Paul Krugman recently used his NY Times blog to commit an ugly act of ageism by calling 66-year-old David Stockman, author of the new blockbuster book, The Great Deformation: The Corruption of Capitalism in America, “a cranky old man.” “Cranky” would be a good word to describe the gray-bearded Krugman’s bigoted comment.
Krugman also condemned Stockman’s book for being exactly like every single one of Krugman’s own NY Times columns, namely, “model-free numbers embedded in a rant.” By “model” Krugman means mathematical economic model of the sort he published in his academic journal articles but never in his NY Times columns. Who would read them? Only a small handful of academic nerds has ever read any of Krugman’s academic articles, for which the world should be thankful.
David Stockman observed in a recent FOX News Channel interview that when Krugman worked on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisors in the Reagan administration he was “a pleasant and astute young man” but “something very strange has happened to him over the past thirty years.”
6:12 am on April 5, 2013
