New York Times Review of "The Conscience of a Liberal"

Here is a review of Paul Krugman's new book, The Conscience of a Liberal from David Kennedy. The review appears in the New York Times. When you start, as David Kennedy does, with the premise that "maybe Krugman is not really an economist" because he believes that sometimes government intervention is necessary to correct market failures, you have to wonder if it's worth reading on. It's not "anti-economist" as Kennedy suggests to believe markets sometimes need to be corrected. The suggestion that it is "anti-economist" displays the reviewer's ignorance about basic economics. Also, if you are going to have an historian rather than an economist or political scientist review Paul Krugman's work, it ought to be one who at least gets history right. Paul Krugman reviews his review:

Continuing the tradition, by Paul Krugman: Well, I’ve gotten a dismissive review in the NYT. It’s sort of a tradition. After all, The Great Unraveling received an equally dismissive review from Peter Beinart, in which he portrayed my conclusion that the Bush administration deliberately misled us into war as a crazy conspiracy theory, and contained this immortal pronouncement:

But most Americans do not consider the Bush administration corrupt, and Paul Krugman cannot convincingly prove it is.

I think David Kennedy’s review will hold up about as well as Peter Beinart’s. I presented facts on voting behavior, which point to the centrality of race — he ignores them. I presented polling evidence about the timing and role of the perception that Democrats are weak on national security; he just waves it away.

Oh, and when Kennedy says, to illustrate my alleged factual problems, that

Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition

you have to ask who’s got the factual problems. I don’t know what “customarily regarded” means, but Carrie Nation wielded her ax in Kansas - and Kansas was the first state to ban alcohol in its constitution.

And here's the review itself:

Malefactors of Megawealth, by David Kennedy, NY Times: Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics... His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal, ... perhaps even more prestigious than receipt of the Nobel in economic science. His twice-weekly column in The New York Times routinely and authoritatively demystifies complex economic arcana.

And yet maybe Krugman is not really an economist — at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”

Most modern economists continue to celebrate Walker’s orthodoxy, and behind it, the classical doctrines of Adam Smith, whose fabled “invisible hand” regularly works wonders of production, distribution, innovation and efficiency, provided it is kept free of the meddlesome “nanny state.” Against the constant threat of encroachment from that benighted quarter the free-market faithful are ever vigilant.

Krugman will have none of this — well, very little of it (he won the Clark Medal for work demonstrating the limitations, but not the total illogic, of free trade). Where the orthodox see nothing but market miracles, he sees many a market failure. And where they detect the invisible hand, he finds manipulation by the richest Americans to rig the game in their favor.

In our time, Krugman argues, the malefactors of megawealth have triumphed. He recites the now-familiar data that the wealthiest 0.01 percent of Americans are seven times richer than they were three decades ago, while the inflation-adjusted income of most American households has barely nudged upward. ...

But Krugman the anti-economist does not believe that growing economic inequality incubated modern political conservatism. In his view, the “arrow of causation” points the other way: political change, cunningly engineered by “radicals of the right,” has spawned egregious economic disparity, as well as a toxic level of partisanship. Ever the iconoclast, Krugman says “this strongly suggests that institutions, norms and the political environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income — and that the impersonal market forces matter less — than Economics 101 might lead you to believe.” In short, it’s the politics, stupid.

The bulk of this book consists of a historical explanation for how this sorry state of affairs came to be. It’s a story that is as factually shaky as it is narratively simplified. (Kansas, whatever its other crimes and misdemeanors, is not customarily regarded as the birthplace of Prohibition; the Voting Rights Act passed in 1965, not 1964.) History according to Krugman goes something like this: the nation suffered through a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism until the New Deal created a new social order characterized by income-leveling taxes, job security, strong labor unions, a prosperous middle class, bipartisan solidarity and general social bliss. Krugman invokes that post-World War II “paradise lost” in his first paragraph, and his yearning to restore that Edenic moment informs all the pages that follow.

