Andrew Sullivan: Biased processing in action!

Here's Daniel Okrent's parting cheap shot at Paul Krugman:

Op-Ed columnist Paul Krugman has the disturbing habit of shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults. Maureen Dowd was still writing that Alberto R. Gonzales "called the Geneva Conventions 'quaint' " nearly two months after a correction in the news pages noted that Gonzales had specifically applied the term to Geneva provisions about commissary privileges, athletic uniforms and scientific instruments. Before his retirement in January, William Safire vexed me with his chronic assertion of clear links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein, based on evidence only he seemed to possess.

No one deserves the personal vituperation that regularly comes Dowd's way, and some of Krugman's enemies are every bit as ideological (and consequently unfair) as he is. But that doesn't mean that their boss, publisher Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., shouldn't hold his columnists to higher standards.

I didn't give Krugman, Dowd or Safire the chance to respond before writing the last two paragraphs. I decided to impersonate an opinion columnist.

The claim that Krugman has the "disturbing habit" of "shaping, slicing and selectively citing numbers in a fashion that pleases his acolytes but leaves him open to substantive assaults" is a generalization that is unsupported by a single example, as Bob Somerby and others have pointed out. But to Andrew Sullivan, professional Krugman hater, it's a "damning" argument:

MANKIW ON KRUGMAN: Almost as damning as Dan Okrent. - 3:32:00 PM

It's just textbook. Lord, Ross and Lepper's 1979 article in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology is a classic reference on this phenomenon:

[S]ubjects supporting and opposing capital punishment were exposed to two purported studies, one seemingly confirming and one seemingly disconfirming their existing beliefs about the deterrent efficacy of the death penalty. As predicted, both proponents and opponents of capital punishment rated those results and procedures that confirmed their own beliefs to be the more convincing and probative ones...

(Now, I think you can fairly object that Krugman portrays his ideological opponents in cartoonish ways. But the same applies to Sullivan, and Okrent's use of numbers criticism is just an assertion without supporting evidence. We're talking about a John Bates Clark medal winner here. Krugman does make mistakes, but most of the blogger criticisms of him that I've looked into range from unconvincing to downright dishonest.)

Comments

[Jon Henke]

It's a shame that Okrent couldn't work in some examples of Krugman's sleight of hand, and it's true that many instances cited by bloggers are merely opinion -- sometimes incorrect opinion -- but there are a mountain of actual examples to back up Okrent's assertion. The fact that he didn't mention them does not actually mean they don't exist.

There was the time Krugman asserted that stop loss orders kept soldiers in the military past their agreed terms -- despite the fact that stop loss orders and extensions are a part of the "agreed terms", and are explicitly and repeatedly mentioned in the contracts troops sign.

There's his incredibly tendentious reading of the economic signals in order to warn of stagflation in an economy already under the historically accepted NAIRU, and with strong GDP growth. (you can't be stagnant AND growing strongly)

There was his assertion that the White House "pressured analysts", despite the fact that the Senate Intelligence committee concluded that "When asked whether analysts were pressured in any way to alter their assessments or make their judgements conform with administration policies on Iraq's WMD programs, not a single analyst answered "yes"." Now, perhaps Krugman has his own secret sources for this information, but he didn't actually mention any...

There are the too-many-to-link times that Krugman has flatly contradicted his own previous statements. There's his complete revision of the cause of the South American economic collapses. There's quite a lot of that sort of thing -- far more than I'll link -- and it's a shame that Okrent couldn't mention some of it.

Krugman is an exceptional academic economist. As a pundit, however, he's an on-message shill, with all the sleight of hand that accompanies such a position.