Is citing Paul Krugman in an article criticising partisan professional punditry a deliberate piece of ironic humour?

A wingnut welfare report, in contrast, starts with the conclusions (in this case as invariably about making life more difficult for poor people) and then looks for quotes, polling or reports which might justify these conclusions.

Always loved the term ‘policy based evidence making’. Was it coined by Ben Goldacre?

“Is citing Paul Krugman in an article criticising partisan professional punditry a deliberate piece of ironic humour?”

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist? Of all the possible leftie hacks, you pick that one?!

“Always loved the term ‘policy based evidence making’. Was it coined by Ben Goldacre?”

Think it’s been around for a while, but Michael Marmot in 2004 usually gets the credit.

Flying Rodent’s insight that people who know what they want should get it – good and hard.

I’m sure the airborne gnawing one wasn’t trying to claim credit, but it really is HL Mencken’s insight.

“I’m sure the airborne gnawing one wasn’t trying to claim credit, but it really is HL Mencken’s insight.”

A very good point

Don,

Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist? Of all the possible leftie hacks, you pick that one?!

I know who he is, but you were citing him not on economics but on right-wing punditry, an area of knowledge where to the best of my knowledge he has not won any awards at all (there must at the very least be a scouts badge for spotting rent-a-gob idiots at the very least). You see, being good at economic theory does not make you any better a pundit on anything else than anyone else – and so citing Krugman here as evidence against pundits looked odd.

Incidentally, it is worth noting that winning a Nobel prize for your published work of ten years and more ago does not even mean your every pronouncement on economics now is correct. To be fair to Professor Krugman, I’m pretty certain he doesn’t think this is the case anyway, but he tends to get cited in that way. He sometimes seems to function to some left-wing commentators (and not normally Don to be fair) as a higher authority, akin to the reverence some (thoughtless, to put it mildly) right-winger commentators accord the ‘wingnuts’ of the original piece. Professor Krugman himself is definetely saner, but you cannot extrapolate from the sanity of the man to those following them…

Don -

Excellent article – but I also have to ask why Paul Krugman?

But at the same time, many right leaning think tanks (which include Policy Exchange) do produce thought provoking reports and analysis – and so do left leaning ones. In fact they actually add a lot of value to the public policy debate in this country.

And both groups can be blamed for some shoddy work

First of all, Paul Krugman’s been right about almost everything for nearly three years. He’s slipped up on monetary policy a bit and been slightly too pessimistic about Ireland and the Baltics, but still basically correct. You would have lost a lot of money betting against him.

He has also repeatedly documented the spread of movement conservatism and the funding rightwingers receive to spout nonsense, the book conscience of a liberal and his blog contain a wealth of examples backing up exactly what Don has just blogged about above.

I don’t want to answer for Don, although I have, but that’d be “why Paul Krugman.”

8 – On the contrary Krugman has pretty much been wrong – http://krugman-in-wonderland.blogspot.com/ and http://blog.mises.org/10153/krugman-did-cause-the-housing-bubble/

His current obsession is getting governments to spend spend spend. This may well stimulate a short-term recovery but this will only distort the economy’s capital structure in the long term and create another crash.

Ho! Ho! Very satirical, Don.

I have to join the chorus on Krugman. “Paul Krugman says Gordon Brown was 100% spot on to spend more than he took in tax before the crisis and to spend even more during it, and he’s got a Nobel in economics SO IT MUST BE TRUE” seems to be the standard refrain.

Well, von Hayek and Milton Friedman got Nobels in economics too, and I’ll guess they’d have disagreed. The Nobel doesn’t make Krugman automatically right. But who is right? There’s only one way to find out….

@8 So Krugman agrees with your view of the world, is therefore “right about almost everything” (presumably the rare things he hasn’t been “right” about are where he disagrees with you), is therefore the one to use as some sort of untrumpable card in any argument. A reverse Godwin if you will, where playing him wins you the argument.

Jesus, the left has to do better than this.

Fuck off, test, you tedious reactionary pervert

Amusing. Well, in so far as Left Wing attempts to silence dissent can be.

