CT Blue

Sometimes it amazes me. The New York Times has an op-ed columnist with a Nobel Prize in Economics, but it appears no one at the Times reads his columns. How else to explain that someone let a Republican (Max Boot) write an op-ed piece claiming that the Republican Party has only recently become the actual party of stupid, as opposed to the party that was only pretending to be the party of stupid.

I won’t dissect the whole thing, in which he claims that Ronald Reagan, for instance, was really an intellectual playing the part of a stupid person. Let’s just concentrate fire on this particular paragraph:

There are still some thoughtful Republican leaders exemplified by House Speaker Paul D. Ryan, who devised an impressive new budget plan for his party. But the primary vibe from the G.O.P. has become one of indiscriminate, unthinking, all-consuming anger.

As Krugman has noted time and again, Ryan is not an intellectual paragon, and his “impressive new budget plan” is a total fraud. Just one example, written before Ryan’s descent to the Speaker’s chair:

But Ryan didn’t step into that role by actually being a serious, honest conservative; he just played one on TV. If you knew anything at all about budgeting, you soon realized that his supposedly responsible fiscal proposals were stuffed full of mystery meat. He knew how to game the system, creating the impression that CBO had vetted his plans when it had done no such thing (and in fact hinted broadly that the whole thing was a crock). But there’s never been any indication that he actually knows how to produce a budget — and in any case, giant tax cuts for the rich and fiscal responsibility are fundamentally incompatible.

So Ryan’s current stature is really quite curious, and I’d argue quite fragile. He has been a highly successful con artist, pretending to be the reasonable conservative centrists desperately want to see; he has become a power within his party because of that external achievement. But he’s not a true hero of the crazy right; he’s valued mainly because of his successful con job on the center. So he doesn’t have a reserve of goodwill from the crazies that would let him be, well, not crazy. On the other hand, if he were to be the kind of speaker the crazies want, he would undermine that all-important centrist approbation. Being off to the side, pretending to be dealing thoughtfully with important policy issues, was where he needed to be; moving to the speaker’s chair would be a lose-lose proposition.

Time and again people who can add and subtract (see one of Dean Baker’s takedowns here) have pointed out that Ryan’s budgets don’t add up, but Mr. Boot has apparently bought into the myth that Krugman has tried so hard to expose. He can believe what he wants, but it’s really time for the Times to stop reinforcing the Ryan mythology.

Simon Wren-Lewis is a British economist who has a blog called Mainly Macro. Recently he blamed the British tabloids for the Brexit vote, among other things:

My post ‘The triumph of the tabloids’ is now easily my most read post in the four and a half years I have been writing a blog. I suspect that partly reflects readers from overseas trying to understand how on earth British voters could have chosen to do something so obviously harmful to the economy. I have subsequently been pleased to see others picking up the same idea: Maria Kyriakidou here and Charles Grant here. As Grant says, the tabloids “became propaganda sheets” for Leave. He goes on : “as I discovered while knocking on doors during the campaign, many Britons believe all sort of bizarre things about the EU that have no basis in fact, and the source of which is ultimately newspapers”. Of course the media cannot alone win a referendum like this, and Charles Grant also focuses on other factors, but in many of the accounts of how Brexit happened that I have read the media often does not figure at all. The idea that the media does not matter, or just reflects public opinion, is simply wrong.

…

It is not just the Brexit vote that the tabloids are partly responsible for. It is the racism and intolerance that they have helped legitimise. Of course politicians must take most responsibility for this, but the tabloids play an important role. This will only become worse as those who voted Leave become disillusioned that nothing has improved, and of course no tabloid will ever apologise for getting it wrong. They are the epitome of power without responsibility. And because of the power these newspapers have, politicians dare not criticise them for it. One did, and he paid a heavy price.

via Mainly Macro

Here in the USA, the newspapers don’t have enough influence to sway a local election. Here, we’re far more techologically advanced. Our disinformation is spewed out by television “news” networks and Internet sites. We all know that Fox viewers believe all sorts of demonstrably false things, and that it’s from Fox they are getting their information. If you substituted the word “television” for “newspapers” and “tabloids” in the above quote, it would apply perfectly to this country. If Marshall McLuhas was right, it’s worse here, because television as a form of media discourages intellectual engagement and skepticism. You just tend to soak it in.

One thing the Brits have on us, perhaps to make up for their lack of technological progress, is the fact that in order to get their disinformation, they actually have to do some reading.