Will’s logic is awesome. He is, in effect, saying that instead of the minor programs that the FDR tried in the 30s, the real way out of the Great Depression was for the US government to determine about 40% of the GDP.

I love that Krugman calls him on that.

November 16, 2008 at 4:27 pm

Daniel De Groot

It is another data point in the futility of looking for sincere conservative intellectuals to bother having constructive debates with.

Will, one of their leading lights is dumb enough to spout off this kind of crap in front of a much more knowledgeable and qualified observer and expect to get away with it.

Here’s a tip George: You’re on these panels about 5 times more often than Krugman. Save your opinions on the Great Depression for the times when Krugman is not sitting right there ready to embarrass you.

November 16, 2008 at 4:28 pm

urbino

Yeah, I continue to be slightly gobsmacked by that particular conservative argument, too. You’d think people worried about galloping socialism wouldn’t speak so highly of that era’s economic approach.

November 16, 2008 at 4:31 pm

urbino

BTW, the “magic history phrase” is . . . ? “You don’t need to invoke the government to explain that,” perhaps?

November 16, 2008 at 4:36 pm

Wrongshore

Pssst, Urbino! Check out the post title.

November 16, 2008 at 4:59 pm

A little slice of heaven… « blueollie

[…] of the American West: they show Paul Krugman (Nobel Laureate in economics) correcting conservative pundit George Will when it comes to FDR and the Great […]

November 16, 2008 at 5:38 pm

kid bitzer

urbino, you’re displaying ranke ignorance.

November 16, 2008 at 5:56 pm

Ahistoricality

“what actually happened” is a wonderful phrase: I’ve got a student who’s clearly getting too much information from some pretty fringe sources, and I might need to use it.

November 16, 2008 at 6:01 pm

grackle

To continue what D de G says, I’m amazed, even though maybe I shouldn’t be, at the hubris of Will, proclaiming his own certified economic expertise, with Krugman sitting right next to him. I just gotta kinda admire his daring. I wouldn’t a thought he’d be actually so alive. Of course, I love that he’s wrong (he is wrong, Eric, isn’t he?)

November 16, 2008 at 6:10 pm

eric

he is wrong, Eric, isn’t he?

Are you trying to hurt me?

November 16, 2008 at 6:32 pm

Grande debates da Blogosfera: O New Deal | Na Prática a Teoria é Outra

[…] Eric Rauchway: Para o caso do NPTO ainda estar anotando o placar, manda aí, Nobel: […]

November 16, 2008 at 6:35 pm

Michael

I’m so glad to have the old Krugman back, talking about economics instead of how annoying he finds Obama and Obama supporters.

I don’t mean disagreeing with Obama on health care, which is fair. (Although this seems like a bit much to me:
“If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, (universal health care) just won’t happen.”)

In case anyone has forgotten, here are a few choice quotes pulled after 5 minutes of Googling. The first is from a column called “Hate Springs Eternal”:

“I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here: most of the venom I see is coming from supporters of Mr. Obama”

Or, “among at least some of Barack Obama’s supporters there seems to be a belief that if their candidate is elected, the world’s problems will melt away in the face of his multicultural charisma.”

Or how about this one: “progressive Obama supporters, caught up in the romance of his candidacy, don’t understand that he’s actually undermining their cause.”

Or, “every time there’s a hard choice to be made he (Obama) comes down on the side of doing less.”

Or, “I know that Mr. Obama’s supporters hate to hear this, but he really is less progressive than his rivals on matters of domestic policy” (Notice that “domestic policy”? Nicely done, right? Set aside that whole Iraq War thing, and Hillary was Mahatma Gandhi.)

There’s loads more to cite, but it’s too depressing to relive.

November 16, 2008 at 6:43 pm

Ben Alpers

“If Mr. Obama gets the nomination, (universal health care) just won’t happen.”

I think that’s still a fair statement. Krugman’s mistake was in supposing that if Clinton got the nomination it would.