But I have no problem with this – let’s make it equal though by ending State funding for Leftist policy-based evidence research. Take all those Fake Charities which exist solely to lobby the governments that pay them to lobby themselves. We might want to work on other nonsensical sources of moonbattery like the nef and so on.

And while we are forcing people to live on the dole, we ought to force every Leftist to run a small business so they can experience the joys of making payroll. That ought to, at least, make for informed debate if not the actual end of Left Wingery as we know it today.

@11 Thanks for that detailed criticism of my comments.

@13: Sorry I’m commenting a bit late but it was last day of the month and I was doing staff payroll. Oddly, looking at how we’re being squeezed by Osbornomics at the moment, I feel even more leftwing than this morning.

@Don: Good one, don. Pity most of the commenters are shit.

Ask to see who funds the tax payers allowance, that will show you the true meaning of wingnut welfar.

Private prisons is the next big area for wing nut welfare.

Is this where we add Purnell? Purnell is ‘Blue Labour’. New/Blue Labour are Tories. So, are they all wingnuts?

Best piece on this site for ages!

I’ve found another issue with a Policy Exchange report on welfare, this time in their report “Something for Nothing”.

The current system requires 3 “job-seeking activites” per week. The diagram on p13 of the report says it requires 2.

Also, when I was unemployed recently, attending a job interview did count as a job-seeking activity. The report claims it does not – has this changed?

Excellent piece. Made my day.

Hey, I’ll try out the £65 a week option: as long as nef gets its government funding pulled.

Won’t take me long to get off the £65 a week option, take nef forever to get people to give them enough money voluntarily.

Apparently Hayek and Rand enjoyed taking their government benefits as well, I think they forget to mention it in their big books of bullshit though.

http://www.nakedcapitalism.com/2011/09/friedrich-hayek-joins-ayn-rand-as-a-hypocritical-user-of-medicare.html

Well most Job centers will ask you to keep a diary of your progress seeking work reading a news paper ,looking at adverts, will do.

Most jobs centers will ask people to attend an interview now once a month, well if the jobs on the computer reads zero not a lot of going turning up.

16
Yea, this probably explains why the right-wing are now shouting for harsher prison sentences, nothing like oiling the wheels.

@21

Try getting off the “£65 a week option” after being on it for longer than 3 months and without using any of your industry contacts and I suspect you’d find it a lot harder than you think.

@25. Yes, I do know about long term unemployment: my prof at uni was R. Layard and that’s been one of his big things for decades.

However, I’ve also been saying for some years now that I’d love it if they redid that Matthew Parris prog. Where he (at the time a Tory MP) was stuck in a tower block on benefits.

Stick me, properly, on benefits, council flat in an estate, see how long (without using contacts, agreed) I’m still on benefits.

I’m game. I’ve waited table, washed dishes, tended bar, pulled pints, before (no, not just uni holidays either) Wouldn’t want to have to do it all again but I could.

@26

How long ago did you last do it? I suspect it has changed a lot since then. For a start, that kind of job is entirely reliant on the employee having as few ties as possible. You’re expected to cover shifts at a few hours notice, which becomes difficult if not impossible if you have family duties to take care of. Refuse to cover more than a couple of times and you’ll be out on your ear. You’re expected to accept at least a shift a day, a lot of the time at the manager’s discretion rather than yours – which makes arranging interviews to get back into your professional life extremely difficult due to the limited time in which the latter can occur and the short-notice nature of a lot of them. In a worst-case scenario this means that you’re faced with the Hobson’s Choice of going to the interview, missing your shift and possibly getting fired from the job that’s keeping a roof over your head – or cancelling the interview and showing up for your shift, which will basically put a nail in the coffin if the chances of resuming your actual career path.

@ 24

“Yea, this probably explains why the right-wing are now shouting for harsher prison sentences, nothing like oiling the wheels.”

I don’t think we need a conspiracy theory to explain the fact that the right-wing, or at least the conservative part of it, is demanding harsher prison sentences. It’s pretty much a given.

