Posted on 08/12/2003 4:30:17 AM PDT by ReleaseTheHounds
I hereby issue a public challenge to the New York Times.
When is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction of Paul Krugman's egregious mathematical error in which he claimed, in his August 1 column, that growth in real per capita California state spending from $1,950 in 1990 to $2,211 in 2003 was "only 10%," when anyone with a pocket calculator can tell that it is really 13.4 percent? And when will it correct Krugman's flatly deceptive claim that this growth "was simply a matter of keeping up with the population and inflation," when calculations of real per capita growth, by definition, already take those factors into account?
I challenge the Times either to demonstrate that Krugman's calculation and his characterization are accurate, or to correct his errors. For a Princeton economics professor, this should be a simple matter to straighten out with the editors.
And when is the "newspaper of record" going to run a correction retracting the embarrassing quotation that Krugman attributed to the Bush administration's Treasury Department in his August 5 column, but which no one in the Bush administration or the Treasury Department ever actually said? Krugman wrote that Treasury provided NBC's Tim Russert with statistics on the effects of repealing the Bush tax cuts on six example families. Krugman mocked the Treasury for claiming an "example of a 'lower income' elderly household was one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income." I have seen the documents that Treasury provided to Russert, and neither they nor similar documents published in January used the expression "lower income" in relation to this example household (nor to any other). More, Russert never even said it.
I challenge the Times either to show where the administration said "lower income," or to retract this invented quotation. Surely disclosing the source of the quote should be a simple matter for the Times, as no doubt — in a post-Jayson Blair world — all quotations are fact-checked before publication.
If the source cannot be produced, then Krugman himself would have to retract the invented quotation, too — because he repeated it Saturday in a posting on his personal website. The posting was Krugman's response to a stinging rebuttal published in the letters section of the Times that same day. The letter was from Andrew B. Lyon, the Treasury's former deputy assistant secretary for tax analysis, whose staff prepared the examples for Russert. (By the way, Krugman Truth Squad member Robert Musil wrote a good deconstruction of Krugman's rebuttal-of-the-rebuttal on his Man Without Qualities blog.)
Based on past experience, it's a safe bet that both the Times and Krugman will ignore these challenges, and there will be no corrections or retractions. The editorial pages still report directly to publisher Arthur Sulzberger, Jr. — as they always have — so the change from Howell Raines to Bill Keller as executive editor of the rest of the paper can't be expected to raise standards of integrity on the editorial pages. And publishing that letter from Lyon is no evidence of improvement. As I noted on my blog, The Conspiracy to Keep You Poor and Stupid, the full version of Lyon's letter on Krugman's site has a lot more teeth in it than the sanitized version the Times actually published. No, Krugman probably isn't aware the versions are different.
So what will happen now? At most, Krugman will post a lame self-defense on his website. He'll come up with some econobabble to wave away the "only 10%" spending growth that is really 13.4 percent. And maybe he'll claim that those quotation marks around "lower income" were just a gag — like in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, when Dr. Evil and Mini-Me pantomimed quotation marks around words like "laser" and "liquid hot magma." Hey ... maybe I'm onto something. The diminutive Krugman is an awful lot like Mini-Me. As Dr. Evil himself said, "He's evil, he wants to take over the world, and he fits easily into most overhead storage bins."
Now, let the Krugman Truth Squad briefly train its fire on Krugman's most recent column for the New York Times — the one from Friday in which he said (let me try to put this into just sixteen words): "Salon.com has learned Bush is being bribed by the energy industry to delay on global warming." Is there an imminent threat? But of course: "... the fate of past civilizations that destroyed their environments, and hence themselves."
That's right. The central point of his column is just a rehash of an article in Salon.com. The article asserted that the case for the threat of global warming is open-and-shut, and that anyone who questions it has been corrupted. As Krugman summarized it, any
appearance of uncertainty is "manufactured." Very few independent experts now dispute that manmade global warming is happening, and represents a serious threat. Almost all the skeptics are directly or indirectly on the payroll of the oil, coal and auto industries.
It never seems to occur to this Princeton professor who does his scientific research on Salon.com that the oil, coal, and auto industries have an entirely legitimate interest in being skeptical about something that threatens them. But Krugman quite literally doesn't care. His solution is — you guessed it! — to slap new taxes on industries that contribute to global warming. (As determined by whom? Salon.com?) He proposed his tax solution in a 1997 article for Slate, and while admitting that it would probably reduce GDP, he shrugged, "But so what?"