November 16, 2008 at 6:44 pm

kid bitzer

eh, that stuff doesn’t bother me too much, esp. the parts that are from the primary period.

krugman is a clintonite, okay? all his pals worked for bill. he wanted hillary to get the nomination. it’s not surprising that he said what he said.

but just as hrc herself came around and worked pretty hard for obama in the general, i think we can count on krugman not to hold a grudge.

and the work that krugman did in being the lone voice of sanity against bush in the prestige media for the first five years of this millenium means i will always be in his debt.

yeah, i wish he hadn’t said the anti-obama stuff, but i still admire krugman more than any other op-ed writer out there.

November 16, 2008 at 6:49 pm

Steve_in_NC

Will should have watched more Woody Allen.

“I heard what you were saying, you know nothing of my work…”

(probably too liberal for him).

November 16, 2008 at 6:58 pm

NPTO

Hey, thanks for the link, and don’t worry, I’ll keep score. I assure you I don’t have anything that remotely resembles something better to do.

November 16, 2008 at 7:50 pm

Michael

I admire him as well, kid bitzer. I was being sincere when I said I’m glad to have him back.

But I can’t say that his behavior didn’t bother me. And I did in fact find it surprising that he said what he said. He was, after all, the one chastising others for shirts vs. skins partisanship.

November 16, 2008 at 8:27 pm

Mike M

Anyone have a response to this takedown of Krugman:
http://www.historiansagainstwar.org/blog/2008/11/answer-to-critics-krugmans-prescription.html
admittedly, Beito’s no economist, but he does raise one or two interesting points.

November 16, 2008 at 9:18 pm

Walt

That doesn’t have anything to do anything Krugman says in the video, which is about after the Great Depression is underway and the financial system has already collapsed.

Beito, I’m assuming, is an Austrian. The “tell” for this is that he uses the word “malinvestment”, and talks up the wonders of the 1921 recession.

November 16, 2008 at 9:47 pm

Urk

Actually, Beito is a Historian who teaches ( or at least used to teach, 5-6 years ago) at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. He’s a liberterian. The US history survey course that I took from him (to satisfy a dept. requirement for my American Studies undergrad which apparently couldn’t be filled by any of the upper level history course I had taken before transferring) was easily the most ideologically slanted course I’ve ever been in, certainly more so than any taught by liberal academics. the phrase “voted with their feet” was a laughably recurrent feature of lecture.

I will however give him this: when Bush started seriously mobilizing for war he was one of the first professors on the campus to speak out against it, loudly and publicly.

I don’t think he’s Austrian, unless there’s some sense of the word that I’m misunderstanding.

November 16, 2008 at 9:50 pm

Ahistoricality

Well, Beito’s a libertarian, for sure, but I’m not sure I’d call him an Austrian. I’m no economist either, but the first question I’d have about the comparison between the 1921-2 and 1929-39 depressions would be whether the global economy suffered as much in the earlier one. My recollection is that the European economy, while damaged in WWI, was starting to recover; Japan and the US, ironically, because they hadn’t been damanged in WWI, had overheated and were experiencing a deflation/slowdown in the aftermath of the immediate post-war inflation. The global overproduction of commodities and industrial goods which made the Great Depression so difficult didn’t yet exist. The context was completely different.

November 16, 2008 at 9:57 pm

Ahistoricality

I don’t think he’s Austrian, unless there’s some sense of the word that I’m misunderstanding.

Austrian School, as transmitted by Hayek and von Mises. He certainly hangs around with Austrians, but I’m not sure I’ve ever noticed him citing them.

Beito’s got some good political instincts — I like the libertarian sensitivity to issues of power and civil rights — but the ideology gets pretty thick when you start talking about solutions and markets.

November 16, 2008 at 10:19 pm

Walt

I’m spending too much time online reading Great Depression debates. I forgot “Austrian” had a meaning other than “Austrian School”.

November 17, 2008 at 5:23 am

kid bitzer

and anyhow:

“what actually happened” is not the magic history phrase.

what actually happened is that ranke said “as it actually happened”.

(or “how it actually happened” or “in the way in which it u.s.w.”)

eric’s title doesn’t reflect the magic history phrase as it actually happened.

i blame krugman.

November 17, 2008 at 5:36 am

andrew

I blame Wilhelm von Humboldt.