But as the story unfolds, serpents slither into the garden, in the form of pesky “movement conservatives.” Those upstarts set out in the 1960s to exploit racial tensions, national security anxieties and volatile value-laden matters like abortion, school prayer and gay rights “to change the subject away from bread and butter issues.” By century’s end they had managed to fasten upon their hapless fellow citizens “a second Gilded Age” in which inequality is on the rise and even the modest American version of the welfare state that the New Deal put in place is in danger of being dismantled.

For this dismal state of affairs the Democratic Party is held to be blameless. Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security. As Krugman sees it, the modern Republican Party has been taken over by radicals. “There hasn’t been any corresponding radicalization of the Democratic Party, so the right-wing takeover of the G.O.P. is the underlying cause of today’s bitter partisanship.” No two to tango for him. The ascendancy of modern conservatism is “an almost embarrassingly simple story,” he says, and race is the key. “Much of the whole phenomenon can be summed up in just five words: Southern whites started voting Republican. ... End of story.”

A fuller and more nuanced story might at least gesture toward the role that environmental and natural-resource issues have played in making red-state country out of the interior West, not to mention the unsettling effects of the “value issues” on voters well beyond Dixie. And as for national security — well, as Krugman sees things, it was not Democratic bungling in the Iranian hostage crisis or humiliation in Somalia or feeble responses to the first bombing attack on the World Trade Center or the assault on the U.S.S. Cole, but the runaway popularity of the Rambo films (I’m not making this up) that hoodwinked the public into believing that the party of Carter and Clinton (not to mention McGovern and Kucinich) might not be the most steadfast guardian of the Republic’s safety.

For all that he inveighs against the evils of partisanship, Krugman astonishingly concludes by repudiating the chimera of “bipartisan compromise” and declaring that “to be a progressive, then, means being a partisan — at least for now.” Indeed, at times he seems more intent on settling his neocon adversaries’ hash than on advancing solutions to vexed policy issues. “Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy,” he writes, a sentence that both stylistically and substantively says much about the shortcomings of this book.

That assorted wing nuts have pretty much managed to hijack the Republican Party in recent years is scarcely in doubt. That the market is at least occasionally fallible is also not at issue. Nor is it deniable that the New Deal rendered the lives of millions of Americans more secure, and that they have become markedly less so in recent decades. A tidal wave of risk-shifting — from defined-benefit to defined-contribution retirement plans, and from employer-financed to individually-paid health care insurance, to cite but two examples — has set millions of American families anxiously adrift on a sea of uncertainty. Krugman’s chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book, a rueful reminder of the kind of skilled and accessible economic analysis of which he is capable, and how little of it is on display here. Like the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the films of Michael Moore, Krugman’s shrill polemic may hearten the faithful, but it will do little to persuade the unconvinced or to advance the national discussion of the important issues it addresses. It may even deepen the very partisan divide he denounces. Where is the distinguished economist when we need him?

More to the point, where's a decent reviewer when we need him? As Krugman notes in his response, David Kennedy is wrong about the history of prohibition, and the other "error" is a pretty trivial slip of writing 1964 instead of 1965. If those are the best examples of Krugman's errors Kennedy (as an historian himself) can come up with, then you have to conclude that Krugman is on pretty solid ground with the historical story he tells.

The review also ignores a lot of evidence from political scientist Larry Bartels on values voting that supports Krugman's position on the influence of racial politics. The values voting conclusions aren't things Krugman simply asserts - as you might conclude from the review - Krugman reviews solid evidence before coming to this conclusion. So when Kennedy launches into other reasons why voters may have supported Republicans, it does nothing to undermine Krugman's thesis that a large amount of the change arises from racial politics. The Bartels evidence is still there, nothing is presented in the review to counter it, and it paints a clear picture.

The author also takes issue with the statement that “Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy,” but once again he does not tell us about nor bother to try to rebut the careful, detailed discussion of right-wing institutions and their common funding sources that comes before this statement. Krugman's statement is a summary of this evidence, and to focus on the summary statement rather than than the evidence that supports it is not much of a rebuttal.

