What Krugman has discovered, these last few years, is that ideas that should be dead can live on...

[phantom power]

Meanwhile, it’s been fun, over the last decade or two, to watch Paul Krugman be radicalized by his opponents. This is a longtime globalization advocate who was hired, by the Times, presumably to write a column based mainly on economics, along the lines of his old Slate columns where he’d explain Japan with ticket scalping analogies and so on. Instead they got this angry fulminating liberal truth-crusader.

And this wonderful new Krugman even occasionally sounds very slightly like Doug Henwood. From his NYRB essay:

So is the austerian impulse all a matter of psychology? No, there’s also a fair bit of self-interest involved. As many observers have noted, the turn away from fiscal and monetary stimulus can be interpreted, if you like, as giving creditors priority over workers.

Yesterday, he approvingly cited Naomi Klein. The significance of that can’t quite be overstated, if you, in the words of BuzzFeed, Remember the ’90s. Krugman was (is!) a globalization advocate mainstream economist. Klein is one of the foremost voices of the ’90s anti-globalization movement. It turns out they can share a side of the great American political divide without driving each other crazy:

What [Noah] Smith didn’t note, somewhat surprisingly, is that his argument is very close to Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine, with its argument that elites systematically exploit disasters to push through neoliberal policies even if these policies are essentially irrelevant to the sources of disaster. I have to admit that I was predisposed to dislike Klein’s book when it came out, probably out of professional turf-defending and whatever — but her thesis really helps explain a lot about what’s going on in Europe in particular.

What Krugman has discovered, these last few years, is that ideas that should be dead can live on forever when the right people, like Michael Kinsley, believe in them. And the right people continue to believe in austerity.

http://www.salon.com/2013/05/17/kinsley_loves_austerity_because_it_is_spinach/

[Laelth]

1. k&r for exposure. n/t

-Laelth

[CTyankee]

2. the odd thing is how Kinsley proves Krugman's point. I can't help wondering if Kinsley's

Parkinson disease has affected his thinking. I wonder, because otherwise, why does Kinsley do exactly as Krugman describes?

[BootinUp]

3. Excellent column. nt