November 17, 2008 at 6:34 am

Michael Turner

“Krugman Schools Will,” is sort of a garden path sentence. I spent a second wondering what Krugman Schools would do.

George Will – a kind of garden path name, then?

George will listen to Krugman. George will make faces. George will hear Krugman talk about “consumers” during the 30s. George will mentally note that “consumers” are a whole category of troublesome beings that didn’t even exist until that other massive irritation, Ralph Nader, invented them in the 60s. George will silently dismiss Krugman’s nonsense.

George Will.

November 17, 2008 at 7:57 am

kid bitzer

andrew, i can’t follow your link.

November 17, 2008 at 8:32 am

politicalfootball

Regarding Krugman and Obama, I’m awfully glad that there’s a prominent voice out there willing to challenge Obama from the left. If Obama’s instincts really are toward universal healthcare (and I believe that’s the case), then he needs people hassling him about the insufficiency of his stated plan. Edwards performed this service admirably in the primaries, and dragged both Clinton and Obama in his direction.

November 17, 2008 at 10:06 am

Ben Alpers

Regarding Krugman and Obama, I’m awfully glad that there’s a prominent voice out there willing to challenge Obama from the left.

I’m certainly happy to have people challenge Obama from the left, but Krugman’s not very far left. At least during the primaries, he was endorsing Hillary Clinton’s healthcare plan, which was more or less the Obama plan plus mandates.

If the goal is to achieve universal health care access, we need someone pressuring Obama in the direction of Medicare for All.

November 17, 2008 at 10:46 am

Vance

kb, this appears to be what andrew meant to link.

November 17, 2008 at 11:36 am

kid bitzer

ho-ho!

i always associate this view of historicism with ranke’s quote about the historian’s task being ‘bloss zu zeigen, wie es eigentlich gewesen’.

i had not known that this was indebted to von humboldt. anyone have a link to a translation of humboldt into german?

November 17, 2008 at 11:58 am

Daniel De Groot

Ben,

Krugman has said numerous times he supports true UHC, but picked Clinton’s plan as “better” but not ideal.

Much of Conscience of a Liberal is about the need and value of bringing UHC to America. Not least because Bill Kristol was right: It would reengergize liberalism and refresh the idea that government can contribute meaningfully and positively to people’s lives, which is the biggest reason the GOP will oppose it tooth and nail (ditto SCHIP expansion).

November 17, 2008 at 12:18 pm

Vance

TDIH: Jackie Speier remembers Jonestown, 30 years later.

November 17, 2008 at 12:41 pm

andrew

Thanks, Vance. I should have checked to make sure I didn’t mess up the html.

November 17, 2008 at 1:08 pm

Ben Alpers

i had not known that this was indebted to von humboldt. anyone have a link to a translation of humboldt into german?

The original German text of Humboldt’s “Über die Aufgaben des Geschichtsschreibers” is available here. The sentence in question (translated in the earlier link as “The historian’s task is to present what actually happened” is “Die Aufgaben des Geschichtsschreibers ist die Darstellung des Geschehenen”. The translator seems to have imported the “actually” from Ranke. My German is far from perfect, but wouldn’t a more literal translation of that first sentence be “The task of the writer of history is the presentation of events”?

November 17, 2008 at 1:14 pm

Ben Alpers

Krugman has said numerous times he supports true UHC, but picked Clinton’s plan as “better” but not ideal.

I know Krugman says this.

And Obama has also said that, were he starting from scratch, he’d go with single payer.

I really have two areas of disagreement with such statements of theoretical support for true UHC.

First, the only way we’ll ever achieve full UHC is for more people to start actually proposing it. And it seems reasonable to ask those who claim, in theory, to support it to, you know, actually support it.

Second, even if we can’t achieve a single-payer system in the immediate future, single-payer remains an excellent negotiating position for those who wish to extract the maximum concessions from those who oppose altering our health-care delivery systems.

So color me skeptical about all those who claim to have a preference for single-payer but then put all their efforts into achieving some other sort of health-care reform.

November 17, 2008 at 1:16 pm

Vance

The most straightforward translation of “(das) Geschehene(n)” really is “what happened”. There’s at least one other word (Ereignis) closer to “event”. And I would probably go with “representation” rather than “presentation”.