It's too bad that Kennedy chose to argue that, in essence, "Democrats have problems too" -- as though that somehow excuses Republicans for issues like racial politics -- rather than dealing with the evidence Krugman presents concerning the political and economic changes that produced the New Gilded Age.

Update: Brad DeLong adds:

David M. Kennedy of Stanford Makes His Play for the Stupidest Man Alive Crown, by Brad DeLong: Stanford's David M. Kennedy reveals that he is a serious contender for the "Stupidest Man Alive" title. Let's roll the tape: the start of his review of Paul Krugman's The Conscience of a Liberal:

Malefactors of Megawealth: Paul Krugman is a justly renowned professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. His abundant accolades include the John Bates Clark Medal... a distinction... perhaps even more prestigious than... the Nobel.... [Y]et maybe Krugman is not really an economist — at least not according to the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was... used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.” Most modern economists continue to celebrate Walker’s orthodoxy, and behind it, the classical doctrines of Adam Smith, whose fabled “invisible hand” regularly works wonders of production, distribution, innovation and efficiency, provided it is kept free of the meddlesome “nanny state.”... Krugman [is] the anti-economist...

David Kennedy thus demonstrates that he (a) has never read Adam Smith, and (b) has little acquaintance with modern American economists--who are (like Adam Smith) much more interested in prescribing how the nanny state should meddle to be effective than in protecting the naked market from interference.

Equally bizarre is the end of Kennedy's review:

Like the rants of Rush Limbaugh or the films of Michael Moore, Krugman’s shrill polemic may hearten the faithful, but it will do little to persuade the unconvinced or to advance the national discussion of the important issues it addresses...

David Kennedy thus demonstrates his allegiance to those who have never had substantive arguments to make in reply to Paul Krugman's arguments, and hence have no move to make save the rhetorical one of dismissing him as "shrill." Because, of course, David Kennedy had just before admitted that Krugman is right on the substance:

That assorted wing nuts have pretty much managed to hijack the Republican Party in recent years is scarcely in doubt. That the market is at least occasionally fallible is also not at issue. Nor is it deniable that the New Deal rendered the lives of millions of Americans more secure, and that they have become markedly less so.... Krugman’s chapter on the imperative need for health care reform is the best in this book...

And Paul Krugman replies... [as above]

Update: Also see:

Ah. Stanford's David Kennedy Can't Quote Properly Either...: David Kennedy of Stanford opens his review of Paul Krugman's "Conscience of a Liberal" with a claim that AEA founding president Francis Amasa Walker defined an economist as a faithful believer in laissez-faire, “not... the test of economic orthodoxy, merely.... [But] used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”

Why am I not surprised that Francis Amasa Walker actually said something very different?

And, for a round-up of posts, see:

A Gathering of the Clans...: Economic historians, historians of economic thought, practitioners of political economy, and others are painting themselves blue with woad and practicing with staves after reading Stanford's David Kennedy's trashing of Paul Krugman.

Comments

[Dickeylee]

I'm guessing that Kennedy is a Guliani man? Thompson? The point of how a Republican always sees the smote in others eyes, but never the log in his own is very apt here. Keep blaming the Democrats, keep blaming the Democrats, keep blaming the Democrats will be the '08 mantra that their mouthpieces will tell.

[hari]

Krugman and his NYT column is way ahead of his times. I guess his contemporaries may not really understand how and why PK has become such an anatagonist for the "right". The fact that he's become one, is rason why, I suspect, NYT sought Kennedy to review it.

Does anyone know how old is Kennedy? And what was his last book?

[RW]

And always show "balance" by arguing Democrats are "no better" than Republicans even when such a declaration is simultaneously a red herring and non sequitur, a distraction from the problem under discussion and pointlessly irrelevant to boot.

[anne]

Mark Thoma:

"When you start, as David Kennedy does, with the premise that 'maybe Krugman is not really an economist' because he believes that sometimes government intervention is necessary to correct market failures, you have to wonder if it's worth reading on."

