"It's now a rough world for people who do sloppy work," says Paul Krugman -- but "somehow [he] can't seem to muster any sympathy"

by Ken

Somehow I seem to have found myself on the Nobel beat. First, there was the rush of the unexpected but wildly deserved Literature prize for Alice Munro. Now there's the curiosity of an Economics prize split three ways, with two of those three, Chicago's Eugene Fama (an old-Chicago-school worshipper of the mojo of "markets") and Yale's Robert Shiller (who has a very different view of markets), being economists whom even I know you don't ever expect to see sharing, well, anything.

Although The New Yorker's John Cassidy has an excellent blogpost, "Inefficient Markets: A Nobel for Shiller (and Fama)," making the case that insofar as the Nobel acknowledges understanding of the inefficiency of markets, it's really to Shiller (right), with a recognition of work done by Fama which laid the groundwork for Shiller's, recognition that also, without saying so, manages to give Fama the Nobel that he unaccountably didn't get back when the Nobel people were handing them out to every economist who had "University of Chicago" on his résumé. (Cassidy also reminds us that he interviewed Fama as one of six University of Chicago economists included in a major magazine piece in the aftermath of the economic meltdown, contemplating the dismal performance of the Chicago wizards, which I wrote about at the time.)

Naturally I was curious what Paul Krugman would have to say -- curious enough that I decided to throw my now-standard NYT clickophobia aside and slip into his blog. Sure enough, there's a post from a little before noon, "The Nobel" (use the above blog link to find it; I'm afraid it'll cost me a click if I click to get a specific blogpost link), in which he says that he's "actually fine with the prize."

It's an old jibe against economics that it's the only field where two people can win the Nobel for saying exactly the opposite thing; even the people making that jibe, however, probably didn't envisage those two guys sharing the same prize, which is kind of what happened here.

But I am actually fine with the prize. Fama's work on efficient markets was essential in setting up the benchmark against which alternatives had to be tested; Shiller did more than anyone else to codify the ways the efficient market hypothesis fails in practice. If Fama has said some foolish things in recent years, no matter -- he did earn this honor, as did Shiller. As for Hansen, his work involves econometric methods on which I have no expertise at all, but I'll trust the experts who consider it great work.

So, all good -- and you actually have to admire the prize committee for finding a way to give Fama the long-expected honor without seeming as if they are completely out of touch with everything going on around them.

But this isn't what really got my attention on this visit to the Krugman blog. A mere 15 minuts before "The Nobel," PK posted this:

October 14, 2013, 11:29 am

Do You Know Who I Am?

One of the odd things about the debates we've been having over economic policy since the financial crisis is how many people on one side of these debates -- the side I'm not on, as it happens -- believe that they can win arguments by pulling rank. Critics are dismissed as just bloggers [a droll Brad DeLong putdown of Niall Ferguson], which supposedly disqualifies them from pointing out errors and untrue statements; ideas are dismissed (wrongly, as it happens) as not part of what anyone has taught graduate students , as if this removes any possibility that the ideas might nonetheless be right.

Do I pull rank the same way? I'm sure that if you go over my writings with a fine-toothed comb, you'll find some examples. But I try not to; I try to make arguments on the merits, and if I dismiss someone's contribution, I try to do it based on what he says, not who he is.

What a lot of people -- academics, I'm sorry to say, in particular -- don't seem to understand are the limits to what credentials get you, in principle and in practice.

Basically, having a fancy named chair and maybe some prizes entitles you to a hearing -- no more. It's a great buzzing hive of commentary out there, so nobody can read everything that someone says; but if a famous intellectual makes a pronouncement, he both should and does get a listen much more easily than someone without the preexisting reputation.

But academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there's no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot -- and no special qualifications required to make that pronouncement other than doing your own homework.

Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.

One of the great things about the blogosphere is that it has made it possible for a number of people meeting that second condition to gain an audience. I don't care whether they're PhDs, professors, or just some guy with a blog -- it's the work that matters.

Meanwhile, we didn't need blogs to know that many great and famous intellectuals are, in fact, fools. Some of them may always have been fools; some of them are hedgehogs, who know a lot about a narrow area but are ignorant elsewhere (and are, in many cases, so ignorant that they don't know they're ignorant -- a variant on Dunning-Kruger.) And some of them have, for whatever reason, lost it -- I can think offhand of several economists, not all of them all that old, of whom it is common to say, "I can't believe that guy wrote those papers."

And let me add that believing that you can pull rank in this wide-open modern age is itself a demonstration of incompetence. Who, exactly, do you think cares? Not the readers, that's for sure.

True, it's now a rough world for people who do sloppy work, and are counting on their credentials to shield them from criticism. Somehow, though, I can't seem to muster any sympathy.

Right-wingers never get this, and of course hearing it (once again) from Krugman will just make them batshit-crazier, more inflexible, and generally more bogus intellectually.


UPDATE TO OUR CONTINUING NOBEL PRIZE COVERAGE . . .

In the outstanding tribute to newly minted Literature Nobelist Alice Munro, "Alice Munro, Our Chekhov" (which I wrote about Friday), The New Yorker's James Wood spotlighted facets of Munro's crafts and literary wizardry via some detailed comments on the story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain." The story link, unfortunately, was to the magazine's online archive, which is a wonderful resource but, alas, tappable only by subscribers. And even subscribers can only read it online.

Now the story has been reprinted as the fiction piece in the October 21 issue of the magazine, with a conventional link. My suggestion had been if possible to read the story first, so as to avoid the inevitable spoilers in Wood's piece. Now it's easy to do. Well done, New Yorker people!

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