OMG: Krugman vs. Jon Stewart

My two favorite opinionators are fighting. It's like being a child of divorce!

First Krugman suggested the idea - and to my surprise the first time he mentioned it was all the way back in July 2011:

Well, there do appear to be legal loopholes. Jack Balkin gives us the platinum coin option:

Sovereign governments such as the United States can print new money. However, there’s a statutory limit to the amount of paper currency that can be in circulation at any one time.
Ironically, there’s no similar limit on the amount of coinage. A little-known statute gives the secretary of the Treasury the authority to issue platinum coins in any denomination. So some commentators have suggested that the Treasury create two $1 trillion coins, deposit them in its account in the Federal Reserve and write checks on the proceeds.

... These things sound ridiculous — but so is the behavior of Congressional Republicans. So why not fight back using legal tricks?

Wow. But he also brought it up more recently, and the meme spread. So last Thursday, Jon Stewart addressed the idea:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
The Trillion-Dollar Coin
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

And then Krugman struck back:

...Above all, however, what went wrong here is a lack of professionalism on the part of Stewart and his staff. Yes, it’s a comedy show — but the jokes are supposed to be (and usually are) knowing jokes, which are funny and powerful precisely because the Daily Show people have done their homework and understand the real issues better than the alleged leaders spouting nonsense. In this case, however, it’s obvious that nobody at TDS spent even a few minutes researching the topic. It was just yuk-yuk-yuk they’re talking about a trillion-dollar con hahaha.
Hey, if we want this kind of intellectual laziness, we can just tune in to Fox. 

Update: Some people are asking why I don’t go on TDS to explain. Um, first I have to be invited — which hasn’t happened since, I think, 2005.

But it wasn't only Krugman. New York Magazine weighed in:

He’s totally missing the point here. The platinum coin is obviously a ridiculous-sounding idea that is natural fodder for The Daily Show. There are lots of ways to do it. You could try to educate the audience about why people are advocating this ridiculous-sounding idea. Or you could do bits about how the coin is a terrible idea.
But the issue is the premise. Pretending that the plan is to mint a coin and pay off the national debt is just flat out false. The premise is the true part of the story, before the punch line. And when the premise is wrong, you’re just cheating.

Now the Daily Show segment was shown last Thursday, and over the weekend the Treasury Department nixed the idea anyway. So I thought Jon Stewart would drop it - but the first segment of the Monday Daily Show was this:

The Daily Show with Jon Stewart	Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c
Paul Krugman & the Trillion Dollar Coin
www.thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Political Humor & Satire Blog The Daily Show on Facebook

So on Tuesday afternoon, Krugman struck back again:

Still lazy. Also, can dish it out, but can’t take it. Sad.

Although I love TDS and Jon Stewart, I have to side with Krugman on this.

The ironic thing is that Krugman already said he thinks it's a silly idea. But Krugman's point is that in spite of the ridiculousness it's a valid action to take because Congressional Republicans are behaving in a ridiculous manner. And what disappoints Krugman (and me) is that we have a high opinion of the Daily Show because it so often DOES go beyond the shallow yucks to find the important point through intelligent analysis. And the bit could have actually been much funnier - not to mention more educational - if TDS had gone that step further to examine why the most important economist of this generation is advocating the idea. Krugman is not just screwing around and he's certainly not being stupid. TDS missed an opportunity here.

The Daily Show needs to invite Krugman on. According to Krugman he hasn't been on the show since 2005. Do we really need some actor pushing some crappy movie on TDS when we could have KRUGMAN?

Krgthulu!

Cthulhu

It's so funny - blogger Duncan Black, AKA Atrios of Eschaton fame (which has been on my blog roll since I first started blogging) occasionally refers to Paul Krugman as "Krgthulu." I haven't been able to find out if he's ever given a reason for it. The earliest incident seems to be from December 2008.

He may only have done it occasionally, but it's enough so that if you Google "Krgthulu" the second hit that comes up is Krugman's own blog.

Usually I call him the Mighty Krug-Man, but I might start calling him Krgthulu too. It's pretty much the same thing - Krugman's awesome might. That's my guess for why Black uses the term - out of affection. Chthulu is:

... one of the central Great Old Ones of the Lovecraft Mythos. It is often cited for the extreme descriptions given of its hideous appearance, its gargantuan size, and the abject terror that it evokes. Cthulhu is often referred to in science fiction and fantasy circles as a tongue-in-cheek shorthand for extreme horror or evil.

Krugman is a big sci-fi fan (he was inspired to become an economist via Asimov's Foundation trilogy) and I bet he gets a kick out of the name.

The Left doesn't always agree with Krugman, but he gained so much respect from so many left-liberal bloggers because all throughout Bush's ascension to power and the early days of the Iraq war, Krugman was one of the very few pundits who would not slack off criticisms for the sake of "patriotism."

And to the Powers that Be, Krugman really is a powerful nemesis because:

a. Krugman is a self-professed liberal and

b. important enough that what he says is actually listened to by the people in power, who usually ignore liberals.

In fact, I think Krugman's influence has become so great that he has begun to influence the market, big time. He's been criticizing the "bond vigilantes" for months now and as reported (via Krugman's blog) by economist Stan Collender: "Bond Vigilantes are Now Deficit Cheerleaders.

It’s clear that the bond market is now giving at least as strong a signal about its desired fiscal policy as it did in the early 1990s. But instead of demanding reductions in the deficit and government borrowing and threatening higher interest rates if those don’t happen, today’s vigilantes are unmistakably saying just the opposite. They want Washington to do more to stimulate the economy, and they welcome the deficit and debt it will take to do it.

I don't have evidence, just a hunch, but I think that Krugman has become that influential. It's amazing that he's still not a household word. Krugman is kind of like the Velvet Underground of economists - "only about a thousand people bought The Velvet Underground & Nico, and all of them started a band." (TV Tropes attributes this to Brian Eno.)

Oh libertarians. You're always wrong.

My FB friend Corey Robin got another shout-out from the Mighty Krug-Man the other day:

Actually, nothing — because those alleged principles were never real. Conservative religiosity, conservative faith in markets, were never about living a godly life or letting the invisible hand promote entrepreneurship. Instead, it was all as Corey Robin describes it: Conservatism is

a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace.

It’s really about who’s boss, and making sure that the man in charge stays boss. Trump is admired for putting women and workers in their place, and it doesn’t matter if he covets his neighbor’s wife or demands trade wars.

Krugman referenced that Robin piece before as I talked about here. It's a very good piece.

