In Paul Krugman’s most recent op-ed piece in the NYT (”Design for Confusion”), Krugman pretty much knocks all research institutions not affiliated with academia (some would consider this a broad generalization to say the least) implying that they generate ideologically driven “fake” research. Fake research, we learn, is particularly bad because:

… nonscientists sometimes find it hard to tell the difference between research and advocacy - if it’s got numbers and charts in it, doesn’t that make it science? (Our emphasis).

Of course poorly conducted or biased research is bad but it is hardly the exclusive domain of conservative think tanks (Ward Churchill  anyone?). Furthermore, why is it that liberal columnists think so lowly of the people in the real world? Does Krugman really think every bogus study with “numbers and charts” will confuse large numbers of people? Say what you want about conservative writers but at least they give their readers credit for an ounce of intelligence.

The truth of the matter is that:

… politics by its very nature is the enemy of science, and neither side of the political spectrum has been immune to the abuse of science in the pursuit of its agenda. The junk social science that’s been churned out of left-leaning universities is a scandal of major proportions, much bigger than funny games with climatology or the work of the tiny little Disco Institute club.

This means that when it suits them, politicians (and NYT columnists) will cite research from wherever it fits their purposes to do so. The real irony about Krugman’s stone throwing is that he employs ”fact exaggeration” as aggressively as anyone out there. As Krugman wrote just last week:

It’s true that France’s G.D.P. per person is well below that of the United States. But that’s because French workers spend more time with their families. (our emphasis).

Krugman uses the fact the French G.D.P. is lower than the U.S. to advocate his opinion that lower GDP is just a side effect of the superior French social economic model and superior French way of living. He doesn’t bother backing this claim with numbers and charts (which of course might just confuse all of us dim-witted readers). In Krugman’s world, he claims it, so it is deemed true. Any research that shows otherwise is labelled as ”junk” intended to confuse.

An interesting side effect of the strengthening economy is that it is becoming increasing difficult for Krugman to employ this tactic to attack conservative economic policies. For example, try as he might, even Krugman can’t attack the current unemployment figures. However, two weeks ago in his “The Dropout Puzzle” he resorted to claiming that the low unemployment numbers were sending false signals that the economy has fully recovered and that the unemployment number must be hiding something.

“Numbers hiding something” sounded pretty vague (and Harry Potter-esque) to us and a quick Technorati search of economists dissecting Krugman’s writings turned up quite a bit of data debunking pretty much everything he wrote.

There is so much more to debunk/critique in Krugman’s column but we will leave it for others to do. For example, the Hertitage Foundation has a nice article showing why Krugman’s tax cuts/deficit statements are wrong.

Additional reading for Paul Krugman: Sure It’s a Flawed Analysis, But Isn’t It a Pretty Graphic?

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 7th, 2005 at 7:02 pm by Insider and is filed under I knew I'd use my Econ major, Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.