http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/17/black-cats/
August 17, 2009, 8:48 pm
Black cats
I really had no intention of writing more about Niall Ferguson. Regular
readers may recall that he wrote an article in the Financial Times that
began,
President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the
best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He
was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th
president of the US …
I asked, are there no editors?
But Professor Ferguson demands that I (and James Fallows) print his
response:
As you both took exception to my comparison of the President with
Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and
recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done
so. He has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of
African-American Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the
W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me
as follows:
“None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of the
racially-questionable caricatures Disney used. Felix’s blackness, like
Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. …
You are safe on this one.”
What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone
I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish
it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the
question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American.
The mind reels.
For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.
I think he’s a poseur.
I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it
comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the
basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the
impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.
And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.
---
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/economics/article6806419.ece
August 23, 2009
Professor Paul Krugman at war with Niall Ferguson over inflation
America’s top liberal pundit is at loggerheads with a British don over
how to save the world economy
One of them is a “poseur”. The other is “patronising”. One suffers from
“verbal diarrhoea”. The other is a “whiner”.
A bust-up on the set of High School Musical 4 perhaps? A scrap behind
the catwalk at a Milan fashion show? No. Those accusations were slung
round in an increasingly bitter public row between two of the world’s
most distinguished commentators on global finance and economics,
professors Paul Krugman and Niall Ferguson, of Princeton and Harvard,
respectively.
It started as an argument about bond prices. But last week it blew up
into a row about racism, printing money, spending our way out of
recession, and the fate of the global economy.
Academic spats can, of course, be famously catty. Ludwig Wittgenstein
once tossed a poker at his fellow philosopher Karl Popper at a meeting
of the Cambridge Moral Science Club as they argued about whether issues
in philosophy were real or just linguistic puzzles. At least Krugman and
Ferguson haven’t come to blows yet, although at their next meeting it
might be better to hide the blunt instruments. Still, it is a long time
since the academic world witnessed a dispute as gladiatorial as this one.
Henry Kissinger, who knows a bit about fights, both political and
intellectual, once observed that the reason academic tussles were so
vicious was “because the stakes are so small”. And although that is true
in one sense — it doesn’t matter very much whether the professor from
Princeton doesn’t like his rival from Harvard — it is wrong in another.
The stakes in this row are pretty high.
The argument is about whether the huge stimulus programmes launched by
governments around the world, and the way central banks are furiously
printing money, are lifting the global economy out of recession. Or
whether they are just teeing up the next crisis — hyper-inflation and an
even worse economic collapse.
In a week in which it emerged that Mervyn King, governor of the Bank of
England, wanted to print even more money, this is far more than an
academic debate. It is about where long-term interest rates are going,
and so whether mortgages will be affordable next year. It is about
whether the glimmers of recovery seen now are about to be crushed by
government spending.
“The deficits are stimulating the economy right now, but once the
recovery starts they may choke it off,” said Stuart Thomson, a bond fund
manager who controls assets of $100 billion at Ignis Asset Management.
“That is what they are really arguing about.”
In short, it is about whether we are fixing the problems or whether we
are just papering over the cracks, and so just storing up more trouble a
few years down the road.
NO INTELLECTUAL cuts quite such a swagger in American public debate as
Paul Krugman. Born in New York and educated at Yale and the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he rose quickly through the ranks
to become professor of economics at Princeton, just about the summit of
the academic mountain.
Unusually for a scholar, Krugman pulls no punches. He avoids the dry,
technical discourses of most economists, and engages passionately in
public debate. In academia, he specialises in the detail of trade
theory, work for which last year he was awarded the Nobel prize, a
trophy that cemented his reputation as one of the leading economists of
his generation.
But it is his column in The New York Times that has catapulted him into
the stratosphere. Avowedly liberal, it ripped into the Bush regime and
the excesses of Wall Street with a passion and a commitment that are
rare in the usually stultifying neutral world of American journalism.
Washington Monthly called him “the most important political columnist in
America”, and few would dispute that judgment.
It was Krugman who said Gordon Brown’s bank rescue had “saved the
world”, so creating the warm glow of approval that our beleaguered prime
minister basked in for a few weeks.
In Ferguson, however, Krugman has met his match. The men are, in many
ways, mirror images of one another: lippy, self-publicising academics,
with a taste for the public stage and an ear for the big theory.
Ferguson, a Glaswegian, was educated at Oxford before embarking on a
career as a historian for which the word stellar isn’t quite good enough.
From his history chair at Oxford, he decamped to America, eventually
adding a chair at Harvard Business School to his portfolio. Along the
way he has written best-selling books on the history of finance and
empire, and presented documentaries on television.
Married to the former Sunday Express editor Susan Douglas, he plays the
media skilfully, turning himself into that modern creation, a “public
thinker”. Indeed, he is very much the right-wing Krugman: a man with a
solid academic background, who still engages furiously in the big public
issues of the day.
THE FIGHT began at the unlikely setting of the Metropolitan Museum of
Modern Art on April 30, at a symposium on the recession organised by the
New York Review of Books. The panel was certainly impressive. Alongside
Ferguson and Krugman were George Soros, the hedge-fund manager, and the
former senator Bill Bradley.
Krugman, an ultra-Keynesian, argued for stimulus spending. Ferguson put
the case for fiscal conservatism, warning of a “rapid explosion of
federal debt”. At some point, the “financial credibility of the United
States will be called into question”, he said.
A few days later, Krugman returned to the argument in a withering
put-down on his blog, describing Ferguson’s views as “really sad” and
“depressing” and belonging to “the dark ages of economics”.