Finding the review, I noticed who was reviewing and was sadened; reading the review, I was startled at the vituperation, repeatedly wrong and always unjust, and to my knowlege unlike the review of any New York Times columnist's work ever appearing in the New York Times.

[anne]

Paul Krugman corrected my memory, still I am shocked.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/books/review/Kennedy-t.html

"Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics, or Democratic condescension toward the ungrammatical yokels who consider their spiritual and moral commitments no less important than the minimum wage or the Endangered Species Act, nor even the Democrats’ vulnerable post-Vietnam record on national security."

Now, I am thinking to the embrace of inherently divisive identity politics and wondering whether that means Democratic Presidential candidates appearing for debates at African American or Latino forums. Has the civil rights movement been inherently divisive identity politics only Martin Luther King never realized?

[patroclus]

David Kennedy's "Freedom from Fear" was full of subtantial historic and economic errors; never corrected by either him or any New York Times review. As any securities lawyer will inform you, the U.S.'s basic statutes governing the cpiatl markets include the Securities Act of 1933, the Exchange Act of 1934, the Public Utility Holding Company Act of 1935, the Maloney Act of 1938, the Trust Indenture Act of 1939, the Holding Company Act of 1940, the Investment Company Act of 1941, the Investment Advisors Act of 1941 and the Administrative Procedure Act of 1941. Yet, in his book, Mr. Kennedy informs us that no significant New Deal legislation was enacted in FDR's second term.

Look at the years of those statutes! The vast majority of law governing the securities industry was indeed enacted in FDR's second term - the Maloney Act brought NASDAQ under the disclosure rubric; the Holding Company Act extended PUHCA to all holding companies, the Investment Advisor Act brought broker-dealers under the disclosure auspices, the Investment Company Act brought non-bank securities houses in and the APA codified the regulatory system whereby the SEC issues regulations and interpretive rulings.

Mr. Kennedy made a glaring series of errors, including historical errors, legal errors and economic errors - reading Freedom From Fear with actual knowledge of the dates, times and political arguments about our securities laws is an utter joke! And yet, he won award after award after award and never got caught!

That a writer such as Mr. Kennedy was employed to write a book review about subjects with which he is not familiar is an insult to Mr. Krugman and all readers of the NYTimes. Mr. Kennedy is not much of an historian and certainly not much of an economist. This review is as shoddy as the Beinart review. Surely, the NYTimes can do better.

[anne]

"Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics...."

Consider carefully what such a condemnation tells us. Does it tell us that identifying with a girl's wish to play soccer is of no account in a boys' footballer world? Women were, of course, not admitted to Harvard engineering till the 1970s, among other divisions. Sliderules and sex mixed poorly in olden times.

Blacks going to school with whites, public school; blacks voting with whites; blacks working with whites. We had separate and equal for 50 years, so who needed more? Martin Luther King just would not understand, and all that marching is, you know, divisive identity politics especially when Blacks are marching. So much for civil rights, being divisive and all.

[WM123]

Kansas was no leader in prohibition

From History of Alcohol Prohibition

“In 1847, the first such cure was enacted for the state of Maine (Cherrington, 1920: 134). (Actually, the first Prohibition law went into effect in 1843 in the territory of Oregon. This was repealed five years later.) “

“A wave of prohibition statutes followed. Delaware, on the heels of Maine, passed its first prohibition law only to have it declared unconstitutional the following year. Similar laws were enacted in Ohio, Illinois, Rhode Island, Minnesota, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania and New York during the next few years. They met with varying fates, including veto by the governors, repeal by the legislatures and invalidation by the state supreme courts.”

From Prohibition in the United States (Wikipedia)

“In May 1657 the General Court of Massachusetts made illegal the sale of strong liquor "whether knowne by the name of rumme, strong water, wine, brandy, etc., etc."[1]”

“Some successes were registered in the 1850s, including Maine's total ban on the manufacture and sale of liquor, adopted in 1851. However, the movement soon lost strength, and prohibition was not a major political issue during the American Civil War (1861-1865). It revived in the 1880s, with the Woman's Christian Temperance Union and the Prohibition Party. “

However, what does Krugman have against Kansas? It is one of the richest states in the nation and ranks 18th in inequality. New Jersey ranks 36th and New York ranks 50th.