@26 – Would you be willing to do it as a career? With no prospects of advancement? And zero job security? Because that’s what people are being offered.

Oh, and you’d still be on benefits – HB at least – on that sort of minimum-wage job.

28. Chaise Guevara

I don’t think we need a conspiracy theory to explain the fact that the right-wing, or at least the conservative part of it, is demanding harsher prison sentences. It’s pretty much a given.

Sure, they actually care about ordinary people. Well, more than do criminals.

29. Leon Wolfson

Would you be willing to do it as a career? With no prospects of advancement? And zero job security? Because that’s what people are being offered.

No it isn’t. There is virtually no job that offers to prospects of advancement. Any job, if held for a reasonable time, provides advancement because it shows that the holder of said job is responsible and hence is a valued worker. When Barbara Ehrenfeldt wrote Nickled and Dimed she had to turn down every offer of promotion she got just to make her point. In real life she would have been on the way to the middle class if she wanted to.

Oh, and you’d still be on benefits – HB at least – on that sort of minimum-wage job.

Good.

Tim W @ 26

Stick me, properly, on benefits, council flat in an estate, see how long (without using contacts, agreed) I’m still on benefits.

To what ends, though Tim? What would that prove? That individual people can get of benefits and find work? That happens every single day of the week with thousands of people going onto and coming off benefits, so really, no one needs that proved to them. This isn’t about getting individual people off benefits, not really. It is about getting hundreds of thousands, perhaps even millions of people with lower skill sets and significant barriers to work back into employment.

A more realistic test would be to give you a progressive, variable illness (like epilepsy) and age you to fifty five (assuming you are not there already) and rid you of a skill set and clone the result say ten thousand times, dump the whole lot of you into an area of the Country where unemployment is about twenty five percent, then see how many ‘Tim Worstalls’ make into long term, sustainable private sector work.

Now, cloning humans is not viable, but I dare say we could give you epilepsy and I suppose we could even strip your skill sets from you in some kind of reverse ‘Joe90’ way, but surely you are not seriously suggesting that merely putting you in a council flat would be a valuable experiment?

That is why the Mathew Parris thing was a complete waste of time. He was beamed into a position and got to have a scout around for a few days ands was whisked away from it. Not the same as suffering the processes that got the equivalent person into that position, unless you can recreate the baggage, the experiment is meaningless.

The closet thing to ‘reality’ was the time they took a few ‘C’ listers and made them homeless for a few days. Unsurprisingly the person who could not hack it was the privileged chump born into wealth whose had the safety net of a few million quid to save him from his addictions.

@30 – “No it isn’t. There is virtually no job that offers to prospects of advancement. ”

Right. And the pope aint Catholic. Trolling to disrupt the conversation again.

The jobs are dead-end. And you’re telling young people to take them for a lifetime. Rich shits like you…

Id ban MoveAnyMountain or So Much for Subtlety or whatever he is called if I had anything to do with this site. He is a disingenuous sociopath whose modus operandi is to disrupt conversation with falacious contention presented as fact and by repetition render the whole thing untenable. Obviously intelligent right wing contribution from genuine humans is most welcome.

31
Coudn’t agree more, beaming people into situations where they know that it is just a game, and they will be returning to their nice affluent lives very soon, is a pointless excercise.
26
Matthew Parris is a good example, how about beaming him into a tower block for about three years on benefits and not being able to call upon his rich friends for assistance.

@25. Yes, I do know about long term unemployment: my prof at uni was R. Layard and that’s been one of his big things for decades.

However, I’ve also been saying for some years now that I’d love it if they redid that Matthew Parris prog. Where he (at the time a Tory MP) was stuck in a tower block on benefits.

Stick me, properly, on benefits, council flat in an estate, see how long (without using contacts, agreed) I’m still on benefits.

I’m game. I’ve waited table, washed dishes, tended bar, pulled pints, before (no, not just uni holidays either) Wouldn’t want to have to do it all again but I could

Try it with no legs see how you get on then…….