The funny thing about Krugman giving a nod to Robin is that every time it happens a bunch of Robin's Facebook friends say something like "Congratulations Corey for the mention, and BTW, Krugman is a running dog of capitalism and a big poopy-head."

Many of Robin's friends consider themselves Marxists or anarchists or some other such useless leftist posturing. So it's especially amusing that Krugman was criticized by a libertarian for being an extremist leftist and a big poopy-head. Someone named Kevin Vallier at "Bleeding Heart Libertarianism" writes:

Krugman’s opponents aren’t just wrong: they oppose fundamental moral and political values (equality) that any reasonable, decent person should accept. How are Very Serious Progressives like Krugman to share a country such individuals? Krugman’s answer is clear: support state power to crush conservative policies and criticize their intelligence and character. 

It is easy to see the moral vice and animus in the post. Krugman dehumanizes his opponents by refusing to regard even some of them as fundamentally well-motivated and informed. Conservatives are foes and nothing more.

He doesn't even say Krugman was wrong to characterize conservatives that way - apparently to accurately describe conservative views is to "dehumanize" them.

I think this is the key to the whole thing: "Krugman’s opponents aren’t just wrong: they oppose fundamental moral and political values (equality) that any reasonable, decent person should accept."

What really bugs Vallier is the notion that anybody would believe that equality is a value that all reasonable decent people should hold. Krugman has values, and expresses those values, and Vallier finds this unacceptable.

And of course it's deeply ironic that any libertarian would complain about someone dehumanizing opponents - their heroine Ayn Rand specialized in dehumanizing her ideological opponents - anybody who doesn't believe that hasn't read "Atlas Shrugged." I talked about that in 2013:

The most prominent feature of Atlas Shrugged is its extreme binary view of the world - it is the most common criticism of the novel: the good guys are uniformly physically attractive and skillful and smart, the bad guys are uniformly unattractive (even Lillian Rearden who is constantly described as having "dead eyes") and stupid and incompetent and cruel. It is this extreme dichotomy that renders the novel ridiculous to so many people. Atlas Shrugged has been jokingly compared to The Lord of the Rings, except, the punchline goes, that LOTR "involves orcs." But I would argue that Rand so dehumanizes her ideological opponents that in fact Atlas Shrugged and Lord of the Rings both involve orcs.

Liza Featherstone wants to destroy feminism

Liza Featherstone, member of the brocialist ladies auxiliary, who writes for the Nation among others, finally blatanty admitted she wants to destroy feminism. She calls it "neoliberal" feminism (aka "bourgeois feminism") but that's just a bullshit adjective. The kind of feminism that brocialists like her and her husband believe in isn't actually feminism at all because it isn't about women.

Liza Featherstone wants to destroy feminism. Period. That's why you see her doing things like calling the author of a Ms. Magazine article on rape "bitch" because the article dares to suggest that rape is rape no matter what a woman's socioeconomic status is.  This is a typical expression of Featherstone's war on women - instead of acknowledging that rape is both horrible and common for all women, Featherstone seeks to minimize the impact of rape on women who are not in the most extreme circumstances, apparently out of some intense bitter hatred of privileged elites, like Ivy League school students.

And of course the incredible fact is that Featherstone herself and her husband attended Ivy League schools and live elite and privileged lives. How is it possible that these two can make careers out of whining about elites and the privileged without heads exploding - if not their own heads, which are protected by being completely up their own asses - then at least the heads of people around them who are not completely blind to the total un-self-aware hypocrisy?

The screen image above from Featherstone's Facebook page also demonstrates the disdain for accuracy that Henwood and Featherstone share. Krugman doesn't say we haven't paid any attention - he says:

Which is more amazing: the fact that a long-serving Republican speaker of the House sexually abused teenage boys, or how little attention this revelation has received?

It seemed to me too, odd that Hastert's crimes haven't been discussed more in the media. Especially when you consider what a big fucking deal is made out of Bill Clinton's consensual affairs with adults. But then Hastert is a Republican and so doesn't have a big target on his back the way the Clintons do.

But you have to wonder why Featherstone is making such a big deal about Krugman's comment about Hastert. So Krugman thinks not a lot of attention has been paid. Why does she care enough to remark on it?  No doubt because the rest of the column is Krugman discussing Hillary Clinton's plans to "improve both the affordability and quality of U.S. child care" and even Featherstone isn't a big enough hypocrite to bitch about that. She had to find something to attack Krugman for.

But why does she want to attack Krugman, a self-declared liberal, so much? Of course it's because  Krugman does not support Sanders and provided well-reasoned and fact-filled analyses of Sanders policy proposal weaknesses.

And she hates Krugman because he's one of the privileged elites.

Go back to destroying feminism Liza Featherstone. Your efforts there are about as significant as your attacks on Paul Krugman. You and your husband are pathetic enablers of the Right in your bitter hatred of non-extremists on the Left.

Koch brothers employee Aaron M. Renn hates Paul Krugman

I recently mentioned I was excited that I might bump into Krugman while running in Riverside Park thanks to reading his blog post about the park. Well somebody else took note of that post, but not in a good way:

Most Americans believe in capitalism, but know that a lot of its top beneficiaries are not fully exposed to marketplace discipline. Most Americans are painfully aware that life is good for people like Paul Krugman, and they know that he doesn’t much care what’s happening to them. Charles Murray created his “bubble quiz” to illustrate the degree to which much of the upper-middle class has grown detached from the experience of workaday Americans. When PBS invited its readers to take the quiz, the zip code where this detachment was most pronounced was my own: 10023, the Upper West Side. It’s a far cry from where I grew up, in Southern Indiana.

Aaron M. Renn mentions the unequal distribution of wealth in a capitalist system, not something that generally bothers right-wingers. Then he says that the beneficiaries are "not fully exposed to marketplace discipline" and elsewhere in his article he gripes about government bailouts. Libertarians believe that laissez-faire capitalism is the answer to all the world's problems and are generally against government influence on the market, so he must be a Libertarian. Plus I found him whinging about progressives stealing libertarian ideas.

And then he references Charles Murray, a prominent Libertarian who is most famous for co-authoring "The Bell Curve" in 1994, which argues that black people as a group are less intelligent than all other ethnic groups, so we shouldn't spend money on government programs designed to help the poor because they're too stupid to benefit from it. The book was widely criticized. Including by then civil rights lawyer and writer Barack Obama.

NPR
October 28, 1994
SHOW: All Things Considered (NPR 4:30 pm ET)
Charles Murray's Political Expediency Denounced 

BARACK OBAMA, Commentator: Charles Murray is inviting American down a dangerous path. 