But maybe we can work with this. As Robert Musil pointed out, Krugman seems to have adopted a new policy of accepting ideas that "very few independent experts now dispute." Musil wondered whether this will apply to the economy?
Krugman has insisted that the economy is not recovering, thanks to Bush's tax cuts and Alan Greenspan's "destructive outbreak of optimism." Now that the Wall Street Journal reported that an "overwhelming 92% of economists ... believe the rise in profits will prompt companies to boost capital spending and investment" and Krugman's own New York Times reported that the "spring upturn has nearly every forecaster, even the pessimists among them, signing on to the proposition that the national economy is finally breaking out," won't Krugman have to admit that the Bush economic program is working?
— Donald Luskin is chief investment officer of Trend Macrolytics LLC, an independent economics and investment-research firm. He welcomes your comments at don@trendmacro.com.
The media, including The New York Times, The Today Show with Perky Katie Communist and Matt Liar among others, want to rule the country without having an election. Evidently they think subscribers are voters and ratings are indicative of political support. Surprise! The internet has become a better method of communication and has even allowed We, The People to be "first on the scene." (for example, FreeRepublic.com and the Challenger Space Shuttle disaster) Their shell game is no longer so effective because now people can see what's beneath all three shells. Isn't truth a wonderful thing?
I'd say that Luskin is somewhat less than awesome. I have not read all of Krugman's columns, much less checked the validity of every word he has written. Hence, Luskin may be correct in the couple of errors that he points out. However, I don't think it quite merits the level of chest-pounding that he engages in. Although I would expect more accuracy from a highly-educated economist, the errors are pretty small compared to those made by some other well-known political commentators.
For example, I heard Rush Limbaugh make a huge error that was off by a factor of over one hundred in his favor. I described the error and called on him to retract it at http://home.netcom.com/~rdavis2/cutpuny.html. I described a number of other Rush errors at http://home.netcom.com/~rdavis2/rush.html. Not only have I never heard him retract any those errors, some of them are still posted on his website. In addition, I am yet to run into a Rush supporter who believes that Rush should retract any of his errors.
In fact, I wish there was some way to force those with large audiences to retract errors to as many of the original audience as possible. A number of those speakers would undoubtably start writing much more carefully. In any case, I noticed that Luskin made a serious logical mistake at the end of this article. In the final sentence, he states:
Now that the Wall Street Journal reported that an "overwhelming 92% of economists ... believe the rise in profits will prompt companies to boost capital spending and investment" and Krugman's own New York Times reported that the "spring upturn has nearly every forecaster, even the pessimists among them, signing on to the proposition that the national economy is finally breaking out," won't Krugman have to admit that the Bush economic program is working?
Of course, any beginning logic student could tell you that the eventual recovery of the economy does not prove that the Bush economic program is working. It simply proves that the program did not permanently prevent the economic recovery. I therefore call on Luskin to publicly admit and retract his horrendous logical misstatement!
Ahhh, the everybody does it defense - nice one.
Do you realize that there is a clear pattern to Krugman's 'errors'?
Krugman is nothing more than a socialist propagandist, consistently resorting to lies to further his socialist agenda.
Go back and read the archives of Luskin's "Krugman Truth Squad" to educate yourself.
Speaking as a beginning logic student, are you? If so, you are woefully unstudied on your subject.
As is typical of newspaper "proof", the statement proves neither one. All it does is assert a correlation between the opinions of 92% of economists regarding corporate profits and optimism about the national economy. Luskin correlates the time period of the Bush policy with the time period of the recovery. A correlation is evidence, not proof. Just because everyone who eats carrots will die, doesn't mean carrots cause death.
It doesn't prove anything at all regarding Bush Admin policy, good or bad. It would be beyond the scope of anything short of an economics graduate thesis to even attempt to do so.
What can be said is the following:
A) The economy that was trending down has started trending up.
B) Economists, except for Krugman, like this.
C) The Bush Admin. has an economic policy.
Insofar as ANY president has ANY direct influence on the economy, via short term stimuluses, Bush's policy seems to help more than hinder, but that is not provable beyond reasonable debate without very complex economic theory number crunching.
