The best part is where he blames the financial crisis on government overregulation. Because in a truly laissez-faire world, naturally crucial money center banks would never turn themselves into gigantic casinos because…look it’s Halley’s Comet!

I can’t possibly imagine why anyone would have a problem with the way Greg Mankiw teaches Ec 10.

If anyone wants to get me the Stop Making Sense DVD for Hanukkah, I’ll be eternally grateful.

 If you’re talking about a purely political speech then dwelling on the fact that negative real interest rates are crazy or how the Federal Reserve should be more tolerant of higher prices and especially higher prices for food and gasoline is a bad strategy. The public doesn’t have a deep understanding of the deficit or passionate views about it, but they know that they’re “bad.” The public has less understanding of monetary policy, but they know that inflation is “bad.”

 

Are there any highly technical subjects that have successfully gotten through to the public at large? The main example I can think of is environmental science. Somehow people did manage to learn about the greenhouse effect, the ozone hole, and so forth. On the other hand, the environmental movement originally grew because of issues that were not particuarly technical. It’s not hard to understand why people might be attracted to environmentalism when their local Midwestern river is catching fire.

-I became a one-man farmer’s market in my hometown and sold a respectable amount of lychee grown in my mom’s backyard. At peak ripeness, this was some of the best I’d ever tasted.

-After some terrifying stroke-like symptoms I was diagnosed with a bout of vestibular neuronitis, which fortunately seems to have mostly subsided but sidelined me for awhile.

-Started the science education I made a point of avoiding in the past. Jury’s still out on whether my lapse in judgment was back then or now.

-Ate seven courses of beef. Mmmmm.

1. Long John Silver. Good lord they made that fish look tasty on TV. How on earth does this chain stay in business?

2. Lucky Charms. The freeze-dried marshmallow is not half as delicious as it appears when an animated leprechaun is firing magical rainbows into it.

3. Sunny Delight. It looked like orange juice, only much, much more refreshing. In real life, this beverage tastes like Rust Belt sadness covered liberally in high fructose corn syrup.

The ESPN roundtable on the whole dumb affair (video at the above link) is pretty predictably boneheaded, but I did think Scoop Jackson got close to the mark here by noting that most professional athletes haven’t really been trained on their employers’ policies on social media, so every single incident ends up being dealt with ad hoc and players are never told exactly what the boundaries of acceptability are. Personally, I think the key to the whole “should celebrity athletes tweet” debate  is that those boundaries themselves are  virtually impossible to define –  an employer like the NFL simply cannot always know in advance what’s going to be “controversial” and what isn’t. A tweet about buying your spouse a fur coat could pass without incident, or it could result in PETA going on the warpath.  The really big determinant of a “controversy” is how big a megaphone the offended people have. With that in mind, I come down firmly on the side of player freedom: let the damn athletes tweet. God forbid they might say something that makes their fans rethink their opinions once in awhile.

Most people aren’t going to college to learn how to think, despite the glossy brochures full of ivory-tower talk that the admissions office sends out. They’re going because a degree is the gateway to securing a middle-class or better lifestyle, even though the jobs they’ll end up taking usually require exactly zero of the knowledge they learned in college. And the same is true of, say, old-style ad agencies and investment banks – due to the particular idiosyncrasies of how those sectors evolved, they’re able to operate hugely profitable and largely unaccountable businesses despite it being unclear why their customers really need them at all to accomplish their ultimate goals.

There are times, however, when the consequences of Krugman’s perspective, the darkness of his view of American politics, come into view. In the health-care-reform debate, he saw evidence of “racial hate-mongering.” When the crazed assassin Jared Loughner shot Representative Gabrielle Giffords in January, Krugman saw intimations of a broader disorder to come. “The harshness and the incipient violence are very real,” he told me. The liberal historian Michael Kazin, of Georgetown, told me he thought Krugman’s account of the right succumbed to the old Marxist flaw of false consciousness: “Unlike what Krugman says, conservatism is not some kind of smoke screen for another agenda.” In his 2007 book The Conscience of a Liberal, Krugman was plainer still: “Yes, Virginia,” he wrote, “there is a vast right-wing conspiracy.”

For starters, I went back and reread the passage in question in Krugman’s book and I think that Wallace-Wells has misread Krugman in his final sentence. My take, and I think Krugman’s, is that the stoking of the paranoid style in American politics, that is, feeding the dangerous, true-believing right-wing crazies, is a tactical maneuver on the part of the relatively small number of economic plutocrats who effectively rule the the GOP and the broader conservative movement.  There are tons of obvious benefits to this – not only does having a vigorous undercurrent of extremist nuts, fueled by talk radio frothers, scare the crap out of lawmakers, but it also furthers a broader political goal of distracting America’s white majority into voting against its economic interests. The passage in the book supports this interpretation – Krugman’s point here is about the institutional structure of the conservative movement, not its ultimate aims. Wallace-Wells seems to be claiming that Krugman thinks that conservatism is about producing social disorder and chaos as an end in itself – a strange and dubious idea.

With that in mind, I’m not sure there is really as much disagreement between Kazin and Krugman as Wallace-Wells has set up here. But if there is, Krugman seems to have the better of the argument. The point is that the conservative movement has, for the last 50 years, been spectacularly bad at achieving its social goals in spite of spectacular success at its economic goals. Given that track record, it’s hard for me to see how the center-left consensus on this that Krugman subscribes to is wrong: the conservative movement is happy to pursue its stated aims on abortion and crime and drugs, but when push comes to shove they’ll always take a back seat to tax cut maximalism and goodies for big business.