[CaptainVideo]

Why is someone so pathetically ignorant of economics allowed to review a book dealing to an important degree with economics?

Anyone who understands even a minimum of economics knows that in the presence of externalities, monopoly power, and asymmetric information, markets left to their own devices do not produce efficient results. And even if these were not present there is absolutely no gurarantee that the results markets left to their own devices would produce results that are equitable.

Any competent historian will know at least that much about the related field of economics. Clearly he should have failed a course in undergraduate micro principles, if he took one.

[F. Frederson]

"More to the point, where's a decent reviewer when we need him?"

Maybe Paul Kennedy was unavailable, so they went to the nearest name in the Rolodex.

More likely is that the NYT for some reason felt the need to find a "critical" - as in negative, not analytical - review that could pass as well done. Or perhaps David Kennedy phoned this one in, and the editors just never looked at.

Hopefully a good review will be forthcoming in the NYRB sometime soon.

[Bruce Wilder]

I can readily see why a New York Times editor might choose David M. Kennedy, a Stanford historian noted for combining economic, social and cultural analyses in his histories, to review Krugman's book, with high expectations for the quality of the resulting review.

It seems to me that Kennedy pretty much concedes the factual case, in the final paragraph of the review. So, what is the essence of Kennedy's critique? That Krugman is "shrill"?

I find myself particularly curious about Kennedy and what drives the expression on display in this review -- the disdain for Krugman's "shrill" analysis? Kennedy's own sneering summary of Krugman's argument is loaded with the kind of content-free "kool kidz" snark pioneered by the likes of Maureen Dowd.

When Kennedy complains:

“Yes, Virginia, there is a vast right-wing conspiracy,” [Krugman] writes, a sentence that both stylistically and substantively says much about the shortcomings of this book.

what exactly is Kennedy's point? As far as I can tell, Kennedy does not like the "shrill polemic" quality of Krugman's book, and that's about it: "shrill polemic, bad" sums up Kennedy's argument.

I perfectly understand why "shrill polemics" are not necessarily an attractive form. I doubt that Krugman, himself, much enjoys the effort. It is uncomfortable to be angry. It is anxiety-producing to realize that Rich People want to become richer still, at your expense, and are actively manipulating a nominally democratic politics to accomplish that end.

But, at this moment in our history, there's something pathological in Kennedy's snarky serenity and compulsive retreat to partisan symmetries.

[Morris Sheppard]

Kennedy complains about Krugman's stylistic and substantive shortcomings in a poorly written review that has a plethora of those very faults. This is a man who teaches history but seems unaware of it, or maybe just forgot it. In the end he admits that Krugman is basically right about everything, but is just too "shrill." Where is a handy bucket of ice in which to soak one's head when you need it?

It appears that if you traded one Paul Krugman plus all the trash you wanted to get rid of in a year for six David Kennedy's, you'd come up way short on the deal. Simple economics.

[CaptainVideo]

With respect to the reviewer's quotation that he uses to suggest that maybe Krugman is not really an economist,

"the definition offered more than a century ago by Francis Amasa Walker, the first president of the American Economic Association, who wrote that laissez-faire “was not made the test of economic orthodoxy, merely. It was used to decide whether a man were an economist at all.”

the context of that statement needs to be examined.

Since the American Economic Association was founded by institutionalists who were critical of orthodox economics, this statement by Walker looks like part of a critique by institutionalists of orthodox economics, that is that he was criticising such a definition of what an economist is and therefore criticising the very thing the reviewer is trying to do.

Perhaps someone who is an expert in the History of Economic Thought can clarify this?

[CaptainVideo]

"a Stanford historian noted for combining economic, social and cultural analyses in his histories"

His total ignorance of some of the most basic economic propositions (see my post above) raises serious questions about his competence to do this.