Ferguson shot back in a piece in the Financial Times. “It is a brave or
foolhardy man who picks a fight with Mr Krugman,” he wrote. “Yet a cat
may look at a king, and sometimes a historian can challenge an
economist.” Krugman was “patronising” he said, before offering him a
“refresher course” in the historical context of Keynes’s work.
You can’t offer to lecture Krugman on Keynes, however, without expecting
the return punch to be a big one. Earlier this month, Ferguson wrote
another piece for the FT, comparing Barack Obama to Felix the Cat:
“Felix was not only black,” he wrote. “He was always very, very lucky.”
Krugman saw the opportunity to deploy the nuclear weapon of American
academic arguments — an accusation of racism. “I cannot fathom the state
of mind that led Ferguson to think this was a good way to introduce a
column,” he blogged furiously. “Admittedly, it doesn’t really distract
from his larger point, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t have one.”
As it was succinctly put in the posters for Jaws: The Revenge, this time
it was personal. Over on the influential Huffington Post blog, Ferguson
defended the intro, rather amusingly pointing out that Felix was just a
black cat, “not an African-American cat”. Krugman shot back on his blog:
“He’s a whiner too.”
Undaunted, Ferguson enlisted the opinion of Henry Louis Gates Jr, one of
America’s leading African-American scholars, who handed down the verdict
that referring to Felix as black wasn’t racist, on the grounds that he
really did have black fur, and, anyway, it wasn’t clear that cats had race.
None of which was going to appease Krugman. On his blog on August 17, he
put the boot straight into the British academic. “For the record, I
don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist. I think he’s a poseur.
I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it
comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the
basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the
impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance. And
this time he ended up choking on his own snark.”
This weekend Ferguson said: “I am saddened by Krugman’s resort to ad
hominem attacks, couched in the language of the playground. I presume it
is because he knows, but bitterly resents, that I won the argument we
had back in April about the future path of long-term interest rates.”
He is disappointed by Krugman’s insistence on playing the man rather
than the ball. “He certainly seems much more ready these days to
speculate about the cultural significance of Felix the Cat than to
discuss the issue I once again raised in my FT piece — namely the
potential dangers of the spiralling US fiscal deficit,” said Ferguson.
“It is all very sad and an illustration of the dangers of blogging,
which encourages verbal diarrhoea.”
Krugman didn’t respond to a request for an interview for this article.
But it is unlikely the battle will end there — keep an eye on his blog
tomorrow morning.
IS there anything to this argument, other than a couple of intellectual
egos that have got out of control? Plenty, as it happens.
Leave aside the personalities — these are both men who could happily
start a fight in an empty room — and there is a substantive issue at stake.
“What they are really arguing about is whether we should exit quickly
from the policy that has been taken up,” said Stephen Lewis, a veteran
City economist with Monument Securities. “Even Krugman would agree that
you cannot carry on building up public debt forever. Ferguson’s point is
that we should be looking for the exit right now.”
In that, he is far from alone. Warren Buffett, the world’s richest man,
was warning last week of the dangers of what he called, with his skill
for a pithy phrase, “greenback emissions” — the vast accumulation of
public debt that risks turning America into a “banana republic”.
The debate could not be more relevant in Britain. The Conservative
leader David Cameron has already warned that Gordon Brown’s plans to
double the UK’s national debt has created a risk of default, with
crippling consequences.
The reality is that governments are racking up debt on an unprecedented
scale. “We have never been in a position like this before, not even
during the great depression of the 1930s,” said Lewis.
Maybe that’s why people are looking for guidance from historians as much
as economists. Because while the economists blithely assure the public
that the policies are the right ones, you don’t need to be a Harvard
history professor to know the past tells us that the prescriptions of
experts often go badly wrong, no matter how confidently the medicine is
administered. And when that happens, everyone ends up paying a high price.
Men of many words
Paul Krugman does not disguise his aggressive approach to public life.
The Princeton professor’s personal website carries this warning for
readers: “With any luck, you will find many of these pieces extremely
annoying. My belief is that if a column does not greatly upset a
substantial number of people, the author has wasted the space.”
It is a dictum he has followed closely, even if to his cost. It is
thought that he missed out on a senior role in the Clinton
administration by giving too direct an answer about whether the
president could balance the budget and afford healthcare reform. It was
a resounding “no”.
“You have to be very good at people skills, biting your tongue when
people say silly things,” Krugman said later.
He did serve on the White House Council of Economic Advisers during the
Reagan administration. He has had more than 20 books published, and his
hero is the British economist John Maynard Keynes.
The collapse of the American banking system allowed Krugman to say that
advocates of laissez-faire capitalism had got it wrong. “We’re all
socialists now,” he said, calling for the government to “seize the
commanding heights of the economy”.
Niall Ferguson has taken a similarly rugged approach to academia and
public life, never afraid of a contrary approach. This runs through many
of his general works — he argued that the British Empire was not a bad
thing and that a de facto American-led empire could do even more good works.
The same approach runs through his economic histories. In his best known
book, The Ascent of Money, he examined how good banking and financial
systems eclipsed poor ones.
Unlike Krugman, he has been sceptical about the effectiveness of
government programmes to fix the economic crisis. “My worry is that we
end up with an over-reaction,” he said. “All this zeal for regulation
actually grows out of a very faulty analysis. If deregulation were such
a big problem, why was it that the most regulated entities, banks,
caused the biggest trouble?”
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