Paul Krugman is sneaking up on the idea that the west has been hijacked, and that the hijackers are looting the joint. Here's his latest, "The Unwisdom of Elites" — subtitled "anatomy of a top-down disaster" — and good for him for that. He opens:
The past three years have been a disaster for most Western economies. The United States has mass long-term unemployment for the first time since the 1930s. Meanwhile, Europe’s single currency is coming apart at the seams. How did it all go so wrong? ... [T]he claim [is] that it’s mostly the public’s fault ... that we got into this mess because voters wanted something for nothing, and weak-minded politicians catered to the electorate’s foolishness.Voters as welfare queens; nice move. But watch out — some of those people are white. (I'm white, so I can say that.)
But back to Krugman. He thinks, naturally, that this view is "dead wrong," not the least because it is dead wrong. What we're witnessing is actually a "top-down disaster" (my emphasis):
The policies that got us into this mess weren’t responses to public demand. They were, with few exceptions, policies championed by small groups of influential people — in many cases, the same people now lecturing the rest of us on the need to get serious.And here Krugman starts to show his trademark ... what? deference? This sentence is followed by something about elites "ducking some much-needed reflection." Really? How about elites "heading relentlessly, self-servingly, toward even more money and power"?
I'm serious, by the way, and not just being snarky. This is 100% my main Krugman criticism. He still seems to (pretends to? actually does?) believe that people in power — and those who enable and serve them — respond mainly to ideas. This is either his great Achilles heel, or the way he keeps his column inches at the Times. (If the second, maybe a fair trade.)In the U.S. Krugman identifies three reasons for the budget problem — the Bush tax cuts, the 911 Wars, and the 2008 Recession. Needless to say, the public clamor for all of those was nil. Of the first, Krugman says:
President George W. Bush cut taxes in the service of his party’s ideology, not in response to a groundswell of popular demand — and the bulk of the cuts went to a small, affluent minority.I'm sure you noticed my emphasis, and Krugman's Achilles-like attention to the power of ideas, as opposed to the power of ... power.
As in the U.S., so in Europe, he continues, where the crisis was supposedly caused by troubled nations catering "too much to the masses, promising too much to voters." (The Greeks are the stand-in welfare queens here.) The real story, of course, and the boogyman under the bed, is the euro, a one-size-fits-all-crises currency dominated by the Germans and French whose banks poured the money into the Spanish, Irish, Greek, Portuguese, etc., boom economies, and now don't want to pay for the bailout.
Krugman's answer is the obvious one. If we don't correct our understanding, we'll never really get it, this thing that happened; and we'll get that same thing back, from the same people, with interest. In his words:
We need to place the blame where it belongs, to chasten our policy elites. Otherwise, they’ll do even more damage in the years ahead.Considering the indictment, almost tame. The next question for him, and I'd love to see his answer, is How? How do we place that blame where it belongs? (Of course, this brings us back to power.)
I rag on Krugman for a reason: he's important; he's right most of the time; and the state of his recognition of his Achilles-like flaw (what I call "the state of the Krugman") is a nice stand-in and metric for the ability of front-line intellectuals to see the right-wing cadre revolution as a real revolution, a coup, and not just a struggle of ideas. When Krugman crosses that line (he's done it once before), it will matter.
In the meantime, check out the column; it's worth reading in full.
(The image above, by the way, is Achilles Dying; if you know the story, a tragic, powerful and poignant depiction. Not something I'd wish on a friend.)
GP
