I've been an admirer of Niall Ferguson, the
economics-historian, since his first book, 30-odd
years ago, on the Rothschilds. However, since he
turned to someone more akin to an
economics-best-seller with a spate of pot-boilers
in recent years, I've been less sure about what
is motivating him. His more recent pitching
against Paul Krugman, however, confirms that
Ferguson has lost the objectivity he used to
have. His willful chopping up of facts and dates,
well and truly nailed by Sullivan and others,
puts him beyond the pale as far as I'm concerned.
This doesn't make me any more partial to
Krugman's Keynesianism, however. Demand-side
economics might well have worked in the 1930s
when there were several big ticket items (e.g.
accessible mortgages, cars, TVs) on the
supply-side waiting to be bought by the masses if
only the dollar were not kept too high by
Roosevelt. Today, with nothing new by way of
iconic consumer goods on the supply-side, any
amount of money-printing to enhance the
demand-side can't get the economy moving again.
Even Bernanke is now telling Obama and Congress
that successive bouts of QE are having less
effect each time, and that it's up to politicians
now to carry our supply-side reforms.
Keith
At 00:25 22/08/2012, REH wrote:
Ah yes, Niall Ferguson again. The West and the
Rest, Edmund Burke etc. Ferguson is to
history as a Nascar mechanic is to NASA. We
live in different worlds but I've lived here
longer and know more about it than he does.
I'm really tired of people moving into my space
and then claiming they know more about it than I
do. It began with the visiting anthropologist
who hired somebody from the local bar to be an
informant, spent a few weeks looking around and went home to write a book.
One guy named Henry Rowe Schoolcraft married one
of our women but when he found that he couldn't
learn the Ojibwa language he got religion in the
local revival, divorced his "heathen" wife and
went home to NYCity to start the Museum of
Natural History and become the national "Indian
Expert." His teacher, Louis Cass oversaw the
death march of my ancestors, to Oklahoma and
invented the term Hunter/Gatherer.
Ferguson is just another Englishman who couldn't
see straight. Thank God I had Dame Eva Turner
to show me that they aren't all like that and
that going home was much better than making a
mess here. She changed the face of English
opera and was beloved here. I don't know
where they get the people like Ferguson.
REH
PS. Interesting post Viggo
Krugman, Others Slam Newsweek's Ferguson
Newsweeks eyebrow-raising cover story on
President Barack Obama, headlined Hit the Road,
Barack: Why We Need a New President," is coming
under fire from writers questioning conclusions reached and facts presented.
Author and historian Niall Ferguson has been
savaged in postings by Nobel Prize-winning
economist and New York Times columnist Paul
Krugman, in a lengthy fact check by the Atlantic
magazine, Andrew Sullivan and writers from
Slate, Salon, and Mother Jones among others.
Krugman wrote in a blog post that there are
multiple errors and misrepresentations in the
Newsweek cover story and cited the line that the
CBO and the Joint Committee on Taxation now
estimate that the presidents healthcare law
will have a net cost of close to $1.2 trillion over the 2012-22 period.
Readers are no doubt meant to interpret this as
saying that CBO found that the Act will increase
the deficit. But anyone who actually read, or
even skimmed, the CBO report knows that it found
that the ACA would reduce, not increase, the
deficit because the insurance subsidies were fully paid for, Krugman wrote.
The Atlantic magazine did a lengthy fact check
of Fergusons piece and wrote that rather than
make a straightforward case against the current
administration, Ferguson delves into a fantasy
world of incorrect and tendentious facts. He
simply gets things wrong, again and again and again.
The article then examines a dozen of the more
factually challenged sections of Ferguson's
piece. The sections deal with such things as
private sector job creation, household income,
the numbers of citizens paying taxes and the stimulus.
In the world as Ferguson describes it, Obama is
a big-spending, weak-kneed liberal who can't get
the economy turned around. Think Jimmy Carter on
steroids, the fact check concludes. But the
world is not as Ferguson describes it. A
fact-checked version of the world Ferguson
describes reveals a completely different
narrative a muddy picture of the past four
years, where Obama has sometimes cast himself as
a stimulator, a deficit hawk, a health care
liberal and conservative reformer all at once.
And it's a world where the economy is getting better, albeit slowly.
It would have been worthwhile for Ferguson to
explain why Obama doesn't deserve re-election in
the real world we actually live in. Instead, we
got an exercise in Ferguson's specialty counterfactual history.
Fergusons lengthy rebuttal, posted on The Daily
Beast, characterized the criticisms of his
article as a storm of nit-picking and vilification by "liberal bloggers."
My critics have three things in common, he
wrote. First, they wholly fail to respond to
the central arguments of the piece. Second, they
claim to be engaged in fact checking, whereas
in nearly all cases they are merely offering
alternative (often silly or skewed)
interpretations of the facts. Third, they adopt
a tone of outrage that would be appropriate only
if I had argued that, say, womens bodies can
somehow prevent pregnancies in case of legitimate rape.
He concluded, Has the American public sphere so
degenerated that it is now impossible to make
the case for a change of president without being
set upon in cyberspace by a suspiciously
well-organized gang of the current incumbents
most ideologically committed supporters?
© 2012 Newsmax. All rights reserved.
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Keith Hudson, Saltford, England http://allisstatus.wordpress.com
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