NOAH ADAMS, Host: Civil rights lawyer, Barack Obama.

Mr. OBAMA: The idea that inferior genes account for the problems of the poor in general, and blacks in particular, isn't new, of course. Racial supremacists have been using IQ tests to support their theories since the turn of the century. The arguments against such dubious science aren't new either. Scientists have repeatedly told us that genes don't vary much from one race to another, and psychologists have pointed out the role that language and other cultural barriers can play in depressing minority test scores, and no one disputes that children whose mothers smoke crack when they're pregnant are going to have developmental problems. 

Now, it shouldn't take a genius to figure out that with early intervention such problems can be prevented. But Mr. Murray isn't interested in prevention. He's interested in pushing a very particular policy agenda, specifically, the elimination of affirmative action and welfare programs aimed at the poor. With one finger out to the political wind, Mr. Murray has apparently decided that white America is ready for a return to good old-fashioned racism so long as it's artfully packaged and can admit for exceptions like Colin Powell. It's easy to see the basis for Mr. Murray's calculations. After watching their income stagnate or decline over the past decade, the majority of Americans are in an ugly mood and deeply resent any advantages, realor perceived, that minorities may enjoy. 

I happen to think Mr. Murray's wrong, not just in his estimation of black people, but in his estimation of the broader American public. But I do think Mr. Murray's right about the growing distance between the races. The violence and despair of the inner city are real. So's the problem of street crime. The longer we allow these problems to fester, the easier it becomes for white America to see all blacks as menacing and for black America to see all whites as racist. To close that gap, we're going to have to do more than denounce Mr. Murray's book. We're going to have to take concrete and deliberate action. For blacks, that means taking greater responsibility for the state of our own communities. Too many of us use white racism as an excuse for self-defeating behavior. Too many of our young people think education is a white thing and that the values of hard work and discipline andself-respect are somehow outdated. 

That being said, it's time for all of us, and now I'm talking about the larger American community, to acknowledge that we've never even come close to providing equal opportunity to the majority of black children. Real opportunity would mean quality prenatal care for all women and well-funded and innovative public schools for all children. Real opportunity would mean a job at a living wage for everyone who was willing to work, jobs that can return some structure and dignity to people's lives and give inner-city children something more than a basketball rim to shoot for. In the short run, such ladders of opportunity are going to cost more, not less, than either welfare or affirmative action. But, in the long run, our investment should payoff handsomely. That we fail to make this investment is just plain stupid. It's not the result of an intellectual deficit. It's theresult of a moral deficit. 

ADAMS: Barack Obama is a civil rights lawyer and writer. He lives in Chicago.

So what's Aaron M. Renn's deal? Well it turns out that he works for the Manhattan Institute...

...a right-wing 501(c)(3) non-profit think tank founded in 1978 by William J. Casey, who later became President Ronald Reagan's CIA director.[1] It is an associate member of the State Policy Network.

According to the Manhattan Institute, it is "focused on promoting free-market principles" and has a mission to "develop and disseminate new ideas that foster greater economic choice and individual responsibility."[2]

The Manhattan Institute is funded in part by the Koch brothers.

The Manhattan Institute has received funding from the Koch brothers. The Claude R. Lambe Foundation, one of the Koch Family Foundations, reported giving $2,075,000 to the Manhattan Institute between 2001 and 2012, the last year for which data is available. The Charles G. Koch Foundation gave $100,000 to the Institute in 2012.

Take a look at their list of experts - out of 48, only 6 are women and one is a black man. And Renn has the hypocrisy to claim Paul Krugman lives in a bubble.

Infamous racist Steve Sailer sees much in common with the commentary of Renn and his own work.

But going back to Krugman. Is Renn really so stupid that he can't tell the difference between government-bailout beneficiaries and Paul Krugman? Or is deliberate malice behind Renn's using Krugman as an example of someone that the average person should resent? Because Krugman didn't get a government bailout. Krugman should be the kind of person that Libertarians adore - he's risen to prominence through hard work and intelligence like an Ayn Randian ubermensch.

But then Krugman advocates for liberal policies, including higher taxes and government programs. That's why Renn (and Charles Murray and the Koch brothers) want to use Krugman and other urban liberals as the targets for class resentment. It's all about the politics.

Waiting for Krugman

Here is a photo of Krugman vs. Ayn Rand from
the Atlas Society - they hate Krugman, of course
which is one way you know how great
Krugman is. 

Ever since I read Krugman talking about how he runs in Riverside Park I've been hopeful:

If you want to feel good about the state of America, you could do a lot worse than what I did this morning: take a run in Riverside Park. There are people of all ages, and, yes, all races exercising, strolling hand in hand, playing with their dogs, kicking soccer balls and throwing Frisbees. There are a few homeless people, but the overall atmosphere is friendly – New Yorkers tend to be rushed, but they’re not nasty – and, well, nice.

I've walked in Riverside Park on a few occasions but I will be doing it much more often now that I know there's a chance I'll bump into The Mighty Krugman. And yes, I will insist he take a selfie with me. Whoohoo!

Speaking of Ayn Rand and Krugman - yes, I still plan to do something with my play DARK MARKET which focuses on Ayn Rand's influence on Alan Greenspan and how that contributed to the 2008 meltdown of the economy. It's just that with six actors its more expensive than NORMA JEANE which is a two-hander. And not just to produce - since I pay actors to do readings, six actors can add up.

I give Krugman a shout-out in the intro of the play - I quote him from his blog:

After all, what is "Atlas Shrugged" really about? Leave aside the endless speeches and bad sex scenes. What you’re left with is the tale of how a group of plutocrats overthrow a democratically elected government with a campaign of economic sabotage.

Only 5 more days until Krugman Day!

I'm going to see Krugman at the 92nd St. Y on September 22 - Krugman Day is almost here!

Krugman is my birthday twin! (Month-date, not year!)

This guy loves the Mighty Krug-Man even more than me! Although it looks like his web site needs a little updating. But not as much as Krugman's old web site which he apparently hasn't updated since 2000.

Ooh! Krugman & Rachel Maddow - two great tastes that taste great together!

They are the Walrus, goo goo ga joob

It really startles me now, how little the election of Justin Trudeau registered with me. I am a regular reader, as anybody who follows this blog would know (like maybe three people but anyway...) of Paul Krugman and of The New Yorker and both Krugman and the New Yorker wrote about the election win. I must have read both, or at least read the Krugman piece and noted the existence of the New Yorker piece, but I have no recollection of either.

