Creating caricatures is "listening"? Only in Wonderland!

It seems that Paul Krugman really does listen to what others who are not Keynesians have to say. Really! Why do I know that? Krugman himself says it:

In my experience with these things – which I find both within economics and more broadly – is that if you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at.

The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.

In his own blog, Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux has his own reply to Krugman, and you can read it here. Now, for a guy who insists calling the Austrian Theory of the Business Cycle the "Hangover Theory" (and then explaining it in caricature form and simply refusing to acknowledge that Austrians do not explain it in the terms Krugman uses), his statement is pretty rich. Furthermore, I looked at some past posts of my blog and found a number of places where Krugman has declared that opposition to his points is motivated, at least in large part, by racism and hatred of others. (Last year, Krugman insisted that anyone opposed to QE2 had that viewpoint because that person wanted others to suffer and be out of work.)

So, despite Krugman's insistence that HE and HIS FRIENDS all are the epitome of open-mindedness and that everyone else is a dolt and idiot, I let his own columns and his own comments speak for themselves.

I have met a number of economists who won the Nobel, including Krugman, James Buchanan, Gary Becker, Milton Friedman, and F.A. Hayek. Interestingly, the latter four were gracious to their intellectual opponents and took great efforts to be able to explain differing points of view. And I never saw those four use the kind of attack language that Krugman regularly uses in his columns, articles, blog posts, and interviews.