rhetoric rather than political economy when making his case. it's not that PK has moved to the left as much as that the center has moved to the right (the selecton of Pres. Dubya, etc.) Of course, this indicates that the left/right metaphor doesn't hold up very well. JDevine
Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul
Did PK _return_ the $50K or did he just pocket it and then criticize? Alan At 1/24/2002, you wrote: On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Carl Remick wrote: Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. How do you define personal venality? PK got $50K for a do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater intellectual respectability. Yeah, but to be fair, it was Krugman who publicized the money, unprompted, a year ago, back when Enron was still riding high -- and when he started writing a long series of columns excoriating Enron and its influence over the Bush administration and the way it was screwing California. I thought he was a pretty strong critical voice on both issues, and almost alone among establishment economists. So if venal means allowing the money to hush or soften your opinions, he wasn't venal. I think rather Enron has a beef against him for being disloyal :o) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
RE: Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul
Alan asks:Did PK _return_ the $50K or did he just pocket it and then criticize? Jim Devine: I doubt it, since he gets a lot of payments from corporations (as indicated by the letter below, in today's Los Angeles TIMES) and he seems to see them as payments for specific services rendered: [to the editors of the L.A. TIMES, 1/24/02:] Your Jan. 19 editorial (Enron's Far-Reaching Web) conveyed the impression that (a) I was in some sense on the take from Enron and (b) I hid that involvement. Both impressions are totally false. In 1999 I briefly served on Enron's advisory board. I ended that connection when I agreed to write for the New York Times in the fall of 1999. I also disclosed that past relationship the very first time I mentioned Enron, in a column sharply criticizing the company's role in California's energy crisis, in January 2001. Enron paid members of its advisory board $50,000 for attendance and presentations at two meetings (one of mine was canceled at the last minute), each spanning two business days. This payment, as a daily rate, was if anything somewhat less than I was regularly receiving for presentations to other companies: At the time, as an expert on international financial crises, I was in high demand as a speaker. Your editorial quotes my remark that the board had no function I was aware of. This was self-deprecating humor: I later wondered whether the board was of much direct value to the company. However, I devoted as much time and effort to my presentations as I would have for any other corporate event. Given how scrupulously I have followed the strict conflict-of-interest rules at the New York Times, and how tough I have been on Enron this past year, I am astonished that the Los Angeles Times would imply that I had any ethical lapses. Paul Krugman Columnist, New York Times -Original Message- From: Alan Cibils To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 1/24/02 6:00 AM Subject: [PEN-L:21834] Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul Did PK _return_ the $50K or did he just pocket it and then criticize? Alan At 1/24/2002, you wrote: On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Carl Remick wrote: Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. How do you define personal venality? PK got $50K for a do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater intellectual respectability. Yeah, but to be fair, it was Krugman who publicized the money, unprompted, a year ago, back when Enron was still riding high -- and when he started writing a long series of columns excoriating Enron and its influence over the Bush administration and the way it was screwing California. I thought he was a pretty strong critical voice on both issues, and almost alone among establishment economists. So if venal means allowing the money to hush or soften your opinions, he wasn't venal. I think rather Enron has a beef against him for being disloyal :o) _ Do You Yahoo!? Get your free @yahoo.com address at http://mail.yahoo.com
Re: RE: Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] Alan asks:Did PK _return_ the $50K or did he just pocket it and then criticize? Jim Devine: I doubt it, since he gets a lot of payments from corporations (as indicated by the letter below, in today's Los Angeles TIMES) and he seems to see them as payments for specific services rendered: [to the editors of the L.A. TIMES, 1/24/02:]... Enron paid members of its advisory board $50,000 for attendance and presentations at two meetings (one of mine was canceled at the last minute), each spanning two business days. This payment, as a daily rate [!], was if anything somewhat less [!!] than I was regularly receiving [!!!] for presentations to other companies: At the time, as an expert on international financial crises, I was in high demand as a speaker. Oh, that's OK then. I'll stop my carping and let PK continue his tireless task of speaking truth to power. Carl _ Chat with friends online, try MSN Messenger: http://messenger.msn.com
RE: Re: RE: Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul
Oh, that's OK then. I'll stop my carping and let PK continue his tireless task of speaking truth to power. Carl I know you're being ironic, but I'll reply in a non-ironic way: PK doesn't speak truth to power except within the usual political context of what's good for capital (the real world of power that's idealized by economists like PK as a market system perceived as good -- with some technocratic fiddling -- for the public interest as long as special interests like labor unions don't have excessive influence). What's really venial among academic economists is the winner-take-all system in which super-star economists (who are selected by similarly-minded neoclassical ideologues) run the top graduate programs, get abundant research grants, attain high-paying positions, publish in prestigious journals, etc., which allow them to in turn pull in cash from corporations as consultants, to publish in establishmentarian outlets like the NY TIMES, and to choose the next group of super-stars, while deciding which departments are top, who gets grants, who gets promoted, which journals are prestigious and who gets published in them, etc. In this context, PK is what C. Wright Mills termed a new entrepreneur (in his WHITE COLLAR), a person who prospers by jumping back and forth between academic, business, and government bureaucracies (like Henry the K). Jim Devine
Re: say it ain't so, Paul!
Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. Instead, it seems to me that orthodox economists such as PK got swept up in (and in turn helped create) the intellectual bubble that also included Arthur Andersen and the auditing industry, the Wall Street financial advisors, the economic forecasters, the stock-market speculators, etc. You have to go back to 1999 or even early 2000, when economic triumphalism was rampant (in tandem with foreign-policy triumphalism, after our victory over Serbia, killing a large bunch of civilians in the name of human rights). Neo-liberalism (or what PK calls free-market liberalism) was victorious, despite the East Asian and Russian disasters (and the energy emergency in California). Previous economists had only studied the world -- but the point was to change it! the point is to force the world into the Procrustean Bed of the Walras-Arrow-Debreu Model: if the world was so rife with imperfections that the WAD Model wouldn't fit, fit the world to the Model! De-regulate industry, even those with high fixed costs and economies of scale. Create artificial markets (such as for permits to pollute, or for energy). Allow capital, even short-term electronic herd money, to move freely between countries. If things go wrong, it's because the Model wasn't obeyed _enough_! If things go wrong, the Maestro Alan Greenspan or other Benevolent Technocrats that run central banks will set things right, steering the unemployment rate to its natural level. Who cares about all the increase in inequality that resulted? after all, the neo-liberal policy revolution was _clearly_ raising productivity and efficiency (at least as measured by such things as real GDP which leave out non-market costs and benefits). That meant that we could hypothetically compensate the losers (though that somehow never seemed to happen). Free-market liberals hoped that the tax/transfer system could be used to even out the distribution without sacrificing efficiency. The textbooks tell us that lump-sum transfers are efficient, so let's do it! Our technocratic expertise can be used to do it right. Of course, the shift of economic power that went along with de-regulation (etc.) also meant a shift in political power, by giving a wad of bucks to the companies that most profited from the new era, such as Enron. The big money already had the US Republicans, so it bought the US Democrats, eventually producing the Clinton presidency. (The Democrats were _never_ anti-business, but they had a residual tinge of being pro-Labor, pro-minority, urban, feminist, environmentalist, etc. That had to be stomped out while leaving those constituencies no choice but to vote for the lesser of two evils.) Similar moves can be seen in places like New Zealand and England, where Labour Parties instituted neo-liberal policies (following the triumphs of Thatcher and Reagan). This trend also prevented the free-market liberal dream of lump-sum transfers from ever achieving fruition. Sinking the unions and their allies (and other non-business forces) in the name of perfect markets also meant the pulling away of the countervailing power that would allow marginally left-of-center free-market types to live up to their liberal self-image. Of course, the financial power of Enron and many other companies (along with the IMF and the World Bank and the US government) could be -- and was -- employed to pump up the intellectual bubble that swept the world. It's not really a matter of the De-Regulation Triumphalists buying off people who had contrary points of view. After all, were Larry Lindsay (Dubya's economic Rasputin) or Alan Greenspan ever even mildly left of center? They didn't need to be bought off. Rather, it's a matter of encouraging those who already agree with the Party Line. Intellectual life has a certain Darwinian aspect, so big money helps some competitors survive or even prosper -- if they toe the Line. This, along with the success of market-oriented measures such as real GDP, encourages an intellectual consensus. Then it's a matter of consensus ruling: no-one wants to say the emperor has no clothes because it doesn't pay and it doesn't fit with the official world-view. This is especially true of economic forecasters, but it also infects the auditors, financial advisors, economic pundits, speculators, etc. It hurts your status to be a Cassandra like Wynne Godley. In the stock market, it's possible to profit by being a bear, by selling short (though as Keynes pointed out, you need to know _when_ to leap, but that's never clear). But in establishmentarian intellectual life -- outside of marginal outlets -- it's very hard to prosper this way. I think that we're now seeing the slow leak of hot air out of the intellectual bubble, though the support that Dubya has received after 911 will keep it going for awhile. Jim Devine [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://bellarmine.lmu.edu/~jdevine
Re: Re: say it ain't so, Paul!
From: Devine, James [EMAIL PROTECTED] Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. How do you define personal venality? PK got $50K for a do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater intellectual respectability. As someone who has had $0 in earnings since being laid off last April, I think Nobel-laureate-in-waiting PK's sweetheart deal with this pack of felons stinks. Carl _ Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com/intl.asp.
re: say it ain't so, Paul
I wrote: Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. Carl writes: How do you define personal venality? PK got $50K for a do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater intellectual respectability. As someone who has had $0 in earnings since being laid off last April, I think Nobel-laureate-in-waiting PK's sweetheart deal with this pack of felons stinks. My point is that the system is corrupt. Since the vast majority of people in the US seem to accept this corruption, lambasting someone like PK for going along with the system seems futile at best. I think it's more useful to point to the structural corruption. Also, like with Lawrence Lindsay, PK probably believed pretty much what the same before he got the $$ from Enron as he did afterwards. It was a mutually beneficial transaction, right? He seems perfectly willing to criticize both Enron and Dubya nowadays. BTW, I don't think he's going to get a Nobel. His new international trade stuff isn't seen as that important to the orthodoxy. (Please correct me if I'm wrong.) If it is important, it opens the way to heresy... His pundrity doesn't help him win the big N. JD
Re: say it ain't so, Paul
On Wed, 23 Jan 2002, Carl Remick wrote: Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the sense of personal venality. How do you define personal venality? PK got $50K for a do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater intellectual respectability. Yeah, but to be fair, it was Krugman who publicized the money, unprompted, a year ago, back when Enron was still riding high -- and when he started writing a long series of columns excoriating Enron and its influence over the Bush administration and the way it was screwing California. I thought he was a pretty strong critical voice on both issues, and almost alone among establishment economists. So if venal means allowing the money to hush or soften your opinions, he wasn't venal. I think rather Enron has a beef against him for being disloyal :o) As someone who has had $0 in earnings since being laid off last April, I think Nobel-laureate-in-waiting PK's sweetheart deal with this pack of felons stinks. I can certainly sympathize with the feeling that the Matthew principle is grossly unfair. Still, I don't think there are many people who would turn down a legal 50 grand to do nothing. Would you? People like that are saints, not economists. If economists acted like that it would contradict everything they hold to be true about human motivation. Michael __ Michael PollakNew York [EMAIL PROTECTED]
