douchebag
The center-left, as represented by people like Krugman and DeLong, have not come forward with an alternative transformative agenda, but have instead preached a narrow and fundamentally conservative vision of countercyclical re-stabilization and temporary demand stimulation, apparently with no greater end in sight than a kind of "return to normalcy". Krugman has resolutely resisted calls to understand the crisis of 2007/8 as only one symptom of a fundamentally sick, unjust, oppressive and extractive system. He has insisted that structural transformation is not necessary, and that we should focus like a laser beam on cyclical matters. Krugman is not associated in the public mind, insofar as I can tell, with any particular program of national renewal, restructuring or transformative change.
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All these kinds of changes, however, terrify the average New York Times reader or elite professional in academia or elsewhere. Their affluence is, in the end, constructed in great part out of the meagerly-recompensed labor of their social subordinates. Those opportunities have been lost. Mission accomplished for the center-left.
Lately, Krugman has lately turned media space into an ongoing effort to enhance the social prestige of economists, and to make sure everyone knows that Paul Krugman in particular has always been right about everything. It’s become quite boring and obtuse. Ultimately, Krugman has no interesting ideas, and seems to revel in his hidebound liberal conservatism. Then he wonders why he can’t get enough people to pay attention to him.
Honestly, if I were staffing a new administration I think I might not hire a single economist. Their “science” amounts to a wall of sophistic conservative blather and apologetics for an ancien regime of hierarchy and exploitation. They intimidate otherwise well-meaning people into a cowed and slavish deference to their rambling pseudo-explanations, their mathematical reconstructions of fantasy worlds and their reification of cruelty and oppression into some kind of natural order.
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