And the New Yorker piece mentions Krugman:

Trudeau is now set to become, among other things, Paul Krugman’s favorite politician, since he promises to follow an economic plan that might have been hatched on the right-hand column of the Times’s Op-Ed page: raise taxes on the rich and unapologetically do some deficit spending in order to rebuild the country’s infrastructure and its middle class.

I would have remembered if I had read that. Being Krugman's favorite politician means quite a bit to me.

Via the New Yorker article I discovered a piece in the Canadian magazine The Walrus, (a magazine I had never read or heard of before) and I was really pleased to see that the author confirmed my own conclusions about the character of Justin Trudeau - and that's pretty significant considering that the author Jonathan Kay collaborated on Trudeau's autobiography "Common Ground." So he probably knows Trudeau better than anybody outside of Justin's family and close friends. Kay writes:

He’s someone who desperately wants to do the right thing. Who believes that what he does and says can set things right; that he can heal people and relationships; that he can make people like him and—a sad fantasy for many children of divorce—one another.

As I blogged a couple of weeks ago:

(I love him) also because he is always trying to do the right thing. He's super-conscious and for the most part carries it off with a fair amount of grace and not too much self-consciousness. And he almost doesn't have to - he's pretty much Canadian royalty, as the son of former Canadian PM Pierre Trudeau. The fact that he tries so hard to do the right thing makes him so admirable.

Kay made his observation in reference to a story Trudeau told about his relationship with his mother (I mentioned a couple of others in a previous blog post.) This story jumped out at me too, for its poignance and its exposure of the character of an endearing adolescent:

I spent more than thirty hours interviewing Trudeau. He told me hundreds of stories, not all of which made their way into the book. But there is one, from his young childhood—during the period after his mother, Margaret, abandoned the family—that stands out clearly.
“Whenever I knew my mother was on her way to visit 24 Sussex, I could barely contain my excitement, and began planning my welcome,” is how Trudeau tells the story in Common Ground:

On one occasion I decided to mark her arrival with a musical theme. I had received a small record player as a gift and enjoyed playing the hits of the day—“the day” being the early 1980s—especially Journey’s romantic ballad “Open Arms.” I had heard my mother say how much she liked the Journey song, and I decided that this would be the soundtrack to her entrance at 24 Sussex after one particularly long absence. I waited for her to arrive in her VW Rabbit before cueing up my tiny, tinny record player in my room upstairs. As she opened the door and entered the foyer I cranked up the volume and rushed to the top of the stairs. “Listen, mom,” I yelled down to her. “It’s our song!” Her reaction was to stare up at me, happy to see me but a little confused because she couldn’t hear the music at all. The volume on my record player was about half the level of a modern cell phone. I remember being crushed by that, so desperate was I to inject a sense of magic into every moment that we did have together as a family.

When Common Ground was published in 2014, and the Trudeau camp chose to disclose my role in preparing it, lots of friends asked me some variation on the question: “What’s he like? ” I would say, “Read the book.” And like clockwork, they would roll their eyes and reply, “No—what’s he really like? ” The underlying assumption is that books of this type are mere propaganda. Depending on the politics of the person asking me the question, there usually was some suggestion that, behind closed doors, Trudeau is either a closet socialist or a corporate shill. That he is a thumb-sucking ignoramus who is spoon-fed his lines by Gerald Butts—or a tactical genius who wears his glibness and childlike enthusiasms as a political mask. That he is a tormented scion who is desperate to rise to his father’s epic legacy—or who bitterly detests the old man’s oversized shadow. Since we have spent the last decade trying to figure out the “secret agenda” of Stephen Harper, it was perhaps inevitable that the country would become convinced that there is some “real” Justin Trudeau lurking below the surface.
You can find the real Justin right there, at the top of those stairs, playing his record player.

That last sentence especially is as perfect, concise a summation of a politician's character as any you're likely to see, right up there with another favorite of mine, the line from the New Yorker's David Remnick about Obama: His practiced calm is beyond reckoning.

Kay also addresses the phenomenon of Trudeau being considered just a pretty dummy - or at least less of an intellectual than his father. I could see that was bullshit even before I read "Common Ground" - and Kay of course spent quite a bit of time with Trudeau during the writing of the book and so is in a position to evaluate Trudeau's mind:

Pretty, yes. Dummy, no.

Trudeau probably reads more than any other politician I know. And yet you wouldn’t know this from the way he talks about ideas: His boyish, eager-to-please personality leads him to project publicly in a way that can seem intellectually unsophisticated. Political oratory always sounds best when it’s relaxed and natural. Trudeau’s hyperactive personality makes that a difficult act for him to pull off.

I admit that I am sometimes guilty of idealizing Canada, in light of the election of Trudeau vs. Trump and for other reasons, but Canada is dragged down by anti-intellectuals the same as in the United States - although perhaps not to the same degree. But I think that Trudeau's coming off as more of a regular guy and less of a brainiac serves him well. His being thought of as not-so-bright makes him much more palatable to the know-nothing slobs of Canada. Obama's and Hillary Clinton's obvious intellectual superiority were resented by many Americans and it worked against them.

Obama only squeaked into office, in my opinion, thanks to the overwhelming support of African Americans and the fact that his first opponent's running mate was Sarah Palin and his second opponent was Mitt Romney, who came off as a rich prig, and made Obama look like a regular guy by comparison. Women didn't support Clinton the way blacks supported Obama, since women suffer more from Stockholm Syndrome. But if Trump had gone up against Obama there's a good chance Obama would have lost. In spite of what Obama claims.

But I digress.

Trudeau should keep doing what he's doing.

I have to say, I was surprised by the reason given for the selection of the name "The Walrus" for this magazine. I immediately assumed it was from "Through the Looking Glass."

But no, it's a Canadian thing.

Krugman's prescience & the value of curating

Paul Krugman... veterinarian.

The Baffler, a magazine written and edited by idiots with a superiority complex has two articles in a recent issue ripped right from the NYTimes' favorite genre "liberals are to blame for Trump" as I mentioned a few days ago.

The more ridiculous of the two was about the dangers of "curating" to wit:

A world without fake news might really be awesome. So might a shop where every bottle of wine is excellent. So might an electoral system in which everyone heeds the urging of the professional consensus. But in any such system, reader, people like you and me can be assured with almost perfect confidence that our voices will be curated out.

Curators are the bad guys eliminating the voices of the prosperous centrists like poor Thomas Frank who publishes books and articles for a living.

Frank is a co-founder of The Baffler and of course deciding what will be selected to be included in each issue of the periodical isn't curating, it's editing, so Frank & company are the good guys. Got that?

