Niall Ferguson
Niall Ferguson is Laurence A. Tisch
Professor of History at Harvard University and a senior fellow at the
Hoover Institution, Stanford.
CAMBRIDGE
– “When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths,” US
Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote in a famous dissenting opinion in 1919,
“they may come to believe…that the ultimate good desired is better
reached by free trade in ideas – that the best test of truth is the
power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the
market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely
can be carried out.”
Like
any market, however, the marketplace of ideas needs regulation: in
particular, its participants should be bound by norms of honesty,
humility, and civility. Moreover, every idea-trader should adhere to
these principles.
Of
course, politicians through the ages have polluted the marketplace of
ideas with invective. But in American politics, surprisingly, there has
been progress. According to a study
by the Annenberg Public Policy Center, there has been less incivility
in Congress in recent years than in the 1990’s or the 1940’s. Republican
Senator Ted Cruz was widely condemned
for his aggressive questioning of incoming Defense Secretary Chuck
Hagel back in January. But casting aspersions on a nominee’s patriotism
was the norm in the McCarthy era; it is less common today.
Academia,
by contrast, appears to be moving in the opposite direction. A “social
science” like economics is supposed to be free of partisan vitriol. Yet
economists now routinely stoop to ad hominem attacks and inflammatory polemics.
As
economists go, they do not come much mightier or more influential than
Paul Krugman. A Nobel laureate who teaches at Princeton University,
Krugman is also a columnist for the New York Times, whose commentaries and blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,”
are read with an almost religious fervor by liberal (in the American
sense) economists and journalists around the world. He is a Twitter
superstar, with more than a million followers. A dozen ardent epigones
blog in sync with him, re-posting the wisdom of the master.
Many
people today naively believe that the Internet is an unmitigated boon
for free speech. They underestimate the extent to which such a
concentration of online power corrupts, just as surely as all forms of
power corrupt.
Since
Krugman and I began debating fiscal and monetary policy back in 2009, I
have become increasingly alarmed by the way he abuses his power. Last
week, I resolved to speak out in a three-article series, published squarely in the heart of the liberal blogosphere, the Huffington Post.
As
historians are trained to do, I based my argument on the archives. By
quoting his past writings, I showed, first, that Krugman’s repeated
claims to have been “right about everything”
in his economic commentary are false. Although (like many others) he
identified a housing bubble in 2006, he did not foresee the financial
chain reaction that would fuel a global crisis. Having failed to predict
the US crisis, he then incorrectly predicted the imminent
disintegration of Europe’s monetary union, publishing more than 20
statements on that subject in 2011 and 2012. He has never admitted these
errors; on the contrary, he has retrospectively exaggerated his own prescience.
Second,
Krugman’s claim that a vastly larger fiscal stimulus would have
generated a more rapid economic recovery in the US depends entirely on
conjecture. But the macroeconomic model on which he bases his claim can
hardly be called reliable, given its manifest failures to predict either
the crisis or the euro’s survival. Moreover, at least one of his pre-crisis columns
flatly contradicts his view today that current – or even higher –
levels of federal debt carry no risk whatsoever. So he has no right to
claim, as he has, “a stunning victory” in “an epic intellectual debate.”
Finally
– and most important – even if Krugman had been “right about
everything,” there would still be no justification for the numerous
crude and often personal attacks he has made on those who disagree with
him. Words like “cockroach,” “delusional,” “derp,” “dope,” “fool,”
“knave,” “mendacious idiot,” and “zombie” have no place in civilized
debate. I consider myself lucky that he has called me only a “poseur,” a
“whiner,” “inane” – and, last week, a “troll.”
Far
from engaging in Holmes’s free trade in ideas, Krugman has been the
intellectual equivalent of a robber baron, exploiting his power to the
point of driving decent people away from the public sphere –
particularly younger scholars, who understandably dread a “takedown” by
the “Invincible Krugtron.”
My preferred solution would be accountability. But I have given up hope that the New York Times
will perform its proper editorial function. So, instead, I would
suggest the intellectual equivalent of an antitrust law. For every word
that Krugman publishes, he must henceforth commit to having first read
at least a hundred words by other writers. I cannot guarantee that
reading more widely will teach him honesty, humility, and civility. But
it will at least reduce his unjustifiably large share of the marketplace
of economic ideas.
As
a Supreme Court justice, of course, Holmes opposed antitrust
regulations. But his arguments in this area failed his own “test of
truth,” for they lacked “the power…to get…accepted in the competition of
the market.” Holmes accepted defeat with his customary grace. It is
high time that Krugman – right or wrong – learned to behave that way,
too.
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