On the one hand, I applaud Krugman and Stephens for admitting they were wrong about something. It’s not easy to do and many many people never do it no matter how many times they’re wrong and no matter how public the venue in which they were wrong.
On the other hand, it’s possible – and not at all rare – to admit you’re wrong about something and at the same time be wrong about what you were wrong about, while at the same time making excuses and compounding the error[s] by committing more errors. That’s what Krugman and Stephens have done.
Not only has Krugman been wrong repeatedly about a large variety of predictions, but although he says he was wrong to have missed the seriousness of the coming inflation, he says it’s all just so much more complex than the rest of us can know:
But what, exactly, did I get wrong? Both the initial debate and the way things have played out were more complicated than I suspect most people realize…
What we had…was an argument about magnitudes [of inflation]…Those of us on Team Relaxed argued, however, that the structure of the plan would lead to a much smaller surge in G.D.P. than the headline number would suggest. A big piece of the plan was one-time checks to taxpayers, which we argued would be largely saved rather than spent; another big piece was aid to state and local governments, which we thought would be spent only gradually, over several years.
He goes on in that vein for a while, and adds that a lot of the metrics he and his fellows on “Team Relaxed” were using happened just as they had envisioned. And yet somehow inflation got much worse than they had thought – why? Here’s his explanation for that:
Much, although not all, of the inflation surge seems to reflect disruptions associated with the pandemic. Fear of infection and changes in the way we live caused big shifts in the mix of spending: People spent less money on services and more on goods, leading to shortages of shipping containers, overstressed port capacity, and so on.
Now, we can’t expect someone like an economist to have thought of such things, can we?
Then he goes into other signs that the economy got “overheated” – but even that shouldn’t have led to all this inflation. Next:
So something was wrong with my model of inflation — again, a model shared by many others, including those who were right to worry in early 2021. I know it sounds lame to say that Team Inflation was right for the wrong reasons, but it’s also arguably true.
Yes Paul, it does sound lame. And what does “arguably true” mean – that a person can mount some sort of argument that it’s true?
And of course both Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and China’s lockdown of major cities have added a whole new level of disruption.
Of course.
Krugman calls all of this a “lesson in humility.” I don’t think Krugman is capable of such a thing in any deep or meaningful way. One thing Krugman has entirely left out – something I think was operating hugely and still is – is Krugman’s own politics coupled with wishful thinking. I can almost guarantee that had Trump been president under the same circumstances, Krugman would not have been on “Team Relaxed” about inflation.
What’s more, isn’t there something else that Krugman has left out? Something rather obvious? Could it possibly have been this?
American Petroleum Institute (API) CEO Mike Sommers ripped the White House energy strategy, accusing it of sending mixed signals to domestic industry…
“This administration’s misguided policy agenda — shifting away from domestic oil and natural gas — has compounded inflationary pressures and added headwinds to companies’ daily efforts to meet growing energy needs while reducing emissions,” Sommers told reporters Thursday…
The Consumer Price Index, which the Department of Labor uses to measure inflation, surged 9.1% year-over-year in June, according to a report released Wednesday. Energy prices, including gasoline, natural gas, electricity and fuel oil, alone increased 41.6% over the last 12 months…
“One of the key concerns that we have are the continued mixed messages that we’re getting from this administration,” Sommers said. “On one hand, they’re asking for more supply, but on the other hand, continuing to talk about how this industry needs to go away within a very short period of time.”
Sommers is speaking on behalf of the petroleum industry, of course, so he’s not what you’d call an unbiased source. But it seems rather obvious to me that he’s correct (some more background can be found here). Yet I don’t hear a whisper about this factor in Krugman’s column. Why doesn’t he even address it? Because it would mean he’d have to not only admit he was wrong, but that Biden has been wrong as well.
And then there’s the Times’ resident “conservative,” Bret Stephens. He says he was wrong about Trump supporters. Not Trump himself, mind you, but his supporters, and that some of the things Stephens wrote – such as this one, in his first column about Trump – were counterproductive: “If by now you don’t find Donald Trump appalling, you’re appalling.”
You can summarize Stephens’ July 21st column this way: he says he shouldn’t have called Trump supporters stupid losers even though they are stupid losers. But they’re losers who have been wronged by the Democrats and Obama and so there was a reason they were willing to support an insurrectionist bigot like Trump and didn’t realize – unlike Stephens, who realized and still realizes – how absolutely terrible Trump was and is. But by putting them down, he alienated them and thereby lost his chance to persuade them to change their minds about Trump and see as Stephens does. He should have empathized with them more.