[duus]

as Anne said, "Never mind the Democrats’ embrace of inherently divisive identity politics," is a ridiculous claim. identity politics is *not* inherently divisive. You can believe that only if you believe that, in absence of identity politics, we would not be divided. Identity politics is pointing out existing divisions (at least arguably) with, perhaps, the hope to rectify said divisions. Although one might take issue with that claim, it is an empirical claim, that, a priori, could go either way; and therefore reveals the 'inherent' part of Kennedy's claim to be false.

[Incertus (Brian)]

You can believe that only if you believe that, in absence of identity politics, we would not be divided.

Well, in the sense that pre-Civil War politics weren't divided because all the power was held by white men, I suppose the claim that identity politics divides us holds up. But that's a pretty stupid way to look at it.

[pseudonymous in nc]

This hatchet job is only the most recent example of an ongoing trend in the NYT BR: books by conservatives have been handed off to sympathetic reviewers, while books by liberals are given to people guaranteed to deliver dismissive, sniffy writeups. Sam Tanenhaus may have been described as a 'smart conservative', but his smartness is the insidious way he has skewed the BR's coverage of political books.

[Danny Okrent]

Come on, people. We all know Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults.

[donna]

Again with the Adam Smith nonsense - read "Theory of Moral Sentiments", Mr. Kennedy, and then we'll talk. Smith assumed most men had a conscience. At least Paul Krugman has one! If "the rich", whoever they are, ever develop one, then we won't have income inequality or complaints about their "high taxes." I'm so tired of those who use the system to their advantage complaining about paying for it.

[GM123]

If you type history and prohibition into Google you get any number of histories of prohibition. Kansas does not figure prominently (if at all) in these articles.

The reference to Carrie Nation is interesting and revealing. She did attack saloons in Kansas. However, her efforts were a protest against the failure of the state to enforce its prohibition law. She was from Kentucky (and later Texas).

[Mumon]

The "western states became red because of environmental regulation" is another ridiculous canard, that's being overturned as this went to press; the NYT published this bit...

n increasingly vocal, potent and widespread anti-coal movement is developing here. Environmental groups that have long opposed new power plants are being joined by ranchers, farmers, retired homeowners, ski resort operators and even religious groups.

[save_the_rustbelt]

I'm certainly glad Democrats never play racial politics.

Oh, wait.........

[anne]

Duus:

"Identity politics is *not* inherently divisive. You can believe that only if you believe that, in absence of identity politics, we would not be divided. Identity politics is pointing out existing divisions (at least arguably) with, perhaps, the hope to rectify said divisions. Although one might take issue with that claim, it is an empirical claim, that, a priori, could go either way; and therefore reveals the 'inherent' part of Kennedy's claim to be false."

Nicely written.

[Jrossi]

I agree with the above poster that Kennedy concedes Krugman's most important points. "Shrill polemics" means that Kennedy just doesn't like the cut of Krugman's jib. A common situation.

[anne]

Danny Okrent:

"Come on, people. We all know Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults."

This is a writer pretending to be Daniel Okrent.

[Dan]

CaptainVideo teases out a crucial point in his comment above:

Since the American Economic Association was founded by institutionalists who were critical of orthodox economics, this statement by Walker looks like part of a critique by institutionalists of orthodox economics, that is that he was criticising such a definition of what an economist is and therefore criticising the very thing the reviewer is trying to do.

A quick Google search yields this gloss on Walker's words:

Thus, to be an economist in America before the AEA was founded in 1885 meant that one was an advocate of laissez-faire, and this belief was based on a loose interpretation of the Protestant work ethic filtered through Say's and Bastiat's writings. But there was no modern, technical argument for this advocacy: the support of laissez-faire was an ideology. The young economists who founded the AEA were, of course, interested in pushing the envelope and founded the Association, in part, to give legitimacy to their desire to study the legitimate functions of the state in the economy (in contradistinction to the older advocates of laissez faire).

I think this is one hell of a gotcha right here.

And Kennedy is looking more and more like a clown the deeper we delve.

[Tom Jones]

Who the hell cares about Prohibition anyway?