I'm not arguing the "everybody does it defense". As I said in my last message, I wish there was some way to force those with large audiences to retract errors to as many of the original audience as possible. A number of those speakers would undoubtably start writing much more carefully. Does Luskin have any suggestion to accomplish this?
What I am arguing for is some proportionality. I orginally became involved in this discussion about Krugman because I posted his article, "Everything is Political". I posted it because it generally agreed with an independent analysis which I posted at http://home.netcom.com/~rdavis2/tax03ex.html). I am yet to hear anyone disagree with anything in that analysis. Luskin skipped over the substance of the article and focused on the sentence To give you a sense: the Treasury's example of a "lower income" elderly household was one receiving $2,000 a year in dividend income. Now Krugman did not explicitly say who he was quoting and the example that he is citing is the lower of the two elderly examples. However, it does seem to imply that he is quoting the Treasury document which, to my knowledge, does not use that expression. If that is the case, then he was wrong to put "low income" in quotes. Likewise, Luskin was wrong to imply that an economic recovery proves that Bush's economic program is working.
Do you realize that there is a clear pattern to Krugman's 'errors'?
Krugman is nothing more than a socialist propagandist, consistently resorting to lies to further his socialist agenda.
Frankly, I don't have the time to study any alleged long-term patterns to Krugman's errors any more than I have to study Luskin's errors. My main area of interest is the Treasury examples that Krugman addressed in "Everything is Political" and I addressed in the analysis referenced above. Does anyone have any comments on that?
Why then does Luskin conclude his commentary with the question, "won't Krugman have to admit that the Bush economic program is working"? Did I miss the link to his economics graduate thesis?
I assume it is because his article is about Krugman's bias, and this is a rhetorical question that points it out. I don't know for sure; I'm not Luskin. But the data doesn't support your contention any more than it does Luskin's:
It simply proves that the program did not permanently prevent the economic recovery.
It "proves" nothing of the sort. You are also using rhetoric, not logic.
I assume it is because his article is about Krugman's bias, and this is a rhetorical question that points it out. I don't know for sure; I'm not Luskin. But the data doesn't support your contention any more than it does Luskin's:
This really seems like a stretch. A reader could reasonably conclude that Luskin believes that an economic recovery will prove the validity of the Bush economic program and likely expects this event to occur. At the very least, this statement is misleading, same as Krugman's placement of quotes around "lower income".
It simply proves that the program did not permanently prevent the economic recovery.
It "proves" nothing of the sort. You are also using rhetoric, not logic.
Suppose a person said that Bush's program will permanently prevent an economic recovery. Then suppose that an economic recovery occurs. Wouldn't you then say that the person's original contention has been disproven? Or, put another way, wouldn't you say that the economic recovery has proven that the program did not permanently prevent it's occurrence? This seems so obvious, I can only assume that you are reading something additional into my statement. I am saying that this is the most obvious thing that an economic recovery would prove, not that it is absolutely the only thing.
Disproving one contention does not mean proof of the opposite contention. Maybe the program has nothing at all to do with the occurance. As well to say that the fact I am wearing a red shirt did not prevent an economic event from happening. There is not any provable cause/effect relationship.
So disproving the contention that "A" is true does not prove the opposite contention, that "A" is false? In any case, I didn't want to get bogged down in this abstract argument. I'll address the actual argument you made in the rest of your message.
Maybe the program has nothing at all to do with the occurance. As well to say that the fact I am wearing a red shirt did not prevent an economic event from happening. There is not any provable cause/effect relationship.
On this, I think we agree. In fact, I think it very possible that, if an economic recovery should occur, it will have little to do with Bush's economic policies. The extra money in taxpayers' pockets may well have a positive effect. However, that could well be offset by the negative effect of the resulting deficit. I know that I plan to bank any tax cut that I receive. The fact that the public debt is going up rapidly with the Boomer retirement approaching makes the future much less clear, I think. I feel that I need to prepare for those additional possibilities. In any case, I think we agree that there is no provable cause/effect relationship, good or bad, between Bush's policies and an economic recovery. Hence, the answer to Luskin's concluding question "won't Krugman have to admit that the Bush economic program is working?" is: No, not unless he judges that to be the case.
In any case, I am curious as to whether anyone has a critique of the substance of Krugman's article "Everything is Political" or my related analysis at http://home.netcom.com/~rdavis2/tax03ex.html.
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