Krugman's Fallacy
Reader comment on item: Conservative Professors, an Endangered Species

Submitted by Constantine Kipnis (United States), Apr 13, 2005 at 15:00

Paul Krugman is hardly your balanced surveyor of the political scene. He's as pink as they come and is regularly cited as an authority by less profound liberal journalists who need a boost from an academic authority figure in economics. Reich is the other one but has a better sense of humor.

Notice the dig at Hayek? How equal time for Hayek and Keynes is the same as creationism and evolution? That alone should tell you that Krugman is hardly a disiniterested party – he's very much manning the barricades.

All I can say is that Republicans have for many years forsaken academia and they are now reaping the fruits of their labor. The disdain for non-applied academic knowledge has always been a trademark of the American pragmatist and far too many right-thinking people went directly into business, law, medicine, etc., bypassing the turmoil of the more argumentative arts and sciences. The exception has been the classical education tradition which produced thinkers like William F. Buckley but even in the 1940s Ivy League was already awash in liberals as he described in "God and Man at Yale"…

The only way to stop the academic scales from tipping left is to pile more bodies on the right side. This requires a certain amount of lunatic dedication and self-sacrifice. To provide some anecdotal evidence from my own distant past, I can attest to how unpleasant it is to be in the extreme political minority: in 1988 an informal post-election poll at a grad student party (50+ people) revealed that I was one of two people in my building (which housed all the language and literature depts, linguistics, and philosophy) at Penn. The other was a druggie contrarian type who hated everyone… There was universal shock and amazement, mitigated only by the fact that I could outdrink anyone at that party and was therefore entitled to a certain amount of eccentricity.

Constantine Kipnis
http://www.productdelta.com
http://kaustik.blogspot.com

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