But I happened to be reading Krugman's brilliant piece, written over twenty years ago, White Collars Turn Blue - the conceit of the piece is that Krugman is writing from the year 2096, a hundred years from the actual publication date - and it got me to thinking about the Frank piece when Krugman writes:

Most important of all, the long-ago prophets of the information age seemed to have forgotten basic economics. When something becomes abundant, it also becomes cheap. A world awash in information is one in which information has very little market value. In general, when the economy becomes extremely good at doing something, that activity becomes less, rather than more, important.

But actually information does have a big market value, but it depends on what kind, as any insider trading convict can tell you. The world is indeed awash in so much information that filtering is the big problem. That's where editors come in - or, in other words curators.

Curating is basically what I do with NYCPlaywrights - I decide which calls for submissions are included. That's why playwrights come to the site, because not only does it save them the trouble of searching for the information themselves, but I make sure that the opportunities do not charge submission fees. That's a value judgment on my part and no other calls for submissions sites  (there are about four other regular, reliable sources in addition to NYCPlaywrights, by my count) filter those out - they all include submission calls that charge fees just to email or snail-mail your work to somebody.

The Huffington Post includes original work (including the review of my play) but it got its start basically reusing the work of other newspapers as a news aggregator.

So I think it's clear that people who are willing to curate the information tsunami are going to be ever more important to the economy. I just did some calculating and if I had about 50 web sites that earned as much in a year as NYCPlaywrights does I could make blogging my full-time job. It's worth thinking about. The only trick is figuring out what kind of information people need you to curate and whether it's profitable to get it to them. I stumbled upon the money-making aspect of NYCPlaywrights almost accidentally - I started out just trying to share info with members of my group which met up in-person. Then I realized that the international reach of the Internet meant I could make money sharing that information. Although of course we are limited to the anglosphere - until I learn French.

I put about 4 hours a week into running NYCPlaywrights, on average, so if I had 50 sites I'd be working 100 hour weeks, unless I hired help or figured out how to do a site in 2 hours per week in which case I could work a more reasonable 50 hours a week. Hmm... worth thinking about.

Krugman ends his 1996 essay in a way that really hits home for me - he's talking about scientists but it goes double for playwrights:

Luckily, the same technology that has made it possible to capitalize directly on knowledge has also created many more opportunities for celebrity. The 500-channel world is a place of many subcultures, each with its own heroes. Still, the celebrity economy has been hard on people -- especially for those with a scholarly bent. A century ago, it was actually possible to make a living as a more or less pure scholar. Now if you want to devote yourself to scholarship, there are only three choices. Like Charles Darwin, you can be born rich. Like Alfred Wallace, the less-fortunate co-discoverer of evolution, you can make your living doing something else and pursue research as a hobby. Or, like many 19th-century scientists, you can try to cash in on a scholarly reputation by going on the lecture circuit. 

But celebrity, though more common, still does not come easily. That is why writing this article is such an opportunity. I actually don't mind my day job in the veterinary clinic, but I have always wanted to be a full-time economist; an article like this may be just what I need to make my dream come true.

Niall Ferguson's epic meltdown

Right-wing historian and economist-wanna-be Niall Ferguson seems to be having an epic meltdown over being called out by the mighty Krugman. He writes:

For too long, Paul Krugman has exploited his authority as an award-winning economist and his power as a New York Times columnist to heap opprobrium on anyone who ventures to disagree with him. Along the way, he has acquired a claque of like-minded bloggers who play a sinister game of tag with him, endorsing his attacks and adding vitriol of their own. I would like to name and shame in this context Dean Baker, Josh Barro, Brad DeLong, Matthew O'Brien, Noah Smith, Matthew Yglesias and Justin Wolfers. Krugman and his acolytes evidently relish the viciousness of their attacks, priding themselves on the crassness of their language. But I should like to know what qualifies a figure like Matt O'Brien to call anyone a "disingenuous idiot"? What exactly are his credentials? 35,550 tweets? How does he essentially differ from the cranks who, before the Internet, had to vent their spleen by writing letters in green ink?

So Ferguson's critics both exploit their credentials, and also don't have a good enough credentials to be worthy of criticizing Niall Ferguson. Ferguson, it should be noted is saying this on the prestigious Huffington Post.

Krugman disagrees with Ferguson because Ferguson gets things wrong:

My own unpleasantness with Ferguson began when he tried to weigh in on monetary versus fiscal policy without understanding basic macroeconomics. Later, he tried to critique official inflation numbers without knowing enough about that subject to tell the difference between the experts and the cranks. Now he’s demonstrating, rather embarrassingly, that he doesn’t know how to read CBO reports.

Krugman also defends those without sufficiently lofty credentials from sore-headed, entitled jerks like Ferguson:

But academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot — and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.
Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background. 

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it has made it possible for a number of people meeting that second condition to gain an audience. I don’t care whether they’re PhDs, professors, or just some guy with a blog — it’s the work that matters. 

Meanwhile, we didn’t need blogs to know that many great and famous intellectuals are, in fact, fools. Some of them may always have been fools; some of them are hedgehogs, who know a lot about a narrow area but are ignorant elsewhere (and are, in many cases, so ignorant that they don’t know they’re ignorant — a variant on Dunning-Kruger.) And some of them have, for whatever reason, lost it — I can think offhand of several economists, not all of them all that old, of whom it is common to say, “I can’t believe that guy wrote those papers.” 

And let me add that believing that you can pull rank in this wide-open modern age is itself a demonstration of incompetence. Who, exactly, do you think cares? Not the readers, that’s for sure. 

True, it’s now a rough world for people who do sloppy work, and are counting on their credentials to shield them from criticism. Somehow, though, I can’t seem to muster any sympathy.

When I read the last paragraph I immediately think of Sam Harris.

Krugmania

Krugman is always an enjoyable source of enlightenment on the issue of economics and politics, but I was especially interested in brushing up on my Krugman as a way to get me back into re-writing my play DARK MARKET. Now that I've had a good reading of a fairly good draft of my NORMA JEANE play it's time to get ready for the next DARK MARKET reading - the first in almost a year (!)  in a couple of weeks.

So I've been mainlining Krugman speeches.

Krugman himself, via his Twitter account provided a link to his most recent public speaking engagement at conference in Geneva.

Next I was interested to see that I had somehow missed him speaking - again - at the 92nd Street Y. I caught him in person at the Y in 2009 almost exactly seven years ago, back when I lived on the Upper East Side. I was excited to see he was interviewed by Gillian Tett, whom I first heard of thanks to her interview in the movie Inside Job.

