Herron: Krugman’s sheltered idealism

At one point in his administration, President William Howard Taft sat in on a meeting in… At one point in his administration, President William Howard Taft sat in on a meeting in which an aide rambled on about “the machinery of government.” Taft, hearing the prattling, whispered to a colleague, “The young man really thinks it’s a machine.”

The young aide in this anecdote has long since passed away, but the mindset still retains vitality. This sentiment — one which views government not as a collection of human minds and experiences but rather a seamless engine invulnerable to folly — is thunderously echoed today by economist and columnist Paul Krugman.

The Princeton professor has gained notoriety over the past few years mainly because of his unwavering criticism of the Bush administration’s economic policies. However, his celebrity received a substantial boost after he was awarded the 2008 Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and for his unanticipated criticisms of the Obama economic policies.

Because of Krugman’s tendency to be a voice of opposition, a March issue of Newsweek ran a column characterizing him as “anti-establishment.” But the term is imprecise. It’s not that Krugman is anti-establishment, but that his ideological current can’t be found in mainstream American political thought.

He has led the charge for a “New New Deal,” and has gone as far as claiming that President Barack Obama’s stimulus plan is not too large, but in fact not large enough: “To close a gap of more than $2 trillion … Mr. Obama offers a $775 billion plan. And that’s not enough.”

Krugman has also advocated, among other things, short-run protectionism, an embrace of a welfare state, universal health care, a reduction in “the inflow of low-skill immigrants,” elimination of guest-worker programs, minimum wage, unionization and dramatic financial regulation. All of these policies are geared toward aiding the lower class through government intervention. His activism has made him the champion of the American left, and he is consistently ranked as one of the most partisan columnists by Lying in Ponds, a site that studies intellectual partisanship.

Liberals often cite Krugman’s Nobel Prize as an endorsement of his ideology, but the prize was awarded to Krugman for “having shown the effects of economies of scale on trade patterns and on the location of economic activity.” In other words, he was merited for profound insights into non-partisan economic quandary, not for his partisan lucubration.

Krugman is undoubtedly brilliant. But intellect alone is not always sufficient. The problem with his ideas is that they embody a belief in the perfectibility of mankind — the belief that, with only the aid of a benevolent government, all the ills of the world may be remedied. He’s gone on record as claiming that the social sciences offer “the beauty of pushing a button to solve problems.”

Krugman spent his formative years reading Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, a series of books that discusses the fictional discipline of “psychohistory.” The psychohistorians “use their understanding of the mathematics of society to save civilization as the Galactic Empire collapses.” It isn’t difficult to see how such an idealistic, even romantic, perspective of the sciences could sway anybody with ambition and intelligence.

Krugman has spent nearly his entire life ensconced in academia. He attended Yale and MIT and has taught at UC Berkeley, the London School of Economics, Stanford and now Princeton. He’s been surrounded by the most brilliant minds in the world. For this reason, he’s developed an unhealthy distrust of the average citizen. In one of his New York Times columns, he revealed a belief that “it’s neither fair nor realistic to expect ordinary citizens to have enough medical expertise to make life-or-death decisions about their own treatment.” Essentially, we’re not smart enough to make our own decisions.

Thomas Carlyle called economics “the dismal science.” The term is astutely accurate, for economics is, in its simplest form, a means through which we attempt to deal with the general despondency and brutishness of humanity. The status quo of our existence is poverty, and the goal of policy is to find the best mechanisms for creating wealth. Often, these mechanisms involve tough, dismal choices.

If, like Krugman, we are to assume that the status quo is life as we currently know it — television, air conditioning, leather couches — then any loss of luxury is viewed as a tragedy. The immediate reaction is to create a government policy that ameliorates the suffering — a policy that, almost always, can be best characterized as H.L. Mencken would describe it — “neat, plausible, and wrong.”

E-mail Mason at mph20@pitt.edu.