[evagrius]

Who are "the ungrammatical yokels"?

[anne]

"Kansas was the first state to ban alcohol in its constitution," in 1880.

No matter, in 1657 Massachusetts was wild about alcohol and seemingly still is, but Paul Krugman does not dislike Kansas, though my support is conditional on Kansas no longer being so crazy about the teaching of evolution but that's me and not Krugman. Can a Republican run for President, and acknowledge 150 years of biological thought? I actually think not.

[GM123]

Tom Jones,

"Who the hell cares about Prohibition anyway?"

Apparently, Krugman and Kennedy care a lot about prohibtion and the supposed role of Kansas in prohibition. Why isn't clear.

[Paul G. Brown]

It says a lot about the quality of Kennedy's review of the book, and folk like WM123 and GM123, that the best they can do is to pick on a throw-away line about Kansas and prohibition.

Rather than make any effort to confront the substance of PK's argument (and here let me say I actually have a couple of problems with PK's ideas; specifically that the way voluntary voting works means elections in the US tend to give you a pretty distorted view of the attitudes and beliefs of the general populace, making me skeptical of any associations between general population trends and voting patterns) they instead pick up some debating point.

People in the US are suffering and dying needlessly. The world's peoples are losing its faith in the ideals of democracy and freedom that the US has come to represent. The planet is heating up. And the response to a serious contribution to the debate is that the book exaggerates the role of Kansas in the passage of the 18th Amendment?

And then there is the review's last paragraph. In these times, to be 'shrill' is to be aware.

[anne]

Dan, thank you.

I am interested in the social context of the passage by Francis Amasa Walker, and will ask reference about it. Richard Hofstadter relates classical economic thinking to "social" Darwinism * in a way I wish to look after.

* Charles Darwin was in no way a social Darwinist and I dislike the expression but the expression remains.

[Julio]

Besides being wrongheaded, this is a poorly written review:

You learn something about Mr. Kennedy's opinions and character, and practically nothing about the book itself.

[WM123]

Paul G. Brown,

I wrote

"However, what does Krugman have against Kansas? It is one of the richest states in the nation and ranks 18th in inequality. New Jersey ranks 36th and New York ranks 50th."

No mention prohibition.

[anne]

NC reminds me, and I did not want to be reminded, that in several important instances, a conservative polemical New York Times review has made what should be an important reference review unusable. Similar comment was made recently by Yale's Harold Bloom. I had not thought about the influence of the editor of the book review before however. The New York Review has been excellent, the Guardian has moments, but more is needed from the Times.

[anne]

As in whether Kansas enjoys drinking or not, we have no idea of why the matter is raised; the review is not about developing Paul Krugman's thesis, which is where the problem lies most of all. These comments are helpful, even in understanding what is missing in the review beyond any political slant.

I am especially interested in any thoughts on whether the American Economic Association was a response to counter social Darwinist thinking among classical economists. What might this mean?

[RW]

A agree with those who consider the discussion of prohibition rather trivial but did notice that Krugman actually wrote "Kansas was the first state to ban alcohol in its constitution" and, knowing that Krugman is rarely careless in either writing or speech, did a bit of googling and could not find any state that, in fact, banned alcohol in its constitution before Kansas did: Many states made it illegal before Kansas but I can't find a single one that did so via the process of constitutional amendment.

I confess I am curious about this now: Anyone know different; was there any state that enshrined prohibition _in their constitution_ before Kansas?

Either way David Kennedy is just looking worse and worse which, btw, is probably a critical reason Krugman keeps looking better and better: It's not that Krugman is without flaw or never indulges in stridency or can not make errors (although if one attends closely to his wording those errors are few indeed), it is simply that the work of those who attack him tends to be worse by comparison.

[Dan]

Even the libertarians at Ludwig von Mises Institute agree that the AEA was found in the spirit of "progressivism."

http://www.mises.org/story/2318

The economists' premier professional society, the American Economic Association, was itself created as an explicitly "progressive" organization. Its founder, the religious and social reformer Richard T. Ely, planned an association, he reported to a colleague, of "economists who repudiate laissez-faire as a scientific doctrine."