Krugman has also been on Bill Maher's show. I don't think I knew that.

With friends like them

Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone, writers for The Nation and Jacobin, and Henwood's blog, are nasty people, as I have demonstrated several times on this blog. Henwood is particularly thin-skinned and apparently decided to retaliate against Katha Pollitt for handing him his ass last month by trying to embarrass her on his blog - I missed it until just recently.

Last time I checked Pollitt considered Henwood her friend - but if a friend of mine went after me like that in public I wouldn't feel too friendly towards them. I just can't compartmentalize my feelings that well. Of course they're also work colleagues at The Nation, so maybe it's just a work friendship.

Bernie Sanders isn't projected to do nearly as well in upcoming state caucuses and primaries as he had been for the past month, and desperation doesn't tend to make nasty people any nicer. Naturally Henwood has to attack Krugman, who, as far as I know doesn't consider Henwood a friend:

The Sanders campaign has certainly sharpened the contradictions, hasn’t it? It’s been very clarifying to see Hillary Clinton and her surrogates running against single-payer and free college, with intellectual cover coming from Paul Krugman and Vox.

Doug Henwood is trying to present Krugman as being against single-payer and free college, because he's dishonest like that. But as Krugman noted:

What I and most of my wonk friends would like to see is what the late Robert Heilbroner used to call Slightly Imaginary Sweden — or these days, maybe Diversified Denmark. That is, a strong social safety net that protects everyone against avoidable misery, workers with substantial bargaining power, strong environmental policy; not an equalized society, not a Utopia, but someplace where basic decency is a fundamental principle. 

But nothing like that is going to happen in America any time soon. If we’re going to have any kind of radical change in the next few years and probably the next couple of decades, it will come from the right, not the left.

As Matt O’Brien rightly said recently, even the incremental changes Hillary Clinton is proposing are very unlikely to get through Congress; the radical changes Bernie Sanders is proposing wouldn’t happen even if Democrats retook the House. O’Brien says that the Democratic primary is “like arguing what’s more real: a magical unicorn or a regular unicorn. In either case, you’re still running on a unicorn platform.” This is, alas, probably true: the platforms of the candidates are better seen as aspirational than as programs at all likely to happen. 

But in that case, why not go for the magical unicorn? A couple of reasons.
One is that there are degrees of realism: a program that could be implemented in part if Democrats retake the House might turn out to be a useful guide relatively soon, while a program that requires a political revolution won’t.

Another is that, perhaps inevitably, the Sanders insistence on the need for magical unicorns has led to invocations of economic as well as political magic. I warned a while back that even Sanders wasn’t willing to level with voters about what his ideals would require — that, in particular, he was assuming unrealistic savings in order to gloss over the reality that quite a few middle-class Americans would be net losers from a transition to single payer. I’m not alone in raising such concerns, and not just about the health plan.

Naturally Doug Henwood refuses to admit the possibility that Krugman is speaking for himself - instead Henwood characterizes him as providing "intellectual cover" for Clinton.

What I can't figure out about Henwood and his wife Featherstone is who exactly they think they are and who they think they're speaking for. They like to use terms like "bourgeois" and "elites" when describing their political enemies. Here's Featherstone:

FEATHERSTONE: Well, faux feminism is a bit of hyperbole, because of course--of course all kinds of revolting ideologies are part of feminism. I can't say only my feminism is the real feminism. I'm kind of kidding about that, a little. But what I do think is that that sort of feminism is not actually serious about improving the vast majority of women's lives, that what Hillary represents--what I mean by faux feminism is that it's elite feminism, so it is only going to serve a few. So you know, elite women who may cheer, you know, the symbolic lifting of the glass ceiling that Hillary represents. But on the other hand what her record represents is, as I say in the piece, a contempt for the kind of social democratic policies that most women need.

Featherstone's kind of feminism is I'm sure the same as her husband's "feminism" - one that isn't about women so much as about peace and egalitarianism. Also Featherstone thinks the bitches at Ms. Magazine are idiots for talking about the universality of rape - apparently Featherstone doesn't think that rape is rape - by her way of thinking you shouldn't compare the rape of elite women to the rape of the non-elite. Elite in this case being women who attend Ivy League colleges.

But I don't see how either of them could be any more elite if they tried. I mean, not only did they both attend Ivy League schools - Featherstone went to Columbia, Henwood went to Yale - they both seem to make a living exclusively from opining in Academia and far-left periodicals - or in Featherstone's case, AM New York, and they can afford to live in a condo in Brooklyn, which, according to Zillow is worth $2 million.

It's amazing how much information you can learn based on real estate and other sites these days: Spokeo will tell you who lives/lived in buildings, whether there is a sex offender in the neighborhood, crime rate etc.; and Homemetry will even tell you what the owner/tenant occupation and education level is, or even their nationality or ethnicity. They aren't always accurate though - an ex-boyfriend of mine is listed as "English" but he's Korean.

According to online records Henwood bought his place three years ago for under a million, so if the property is worth $2M now that's quite an impressive gain. If these records are accurate then I have to admit, for somebody who hates capitalism so much Henwood does pretty well by it. 

David Brooks - still an idiot

David Brooks is a raving ninny. There's virtually nothing that he believes that isn't decisively refuted by Paul Krugman.

Brooks:

Over the past few decades, several European nations, like Germany and the Netherlands, have played by the rules and practiced good governance. They have lived within their means, undertaken painful reforms, enhanced their competitiveness and reinforced good values. Now they are being brutally browbeaten for not wanting to bail out nations like Greece, Italy and Spain, which did not do these things, which instead borrowed huge amounts of money that they are choosing not to repay.

more of the Brooks travesty.

Krugman:

Before the crisis Spain had low and declining debt. Italy had high debt inherited from the past, but it was steadily working that debt down relative to GDP. Neither country was being profligate — that’s just not what happened. Since the crisis debt has been rising relative to GDP, but that’s what happens when you have an economic crisis.

Yes, Greece. But Greece is now a tiny part of this story. As I said in today’s column, Greece (GDP of about $300 billion) is roughly Greater Miami ($270 billion). Italy and Spain are the big stories, and they were not, repeat not, fiscally profligate

more facts from Krugman.

What a party-pooper Krugman is! Ruining David Brooks's morality play with mean old poopy facts!

Krugman defends blogging

Krugman:

...you can, with effort, maintain a blogging style that makes regular readers feel that they’re part of an ongoing conversation yet makes individual posts meaningful to people who aren’t reading everything you write. A blog can be a floor wax and a dessert topping, if you work at it.