November 17, 2008 at 1:33 pm

washerdreyer

Off topic, except that it deals with an NYTimes op-ed writer making historical claims, but Kristol wrote today that, “Only two Republicans won presidential elections in that half-century, Dwight D. Eisenhower and Richard M. Nixon. Both were able to take the White House only because we were mired down in difficult wars, in Korea and Vietnam.”

I don’t know much about Eisenhower v. Stevenson in ’52, except for some some of the aspects relating to Nixon but I do know it was a landslide, and since I don’t trust Kristol at all I wonder what evidence there is that in a world where we weren’t mired in Korea, a Republican wouldn’t have won that election. Is it that Truman’s popularity wouldn’t have plummeted, and he would have run and won? That Eisenhower wouldn’t have won the Rep. nomination? I don’t see how it was the key variable deciding Eisenhower v. Stevenson, once those were the candidates.

Having just looked into this a little bit, I notice that the “Bread and Peace” Presidential prediction model does see the casualties from the Korean War as being the main reason Democrats lost in 1952, so maybe I’m wrong to doubt Kristol in this case.

November 17, 2008 at 1:40 pm

kid bitzer

you’re never wrong to doubt kristol, in any case.

his every word is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the’.

November 17, 2008 at 1:44 pm

kid bitzer

by the way, vance, i agree with you that ‘das geschehen’ is more like ‘what happened’ than like ‘the event’.

this makes me wonder whether later in the essay his question ‘was geschieht?’ should be translated as

s’appenin?
or
s’up?

November 17, 2008 at 1:55 pm

urbino

Pssst, Urbino! Check out the post title.

Oh, right. Heh. <sheepish grin>

November 17, 2008 at 2:08 pm

urbino

If the goal is to achieve universal health care access, we need someone pressuring Obama in the direction of Medicare for All.

Just to beat my particular dead horse one more time: I wish Obama, et al., would stop talking in the language of health insurance, and start talking about health care.

Nobody really wants health insurance. We want health care assurance, or ensurance, but insurance can go hang, for all anyone not in that industry cares.

November 17, 2008 at 2:12 pm

Vance

But Urbino, without insurance companies, half the office staff of US hospitals and doctors’ offices would be out on the street begging!

November 17, 2008 at 2:13 pm

urbino

I know. Just imagine how healthy our homeless population would be!

November 17, 2008 at 2:26 pm

Vance

I’m sure everyone has stories like this…but after knee surgery, watching the correspondence between the hospital and my insurance company (“NOT A BILL”) was enlightening.

Also, contra Ben A.’s text, it’s “die Aufgabe”, not “die Aufgaben”, in that title.

November 17, 2008 at 2:35 pm

Ben Alpers

Also, contra Ben A.’s text, it’s “die Aufgabe”, not “die Aufgaben”, in that title.

Hey! It’s my lousy translation upthread…but it’s not my text. I just linked to it ;-)

November 17, 2008 at 2:38 pm

urbino

I’m sure everyone has stories like this…but after knee surgery, watching the correspondence between the hospital and my insurance company (”NOT A BILL”) was enlightening.

I suppose, in the sense that a nature show about vultures fighting over carrion could be enlightening.

November 17, 2008 at 2:57 pm

kid bitzer

right; enlightening but not edifying.

November 18, 2008 at 3:25 am

Stinky

yuck, two dills and no pickle. I wish the entire east coast would fall into the ocean just to drown the self-selected, self-important “media elite.” Krugman is useless; George Will is useless and unctuous. There should be a tax on media appearances that rises as the square of one’s minutes of airtime.

November 18, 2008 at 11:49 am

eric s.

Oh George Will isn’t totally useless. He occasionally writes about baseball.

November 18, 2008 at 10:54 pm

J Thomas

“I wonder what evidence there is that in a world where we weren’t mired in Korea, a Republican wouldn’t have won that election. Is it that Truman’s popularity wouldn’t have plummeted, and he would have run and won? That Eisenhower wouldn’t have won the Rep. nomination?”

It should always be a little uncertain exactly how things would have turned out, if they had turned out different.

What actually happened.

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