Now I understand!

Why doesn’t eminent economist Paul Krugman’s NYT’s columns rarely, if ever, contain any economics (see Megan McArdle for her usual blistering Krugman rejoinder)? Why does he win the most partisan pundit award in a walk, something you’d think would be positively embarrassing for a columnist hired because he is a professional academic? The mountain of circumstantial evidence leads to only one conclusion: he doesn’t write his own columns.

We know from Virginia Postrel, among others, that many name op-ed writers (e.g., William Bennett) have underlings write for them. So it’s obvious: Krugman has outsourced his column to the Princeton Young Democrats. This would explain everything! Why his columns are filled with the naïve stridency of a 19 year-old true believer. Why they substitute shrill accusations for research and reasoning. Why they’re so intensely focussed on demonizing personalities rather than explaining economic processes.

Here is a sketch of what Krugman’s latest column might have looked like had it actually been written by Krugman (original Princeton Young Democrats text in italics):

As I've been pointing out for more than a year, there is powerful circumstantial evidence that market manipulation played a key role in (the California Energy) crisis. Unlike the soybean market, or the frozen peas market, the energy market is especially susceptible to manipulation because (insert story about a small number of producers with large fixed costs and low variable costs, or whatever).

It turns out that Enron was indeed rigging the markets, with schemes that had smart-alecky nicknames like Fat Boy, Death Star and Get Shorty. The schemes “manipulated” the market by … (I don’t know enough about the details of speculative trading to even know where to go from here. But, presumably, Krugman does.) Here is why that constitutes “manipulation” rather than plain “competition.” And here is why soybean farmers can’t do the same thing.

The bigger story involves market manipulation by a number of producers. Since the electricity production market has many features that makes it exceptionally prone to market manipulation, here is regulatory approach that is superior to the de-regulation scheme attempted in California (insert some degree of details of said approach). Like all regulatory schemes, it is prone to “capture” by the regulated industry. Here is how to minimize that problem. And here is why even given the potential capture problem, it is superior to the alternative de-regulation approaches tried by states like Pennsylvania.

The above would have had pretty much zero partisanship, but a lot of valuable economics.

Further proof of media bias (as if any more were needed):

A Bernard Kalb interview with Ted Kopel aired on C-SPAN a few hours ago. Ted, always an interesting and thoughtful person, approvingly cited the aphorism “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” as the goal of journalism.

If this is that goal of journalism, presumably, then, “journalism” as a career is supposed to appeal specifically to people who a) think that this is a worthy goal, and b) think that journalism is the best way of achieving this goal.

What of those of us who think that wanting to afflict the comfortable is usually just spiteful envy? And what of those of us who think that as a rule being a small cog in a large profit-making enterprise is as effective in comforting the afflicted as is writing summaries of local community board meetings?

“Comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable” quite explicitly appeals to people who think that the “comfortable” got that way primarily by stealing from the less well off, and that that best way to help people is via activities that consciously set that out as a goal. Thus a journalism so defined will attract people with a certain mindset, and detract people with other mindsets (especially people who have been influenced by Adam Smith and the invisible hand). Given that, how could it possibly avoid being biased?