Krugman: Fighting The Derp

[mindwalker_i]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/08/opinion/paul-krugman-fighting-the-derp.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=opinion-c-col-left-region®ion=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

When it comes to economics — and other subjects, but I’ll focus on what I know best — we live in an age of derp and cheap cynicism. And there are powerful forces behind both tendencies. But those forces can be fought, and the place to start fighting is within yourself.

What am I talking about here? “Derp” is a term borrowed from the cartoon “South Park” that has achieved wide currency among people I talk to, because it’s useful shorthand for an all-too-obvious feature of the modern intellectual landscape: people who keep saying the same thing no matter how much evidence accumulates that it’s completely wrong.

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And there’s a lot of derp out there. Inflation derp, in particular, has become more or less a required position among Republicans. Even economists with solid reputations, whose professional work should have made them skeptical of inflation hysteria, have spent years echoing the paranoia of the goldbugs. And that tells you why derp abides: it’s basically political.

<snip/>

True, the peddlers of politically inspired derp are quick to accuse others of the same sin. For example, right at the beginning of the Obama administration Robert Lucas, a Nobel laureate at the University of Chicago, accused Christina Romer, the administration’s chief economist, of intellectual fraud. Her analysis of fiscal policy, he declared, was just “a very naked rationalization for policies that were already, you know, decided on for other reasons.”

So I've been arguing for a long time that republicans - at least the party - have goals, like to cut taxes on the wealthy. They are in search of reasons to do that, which is where all of trickle-down economics comes from, but the "reasons" aren't things that they believe. At all. Republicans don't believe trickle-down will work. They don't believe abstinence-only education will work. They don't care. Having it "work" isn't what they want or care about. So the question is really, why do they want what they want? For cutting taxes, it's fairly straightforward to believe they want to get more money to people who will contribute to their (the republicans') campaigns.

The problem is that the policies they enact have real-world consequences, like ballooning income-inequality to the point where it's destructive to the nation, or the world in the case of climate change.

[Shrike47]

1. I can only agree; they don't care if their policies don't work, although they don't admit it.

They just deny the obvious failure of the policy. We just didn't give it long enough yet, or support it enough. Cutting taxes on the rich didn't make the economy boom? Cut 'em some more!

[mindwalker_i]

2. What's kind of amazing is how so many of us peasants

follow them - maybe not "us" peasants, since we follow the other guys. That's the real success of diving people so they follow their team: they don't see how they're getting screwed as they parrot the party line. While I do believe that we on the left also do it to some extent, the righties do it more - no equivalence.