The worst grade I ever received in college was in an economics
class. A Republican might tell you that explains
a few things,
beginning with the fact that I now work for a
left-leaning alt-weekly that gives itself away for free. I don’t
know. Maybe my bad economics grade does explain my life’s trajectory,
maybe not. But I do believe it puts me squarely within the target
audience for Paul Krugman’s new book, The Conscience of a
Liberal, which, like Krugman’s New York Times columns,
seeks to digest complicated economic theories for the benefit of
economic dunces, and then tries to employ these theories in support of
a political argument.
The political argument Krugman makes in The Conscience of a
Liberal will be familiar to readers of his columns, and to anyone
who pays even a moderate amount of attention to liberal politics. It is
as follows: The Republican Party has been taken over by radicals,
“movement conservatives,” who have contempt for Democracy and a vision
for a harsh, unjust America—a vision, Krugman writes, that is
“completely antithetical to that of the progressive movement.” These
conservatives have been very successful of late, but they can—and
must—be stopped.
Krugman’s economic arguments are more complicated. But they can be
summed up as a dissent from the classic economic orthodoxy that not
only venerates free markets and worships Adam Smith’s “invisible hand,”
but also sees them as the prime movers in wealth distribution, which
then affects the politics of the day (just as the current unequal
distribution of wealth in America—the richest Americans getting
richer, top executives earning several hundred times more than their
average employees, talk of “a new gilded age”—is seen by many as
strongly affecting our current politics).
Krugman argues that it is, in fact, the other way around; that
politics leads and the economic reality follows. History, Krugman
writes, “strongly suggests that institutions, norms, and the political
environment matter a lot more for the distribution of income—and
that impersonal market forces matter less—than Economics 101
might lead you to believe.”
So maybe my poor grade wasn’t such a bad thing after all?
Krugman’s argument about economic causation, which he takes the bulk
of the book to make and support, comes to form the basis for his
political call to arms, which makes up the last few chapters of the
book. If politics affects economics, and we don’t like the current
economics (and who does but the richest Americans?), then we need to
take control of the political steering wheel and change course, Krugman
says.
He teaches economics at Princeton and won the prestigious John Bates
Clark Medal for his work in the field, so I’m hardly qualified to argue
with his economic theorizing. However, one of Krugman’s fellow
academics recently wrote an unimpressed review of the ideas behind
The Conscience of a Liberal in the New York Times (Krugman’s own paper!). David M. Kennedy, a professor of history at
Stanford who won the Pulitzer Prize for a book about the Depression and
World War II eras, a period that Krugman spends much time and verbiage
exploring in his book, questioned in the review whether Krugman is even
a real economist, since Krugman doesn’t see laissez-faire as an ideal
way of organizing an economy, and called Krugman’s book “factually
shaky and narratively simplified.”
I’m not ashamed to admit that I am generally a fan of narrative
simplification when it comes to economic writing. But shaky facts, not
so much. And, even leaving the academics to debate the question of
whether the economic theory that supports Krugman’s politics is,
itself, supportable, there remains a question about Krugman’s politics:
Are they so new and unusual as to warrant a book?
The book left me thinking not.
Perhaps it is something in the field of economics to demonstrate
that politics creates economic conditions, rather than the other way
around, but in the world of politics, it is hardly new to suggest, as
Krugman does in this book, that the Republican Party has been taken
over by “movement conservatives” who must be stopped and cannot be
appeased by compromise. Nor is it unusual in liberal political circles
to exhibit a profound nostalgia for Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New
Deal era, when unions were strong, social security was new and
unchallenged, and all was allegedly right with the world. Nor is it
pleasing, in the world of political-book reading, to once again have to
drag one’s eyes across the phrase “weapons of mass distraction” (in
Krugman’s book, this tired phrase is the heading for chapter nine) or
to read yet another takedown of the Kristols (Irving, the original, and
William, the current) and William F. Buckley (famed editor of the
National Review).
Krugman writes an often-great column. He’s widely regarded as a
great economist. He’s already the author of seven books. This one,
though, whatever its economic merits, could have used a new political
idea or two. 
