Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Paul Krugman and Comment Policies

A lot of fuss has been stirred up this past week with Paul Krugman's announcement that he was changing the comment policies on his blog to limiting the comments to three inches. After the hostile response by some, Krugman basically said: "Hey, it's my blog and if you don't like it, you can lump it."

A number of people have sent me the recent American Thinker piece on this change in policy, although I must say that I am reluctant to embrace the claim that Krugman is doing this out of sheer paranoia. I don't know, and, frankly, since I rarely write in his comments section, I don't care what his comment policies might be.

On a number of occasions, my own comments section has featured duels between people who agree with Krugman and those who disagree, and once in a while I join in the discussion, although I usually limit my comments to the actual blog post. I figure that the comments section is for people to express their own views and, frankly, to have fun.

So, unless a comment is obscene or potentially libelous, I tend to let it stand, as I am not wounded by disagreements nor do I worry that some people think I am an idiot. When one makes public statements, as I have done, people will disagree and that is OK.

I do think that Krugman has seemed angrier on his blog lately, and certainly has been even more partisan. As an academic economist, I tend to believe that economists should be above political rhetoric, even if we can support political candidates. My hope is that my blog or other articles do not degenerate into political talking points, and all too often, I believe Krugman does just that.

Economists have a lot of intellectual weapons, and I don't believe that we have to let our analysis degenerate into ______ good and _______ bad. Unfortunately, I believe that is just what Krugman has done, and his constant blame of all our current problems on Goldstein, er, Republicans, is just silly and beneath his stature as a Nobel laureate.

3 comments:

frank_p. said...

As always, great post. This is one of my favorite blogs and I am thankful that someone is there to take on the elitists.

I have been reading Krugman for longer than I care to admit and have been disagreeing with him more and more as his blind ideological support for his party has increased and has basically compromised him completely.

However, I became disgusted with his hubris on Oct. 10, 2008 in his article "Faustian Bargains". In the article he mentions John Jansen's blog Across the Curve, and states that "sometimes even I have to look up the terms he [Jansen] uses" ..... "EVEN I" he arrogantly states as if he would automatically know more about bond trading than an expert such as Jansen.

Thank you for highlighting Krugman's hubris, arrogance, blatant hypocrisy, inaccuracies, and blind faith towards his party.

Anonymous said...

They were already cutting out just about anything that was not in 100%agreement with The Krugtard.

Bob Roddis said...

They published my slightly snarky comment today:

http://tinyurl.com/28ozrz9

I've found that if you comment early enough on a post cycle, it generally gets published.