Krugman of course is a big part of my "blogging style" in that I mention and quote him at least once a month - although I mention him even more on Facebook, much to my FB friends bemusement. 

But while Krugman has millions of regular readers for his blog, I have about maybe 20. Two of whom read this blog pretty much every day, and about five more who read it on weekdays - so I assume they're reading it from their jobs.

Well maybe one day when I am an internationally-known, Nobel-prize winning economist...

Nancy McClernan vs. the Radical Chic Part 1

When I was growing up I assumed, like most Americans, I was a member of the "middle class".  This wasn't exactly based on incisive socio-economic analysis. Most Americans figure you're either poor - and live in a ghetto or Appalachia  which makes you "lower class" - or rich and own a mansion and yacht like Elmer J. Fudd, millionaire which makes you "upper class" - everybody else is middle class. I wasn't aware of the term "working class" until at least high school, much less proletariat or bourgeoisie.

But my family was definitely working class. My great-great grandfather was a rank and file soldier in the Civil War (Union of course!), who left his family destitute thanks to his alcoholism. My maternal grandfather was a leader of the Philadelphia Teamsters, which is pretty much as working class as you could get - but my grandmother (whose grandfather was the Civil War soldier) made him quit because the socializing he did as part of his job (he hung out with Jimmy Hoffa) made him drink too much for her liking.

My paternal grandfather owned a cafe on the Philadelphia riverfront and then became, I believe, a bus driver but I'm not actually clear on that. My father worked in customer service for several industrial climate control companies, and I guess because it was white collar I didn't think of it as working class. My mother was a secretary. The father of my best friend Laura was an ironworker.

So yeah, my family was working class. And as a college drop-out (my scholarship was only for one year) and single mother I remained working class until an early adoption of desktop publishing led me to technical writing and web development. Now I'm a Vice President in corporate America and have no guilt.

So I have to laugh at people like Liza Featherstone, who said this of Paul Krugman:

When either Katha Pollitt or Paul Krugman are attacked by lesser minds - which is pretty much all other minds - it really pushes my berserk button. And I already despised Featherstone for her attacks on Hillary Clinton and other feminists.

According to Wikipedia, Featherstone:

...graduated from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 2008. Featherstone was a Knight-Bagehot Fellow in Business and Economics Journalism at Columbia for 2007-08[1] and an adjunct professor at the City University of New York. Since 2009, she is an adjunct professor at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute at New York University and, since 2008, an adjunct professor at the Joseph S. Murphy Institute of Labor Studies.

So in other words her entire career has been as an academic and journalist - she comes from exactly the same social class as Krugman. And then there's her husband Doug Henwood who writes Left Business Observer and appears to believe he's qualified to opine on Hillary Clinton's aspirations among other political subjects on the basis of his BA in English from Yale. And then there's Featherstone's and Henwood's employer at the Nation, Katrina vanden Heuvel who is an heiress.

I don't hold it against any of them that they are not working class. I certainly don't feel their opinions should automatically be discounted as Featherstone does to Krugman. And there are plenty of right-wing capitalism-loving assholes among the working class - I doubt that Liza Featherstone has socialized much with people from the working class though, so like radical chic types generally she probably romanticizes them as variations on Bruce Springsteen or something.

It's the self-congratulatory radical-chic hypocrisy of Liza Featherstone that astounds me. Perhaps she believes that because she writes about Labor it makes her an honorary member of the working class.

It's the same radical-chic delusion that has these lefties attacking Sheryl Sandberg for daring to write a book encouraging women to be more assertive in their careers. And of course they admire Liza Featherstone for attacking feminists who are not suitably radical chic.

So who is Verso Books?  I will address that in Part 2. 

Krugman's costume fun!

A couple of days late for Halloween but I couldn't resist posting these costumes from the NYTimes blog of the Mighty Krug-man.

This one is the best. costume. Ever!


My favorite part of this costume is the giant Nobel Prize medallion he wears.

Originally on Business Insider but I found it on Krugman's blog.

This costume is great too - the Confidence Fairy!


You have to be super-wonky to know who the Confidence Fairy is - she is the creation of Krugman to personify the right-wing anti-stimulus crowd's belief that we must lower taxes on business which will in turn give businesses enough confidence to hire and spend us all out of the recession.

Here's an example of how Krugman uses this character: The White House Believes in the Confidence Fairy.

She is often seen in the company of the Bond Vigilantes.

And please note she is holding "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand.

What is it about Ayn Rand and fairies? In my play Christmas Blessing about the Christmas Fairy of New York we discover that (SPOILER ALERT!) Ayn Rand is spending her afterlife as the Christmas Fairy of Minnesota, forced to bestow good cheer and warm holiday feelings on all altruists.

Krugman v. Rumsfeld

Get Krugman! in Slate:

On a day when everyone else was flashing back to 9/11/2001, I was flashing back to the days and months later, when criticism of the Bush administration returned, and the practioners of it became, briefly, Emmanuel Goldsteins. Remember Susan Sontag? Remember the Dixie Chicks? Remember the campaign to "revoke the Oscar" from Michael Moore? There hasn't been much criticism of the substance of Krugman's remarks; denying that 9/11 and counterterrorism strategy became "wedge issues" is denying a few years of political history. The criticism is of Krugman for expressing it...

KRUGMAN MASTERCLASS WHOOHOOOO!

Anybody reading this blog (now in its fourteenth year!) knows how much I admire Paul Krugman.

So of course I absolutely had to sign up for the Krugman Masterclass which was advertised on Youtube videos for Rachel Maddow. It was a little pricey at $90 but I decided to treat myself for my upcoming birthday (I share the date if not the year with Krugman.)

Nancy McClernan vs. the Radical Chic Part 2

Continued from Part 1

Verso Books publishes anti-feminist books like the work of Liza Featherstone disguised as concern for the working class. Verso reposted one of her tweets accusing Hillary Clinton of being a "lean-in feminist."



"Lean In" refers to the Great Satan of the Radical Chic, Sheryl Sandberg who wrote a book by that title encouraging women to be assertive in the workplace. There is nothing that the Radical Chic hates more than a woman who is going for power. As they see it the role of women is to fight the Workers Revolution in order to achieve the end of all hierarchies.

Who is Verso Books?

Well neither the Wiki page nor their web site says much about the people running it. But its CEO appears to be a guy around 33 years old named Jacob Stevens. So he runs a company worth 10-25 million and he's in his early 30s. I haven't been able to verify it yet, but I have a hunch that Stevens is not from the working class.

