Horwitz on Krugman: "BUT HE DID IT FIIIIIIIRRRSSSTTT!!!!!!"

Horwitz responds to his critics (me being one - I commented on this thread):

"To those who think I'm being unfair to Krugman:

When has Krugman EVER extended ANY principle of charitable interpretation to the ideas of Austrians or anyone who fundamentally disagrees with him? I'm all in favor of arguing in good faith and playing fair, but that is not an inexhaustible resources. When others have demonstrated that they consistently refuse to play fair, I will have no hesitation about responding in kind.

I'm just engaging Krugman by the rules he has demonstrated he plays by, and I refuse to apologize for it."

1. Are you serious? So are we to conclude Horwitz is saying "yes, I knowingly misinterpreted Krugman and said he's a warmonger because he did it first - and I don't hesitate about fighting distortion with distortion". I hope he's not saying that, but it sounds like he's saying that.

2. Which isn't to say there aren't major problems with Krugman on the Austrian school. There are. I cover them on here when they come up usually. And, as with most things I comment on, I have an "on the one hand/on the other hand" perspective. Krugman does get things right about the Austrian school. Not much, but some. My view is that most of what he gets wrong is out of ignorance and not deliberate distortion. Still not good, but now Horwitz is fighting an educational opportunity with a distortion (and a distortion on a completely different topic, I might add!).

3. Even where Krugman does get the Austrians wrong, he gets a lot of Austrians right. Maybe we need to bracket these guys off and call them "crude Austrians", I don't know. A lot of them would contest the label - that's the problem. With "crude Keynesians" it's really easy. If you confuse accounting identities like Y=C+I+G with behavioral laws you really don't understand what's going on. It's super-easy to call out a crude Keynesian when you see one. I'm not sure there's a comparable easy way to identify the crude Austrians (any suggestions?). There are Austrians that completely ignore things like secondary deflation - although good Austrians don't ignore this. There are Austrians that don't believe that an increase in money demand can be depressionary - although the good Austrians don't ignore this. There are Austrians that believe the Austrian school is an overinvestment theory, there are Austrians that believe that it is just a malinvestment theory, and there are Austrians that believe that the malinvestments imply an overinvestment but they're still best characterized as malinvestments. Engaging the Austrian school is a bit like whack-a-mole, and the lack of really formal models and ideas makes it that much harder.

*****

Long story short, Krugman is a brew of brilliance, partisanship, and an eagerness to lodge a comment. Most of what he says about the Austrian school is said out of ignorance, but (1.) he really doesn't talk about it all that much (and when he talks about New Monetarists for some reason the Austrians think he's talking about them!), and (2.) he never says anything nearly as inflammatory as Horwitz's claim that Krugman thinks war is morally acceptable and desirable. What is the worst that Krugman has said about the Austrians? That they think an extended period of depression and liquidation is necessary? Well Hayek himself used the word "slow" to describe the readjustment process, and I hear the word "liquidation" all the time from Austrians. So I'm not exactly sure what the issue is - Krugman's attitude? - and I don't know why it merits the kind of response it got from Horwitz.

Here's more sampling:

From commenter "Bastiat" on The Freeman: "But I doubt he reads anymore, he clearly sustains his intellectual rigor with his own delusional drivel"

From commenter Troy Camplin: "I keep telling people Krugman is, let us say, unethical (I have a stronger term for it), but nobody has seemed to have been listening."

From commenter Tibor Machan: "The only point of writing about Krugman is to illustrate just how intellectually corrupt some prominent academics and pundits can become and how immune they are to serious rebuke for their ill advise ideas and proposals."

From commenter Phil Lewis: "Paul Krugman is about as intelligent as my beagle … and, she’s quite dumb. How this man achieved any level of credibility and a job at Princeton is beyond me. Every time I hear Krugman speak, or read his drivel, I’m baffled. Completely detached from reality … delusional idiot."

From commenter Chuck Baird: "Krugman’s Nobel prize was clearly undeserved. It, along with Obama’s Nobel prize, was based on politics, not accomplishment."

Ned Netterville at least qualifies it with a tasteful dose of agape: "I love Paul Krugman. Jesus suggested we love our enemies. Krugman is a child of God, and an enemy of rational economics. As an economist, he is an amoral dingbat."

This is ignorant and childish.