Paul Krugman, The Wonk Gap, and The Eternal Church of the All-Seeing State

A few days ago, Kevin Glass wrote a story about the alleged "Wonk Gap" at Meatball Central, aka The Federalist.

His basic observation is this: The Progressive Left likes to flatter itself as a Party of Experts, making rational, scientific decisions about policy without regard to politics or tribal loyalty.

As a hack at the Washington Monthly put it:

[T]he left has an equally lopsided advantage when it comes to a different type of pundit: wonks. The left’s wonk bench is both wide and deep. These folks are ideologically inclined, certainly, but are also dedicated to study, empirical analysis, and informed debate. They argue mostly through evidence-based reasoning, sometimes shot through with a bit of sarcasm or anger, but they’re uncomfortable with abject partisanship.

This is directly contrasted with the Unreasoning Right, a group which has precious few "wonks," low collective expertise, and, to fill in the significant gaps of their knowledge, examines every policy question through the prism of ideology.

Here's the problem: None of that is true. Because the Left's Wonks have an embarrassing tendency to completely ignore all of their previously stated Expert Opinion the moment a political actor, Barack Obama, tells them that the Left's political interests will be served by doing so.

What good is being a "wonk" if you're going to say "F*** You, Science" the moment the Democratic Party needs you to?

Ever since President Obama endorsed a federal minimum wage hike in his State of the Union speech, progressives have lined up in lockstep support. Economists, bloggers, tv hosts all have come out saying that a minimum wage hike is clearly the right move. You’d be forgiven if you thought that it’s been a very short while since the very existence of a minimum wage was considered controversial.

In the late 1980s, the New York Times advocated for an abolition of the minimum wage. With 25 more years of research, much of it showing that the minimum wage is an inefficient distortion of labor markets, the New York Times reversed position and advocated for a minimum wage hike to historic highs.

...

Even the Times’ progressive-and-proud columnist Paul Krugman has earlier had wise things to say about the minimum wage. In 1998, Krugman wrote:

So what are the effects of increasing minimum wages? Any Econ 101 student can tell you the answer: The higher wage reduces the quantity of labor demanded, and hence leads to unemployment. This theoretical prediction has, however, been hard to confirm with actual data. Indeed, much-cited studies by two well-regarded labor economists, David Card and Alan Krueger, find that where there have been more or less controlled experiments, for example when New Jersey raised minimum wages but Pennsylvania did not, the effects of the increase on employment have been negligible or even positive. Exactly what to make of this result is a source of great dispute. Card and Krueger offered some complex theoretical rationales, but most of their colleagues are unconvinced; the centrist view is probably that minimum wages “do,” in fact, reduce employment, but that the effects are small and swamped by other forces.

What is remarkable, however, is how this rather iffy result has been seized upon by some liberals as a rationale for making large minimum wage increases a core component of the liberal agenda–for arguing that living wages “can play an important role in reversing the 25-year decline in wages experienced by most working people in America” (as this book’s back cover has it). Clearly these advocates very much want to believe that the price of labor–unlike that of gasoline, or Manhattan apartments–can be set based on considerations of justice, not supply and demand, without unpleasant side effects. This will to believe is obvious in this book: The authors not only take the Card-Krueger results as gospel, but advance a number of other arguments that just do not hold up under examination.

...

This earlier version of Paul Krugman had the right idea, writing that what a large minimum wage hike “is really about is not living standards, or even economics, but morality.”

The New York Times’ view has changed. Paul Krugman’s view has changed. Jason Briggeman of George Mason University took a dive into why these elite progressives have changed their opinions on the minimum wage. None of the possible reasons speaks well to the elite progressives’ thinking.

Yes, the sudden reversal on the minimum wage by left-wing academics is so abrupt and startling that other academics are writing papers to try to explain the volte face.

...

The intertwining of the left-wing intelligentsia with the Democratic Party has compromised the ability of many of these writers to actually think critically....

The result of this bandwagon-circling around the inherent rightness of progressivism is a rejection of the traits that they’ve associated with “being a wonk.” [W]hen the leader of the Democratic Party takes a side on an issue that the wonks may feel conflicted about, they tend to fall in line. When the progressive wonkocracy is a key leg of the Democratic Party, though, they’ll discard dispassionate analysis for partisan hackery.

Scott Linciome also discovers other "experts" now claiming to be surprised by the perfectly obvious -- that insurance companies, whose products are now mandated to be purchased, should be set to reap record profits.

And Krugman, meanwhile, continues to discover that all of his previous expertise on matters economic has now been rendered moot by the new discoveries made in the field-- discoveries announced by non-economist Barack Obama in political speeches.

"Here's the world as many Republicans see it: Unemployment insurance, which generally pays eligible workers between 40 and 50 percent of their previous pay, reduces the incentive to search for a new job. As a result, the story goes, workers stay unemployed longer."--former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, New York Times, Dec. 9

"Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect. . . . In other countries, particularly in Europe, benefits are more generous and last longer. The drawback to this generosity is that it reduces a worker's incentive to quickly find a new job. Generous unemployment benefits in some European countries are widely believed to be one of the main causes of 'Eurosclerosis,' the persistent high unemployment that affects a number of European countries."--"Macroeconomics" by Paul Krugman and Robin Wells, second edition, 2009

I should confess that Krugman does not explicitly endorse the "wide belief" that unemployment benefits cause longer-term unemployment in that quote. Nevertheless, just as he admitted the "centrist" view on the minimum wage is that it reduces employment by a small amount, here he confesses the "wide belief" of economists that longer-term and more generous unemployment benefits lead to, well, a more generous and longer-term spell of unemployment.

That belief is texbook-- literally. Krugman wrote about it in a macroeconomics textbook.

And yet, when he is in his firebreathing partisan loyalist mode -- a mode he has scarcely departed from lately -- he will instruct you that only stupid Republicans and non-wonks could possibly believe these silly little nostrums, and that no self-respecting Wonk could possibly credit them as true.

posted by Ace at 02:22 PM

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