I'm sure that plenty of women working at Wal-Mart are more interested in what Sheryl Sandberg has to say about advancing their careers than in Liza Featherstone telling them they shouldn't vote for Hillary Clinton because she's a Lean In feminist.

It's Featherstone, Henwood, and Stevens who are the true elites. They are so elite they believe they are making the world better for the working class, when the working class not only doesn't know who they are, and couldn't care less, but if they knew how these people were claiming to help them would probably laugh in their faces.

Featherstone and company despise Paul Krugman because he forces them to get in touch with reality - something which they are generally insulated from - and since they don't have the native intelligence or erudition to actually debate him on the facts, come up with the most hypocritical un-self-aware attack possible - that Krugman's political opinions should be discounted because of his social class.

Or that he's a Hillary crony. Krugman:

And the response of some — only some — Sanders supporters is disappointing, although I guess predictable given that somewhat similar things happened during the 2008 primary. There will, I guess, always be some people who, having made an emotional commitment to a candidate, can’t accept the proposition that someone might share their values but honestly disagree with the candidate’s approach.
Right now I’m getting the kind of correspondence I usually get from Rush Limbaugh listeners, although this time it’s from the left — I’m a crook, I’m a Hillary crony, etc., etc.. OK, been there before — back in 2008 I was even the subject of tales about my son working for the Clintons, which was surprising because I don’t have a son.
But I’m used to this stuff. It’s a bit more shocking to see Mike Konczal — one of our most powerful advocates of financial reform, heroic critic of austerity, and a huge resource for progressives — attacked as one of Hillary’s minions and an ally of the financial industry.

Konczal's attacker is David Dayen who is of course a buddy of Doug Henwood.

Being a powerful advocate of financial reform would not shield Konczal from attacks from the Radical Chic because effective advocacy is not what they care about - radical posturing is what they care about. And incremental, non-revolutionary change doesn't get them excited - Bernie Sanders yelling and promising the unachievable is what gets them excited - Krugman is right to mention the emotional component of Sanders' supporters.

And that's what Radical Chic is all about: the feeling of being a passionate revolutionary. To them feminism is trashing a harmless aspirational business executive because business executives are not cool. Hillary Clinton is not cool. And like Sheryl Sandberg, she focuses on women's aspirations so these Sanders' partisans want to punish Clinton for her lean-in feminism. This is part of a long tradition, as Nicholas Kristof notes about Clinton:

For most of her career, Hillary Clinton suffered for being a feminist. Retaining her last name helped cost her husband the governorship of Arkansas in 1980 (after that, she became a Clinton). She was mocked in 1992 for saying she wouldn’t be “some little woman standing by my man,” and for asserting, “I suppose I could have stayed home and baked cookies and had teas, but what I decided to do was to fulfill my profession.

(Outrage at her “bitchiness” — a standard put-down of a strong woman — was such that Clinton tried to mollify critics by participating in a bake-off sponsored by Family Circle magazine. That must have stung. But hold on: Clinton’s recipe for oatmeal chocolate chip cookies then triumphed over Barbara Bush’s cookie recipe, upholding the honor of career moms everywhere.)
Even when Hillary Clinton ran for president in 2008, there were put-downs, like the two men from a radio show heckling her, “Iron my shirt!

The Nation has endorsed Bernie Sanders. But other than Katha Pollitt I'm generally not impressed by Nation writers. Not only does the Nation publish the Radical Chic leanings of Doug Henwood and Liza Featherstone, it used to publish Christopher Hitchens even after he became a booster of the Bush administration. The only reason it stopped publishing him was because he quit.

And even before he did that, when he was a saint of the left, he was dismissive of women, as Pollitt noted shortly after Hitchens died:

So far, most of the eulogies of Christopher have come from men, and there’s a reason for that. He moved in a masculine world, and for someone who prided himself on his wide-ranging interests, he had virtually no interest in women’s writing or women’s lives or perspectives. I never got the impression from anything he wrote about women that he had bothered to do the most basic kinds of reading and thinking, let alone interviewing or reporting—the sort of workup he would do before writing about, say, G.K. Chesterton, or Scientology or Kurdistan. It all came off the top of his head, or the depths of his id. Women aren’t funny. Women shouldn’t need to/want to/get to have a job. The Dixie Chicks were “fucking fat slags” (not “sluts,” as he misremembered later). And then of course there was his 1989 column in which he attacked legal abortion and his cartoon version of feminism as “possessive individualism.” I don’t suppose I ever really forgave Christopher for that.

"Possessive individualism" is a synonym for leaning in.

I argued with lefty men about their sainted Hitchens shortly after he died, pointing out what a misogynist he was. Wow did that make them mad - and of course they denied that in spite of Pollitt's statement and his infamous Women Aren't Funny piece for Vanity Fair. And anyway, who cares, they said, he was a cool dude - or words to that effect . He had that Radical Chic posture they love even when he was a Bushie. The Radical Chic much prefers form over substance.

I had already had my fill of Radical Chic by the time I was in my early twenties, based on personal experience. Which I will discuss in Part 3.

Krugman and the Atlas Shrugged gang

One of the more amusing aspects of researching Ayn Rand for the play I'm working on is that I can just do a quick search of Paul Krugman's blog archives - he's mentioned Rand on many occasions as you can see here. But one mustn't only do a search on her name because Krugman also mentions characters from Atlas Shrugged. Just the other day he wrote:

Actually, before I get there, a word about self-styled conservative “market monetarists”: guys, have you noticed who your real policy enemies are? People like me, Brad DeLong, etc. are skeptical about the Fed’s ability to offset the effects of fiscal austerity, but we do want it to try. The furious academic opposition to quantitative easing is instead coming from moderate conservative macroeconomists, notably Taylor and Feldstein. So your problem isn’t just that the GOP’s effective leader on economic issues gets his macro from Francisco D’Anconia; it’s that even the not-so-silly wing of the party is dead set against what you consider reform.

Until recently I wouldn't have realized that this was a dig against Rand-worshipping Libertarians because I didn't know enough about Atlas Shrugged to realize that Francisco D'Anconia is the Latin millionaire playboy who had an affair with Rand's Mary Sue figure in the novel, Dagny Taggart.

Krugman also noted Paul Ryan's debt to Francisco D'Anconia.

But yes, I know. I can't keep avoiding it. The only way I can really critique Atlas Shrugged is to finally read the damn thing. And I promise I will read the whole damn thing. Even if it takes me years. Which it might.