The other founding members, all of whom had been trained in Germany under Gustav Schmoller and other members of the younger German Historical School — the so-called Socialists of the Chair — were similarly possessed with reformist zeal. The constitution of the AEA still contains references to the "positive role of the church, the state and science in the solution of social problems by the 'development of legislative policy.'"

Conflating laissez-faire with Social Darwinism, however, only serves to muddy the water, IMO.

[jawbone]

Well, at least Kennedy knew that Krugman is known as "The Shrill One." Must read blogs....

[anne]

Actually, if the AEA was a reaction to understanding of classical economic thought in the 1880s, I am almost sure when reference sends along material I will find that the ARA was a reaction against the thinking of Herbert Spencer or against social Darwinist thinking which was possibly strongest in the 1880s. This is important, and I am confident I will find just this as did Richard Hofstadter.

[anne]

The American Economics Association was formed when western economic thought was rationalizing colonialism, and as great trusts were forming and being rationalized here and abroad taking advantage here of communications and transportation developments from the Civil War on and colonial consolidation internationally.

[Harold]

The poet Paul Malarme kept a cage of parrots whom he called, "Mes petits acadamiciens."

[ken melvin]

Well, if there's a mistake in the book I shan't be reading it and I don't think anyone else should read it either; the danger's simply too great.

In re the richness of Kansas: Take Johnson County and maybe another burb or two out and run the numbers again.

[Hank Essay]

Let Prof. Kennedy know what you think of his bullshit smear review of Krugman's book:

dmk@stanford.edu

-

[James Killus]

Professor Kennedy understands that if Paul Krugman is correct, the United States is in the hands of criminals and ideological idiots whose policies will lead the country into political, economic and social chaos. Professor Kennedy is disturbed by the idea of political, economic, and social chaos, so he desperately wants Paul Krugman to be wrong. Thus, he has written a review reflecting his desires.

This is how actual conservatives, those who do not wish for tumultuous change, are coopted by authoritarian thugs. "This is a nice country, we've got here," say the thugs. "Pity if something were to happen to it." So the cowards pay the protection and lash out at anyone observing the actual state of things.

I've heard that neighborhoods controlled by the Mafia are very safe, also. That's the story that gets told, anyway. Maybe Prof. Kennedy would like to live in one, or maybe he thinks he does already.

[anne]

Let me be clear that I thoroughly like Michael Moore and having watched "Roger and Me" a while ago I was taken by how clever he was and how much he might have helped General Motor's Roger had Roger ever thought about what producing cars could really be about. "SiCKO" is terrific, and the next time I think about my friendly health insurance company, which I hope not to have to do, I'll think again.

[doggril]

WM123 is being a bit, shall we say, conservative in his sharing of Wikipedia quotes.
Here's another sampling of the Wikipedia information on Prohibition:
"In 1881, Kansas became the first state to outlaw alcoholic beverages in its Constitution, with Carrie Nation gaining notoriety..."
Does WM123 think the rest of us don't know how to use the intertubes?

[el loco]

Then I shall conclude that John Maynard Keynes "is not really an economist", since he believed that the "nanny state" played a role in Adam Smith's invisible hand.

How stupid can these twits get?

[PrestoPundit]

According to everything I find on the internet -- excepting _only_ Paul Krugman -- the birthplace of prohibition was Maine, NOT Kansas. Krugman is one of the most fact challenged academics in the public arena, so this shouldn't surprise anyone.

On history my advice is to go with the historian, not with Krugman.

[gordon]

Kennedy attributes to Krugman a belief in "...a “Long Gilded Age” of let-’er-rip, dog-eat-dog capitalism...". To me, "dog-eat-dog capitalism" would signify a truly competitive market without monopoly or oligopoly rents. This doesn't fit with my understanding of the Gilded Age as an age of trusts and market manipulation. Does Krugman really think of the Gilded Age as an age of perfect competition, or is Kennedy just misinterpreting?