Here’s an excerpt:
…[Stephens says he wrote] dozens of columns denouncing Trump as a unique threat to American life, democratic ideals and the world itself. I regret almost nothing of what I said about the man and his close minions. But the broad swipe at his voters caricatured them and blinkered me.
It also probably did more to help than hinder Trump’s candidacy.
I don’t think Stephens has that kind of clout with anyone, but he continues:
When I looked at Trump, I saw a bigoted blowhard making one ignorant argument after another. What Trump’s supporters saw was a candidate whose entire being was a proudly raised middle finger at a self-satisfied elite that had produced a failing status quo.
I was blind to this. Though I had spent the years of Barack Obama’s presidency denouncing his policies, my objections were more abstract than personal. I belonged to a social class that my friend Peggy Noonan called “the protected.” My family lived in a safe and pleasant…
Trump’s appeal, according to Noonan, was largely to people she called “the unprotected.” Their neighborhoods weren’t so safe and pleasant. Their schools weren’t so excellent. Their livelihoods weren’t so secure. Their experience of America was often one of cultural and economic decline, sometimes felt in the most personal of ways.
It was an experience compounded by the insult of being treated as losers and racists —clinging, in Obama’s notorious 2008 phrase, to “guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren’t like them.”
No wonder they were angry.
Anger can take dumb or dangerous turns, and with Trump they often took both.
So these angry losers – losers compared to people like Bret Stephens, society’s winners – were also stupid to back Trump, but because of their anger it was understandable. That’s what Stephens failed to understand.
It’s really quite something, isn’t it? How condescending someone can be while thinking he or she is being understanding, all the while understanding very little about the actual Trump versus the Trump monster the left created and someone like Stephens agreed with because Trump was obviously so very “appalling”?
The following is probably the most interesting passage in the entire essay, one in which Stephens comes close to saying something true but doesn’t quite make it:
I could have thought a little harder about the fact that, in my dripping condescension toward his supporters, I was also confirming their suspicions about people like me — people who talked a good game about the virtues of empathy but practice it only selectively; people unscathed by the country’s problems yet unembarrassed to propound solutions.
Unfortunately, he follows it up with this:
“I also could have given Trump voters more credit for nuance.”
Nuance? What he means by that – in the next paragraph – is that a lot of people didn’t think much of Trump personally but liked the way he had of “defying deeply flawed conventional pieties.” How about that they liked Trump’s proposed policies, most of which seemed sane as opposed to insane?
Here’s the way it ends:
A final question for myself: Would I be wrong to lambaste Trump’s current supporters, the ones who want him back in the White House despite his refusal to accept his electoral defeat and the historic outrage of Jan. 6?
Morally speaking, no. It’s one thing to take a gamble on a candidate who promises a break with business as usual. It’s another to do that with an ex-president with a record of trying to break the Republic itself.
But I would also approach these voters in a much different spirit than I did the last time. “A drop of honey catches more flies than a gallon of gall,” noted Abraham Lincoln early in his political career. “If you would win a man to your cause, first convince him that you are his sincere friend.” Words to live by, particularly for those of us in the business of persuasion.
So despite the extreme contrast of the state of the US under Trump and what has happened to this country during the Biden administration, Stephens still clings (and not at all bitterly or regretfully) to his deeply-held belief that Trump was awful, and he cites January 6 as the prime example although I’m sure he could come up with others. He must still be in that very very protected class if he still doesn’t get that Trump was enormously better for this country and even the world than Biden has been, and if anyone has been trying to “break the Republic” it has been the left.
Stephens is completely unable to see that. But this time around, he proposes that he won’t show it. Instead, he’ll try to trap those Trump-supporting flies with honey, by convincing them that he’s their friend – the better to do his job of persuading them.
I’m here to tell Stephens – not that he’s listening to me – that he has no hope of persuading a single Trump supporter of anything whatsoever excerpt his own cluelessness and arrogance. And I doubt he convinces anyone on the left of anything, either.
Even though Stephens considers himself to be in the persuasion business, he doesn’t even seem to realize that he’s basically in the “preaching to the choir” business as well as the “token conservative in a leftist outfit” business. Of course, in his failure to persuade he is hardly alone. Persuasion of someone with a different point of view is actually extremely difficult and quite rare, because – as Stephens and Krugman so aptly demonstrate though their own examples – a mind is a difficult thing to change.
