STATUS AND IDEAS
STATUS AND IDEAS: I have been using RealClear politics for a few months now as an excellent clipping service, as they link virtually all the significant op-ed pieces in both the prominent and semi-obscure sources. Indeed, my link to them has been featured since Day 1 of this blog.
I was only vaguely aware that there was also a Commentary weblog at the site. Some very good posts from my skim of this morning. Quite notable is this excellent analysis, vis-a-vis Paul Krugam, of ostensibly brilliant academics at big-name institutions with idiotic ideas. Krugman is certainly a classic case of this. I used one of his books in a graduate level International Political Economy class and the man is, by any measure, highly intelligent and an expert economist. But his NYT punditry, almost always, strikes me as completely asinine. This isn’t simply a function of ideological disagreement. I find Michael Kinsley and Christopher Hitchens to be must-reads because of their skilled analysis, even though I disagree with them much of the time. Ditto Thomas Friedman, with whom I agree almost all the time on economics and disagree almost all the time on virtually everything else. But I actually enjoy reading and listening to brilliant people with whom I disagree–much more so than poor reasoning that nonetheless reaches my conclusions. But most of what Krugman writes just makes me wonder whether the man is losing it.
