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Some of my liberal friends have trouble understanding why Paul Krugman is such a lightening rod for criticism from the right. Everything he says seems so reasonable. If you are in this group, I strongly suggest reading Niall Ferguson. Here’s a small excerpt:

The final piece of Krugman’s analysis was that Cameron and Osborne were “so deeply identified with the austerity doctrine that they can’t change course without effectively destroying themselves politically.” They had “to stick it out until something turns up, no matter how many lives it [austerity] destroys.” Cameron was “the English prisoner”of his own “austerity crusade.” In fact, the government did change course, significantly easing the fiscal tightening in late 2012. Krugman was at first dismissive of these changes as “a set of basically minor twiddles involving credit and planning authorizations, which seem highly unlikely to make any significant difference.” When these “twiddles” turned out to make quite a lot of difference, he cried foul. Why, Cameron and Osborne had stopped doing austerity after two years! How dare they not fulfil Krugman’s apocalyptic predictions!

Krugman has spent much of the last two years trying to dismiss the UK recovery – not surprisingly, as it makes nonsense of nearly everything he has written in recent years. It was, he insisted in September 2013, a “dead-cat-bounce.” The government’s claims of success were “deeply stupid.” The economy’s growth was merely the effect of stopping “banging Britain’s head against the wall.” Comically, in January 2014 Krugman sought to argue that France was the role model Britain should have sought to emulate. By April, however, he had thrown in the towel, but in a typically dishonest way. “The fact that the [UK] economy has perked up,” he argued shamelessly, “is actually a vindication of Keynesian claims, whatever the government’s intentions.” The return to growth – the one he had wholly failed to predict – was “not at all surprising.” There was “nothing here that warranted a major revision of framework.” Perish the thought!

. . .

In the words of Jeffrey Sachs – hardly a conservative on economic issues – UK economic performance has in fact been “broadly similar” to that of the United States, “with the UK outperforming the United States on certain indicators,” such as the employment rate (now at a record high of 73.3 percent compared with 59.2 percent in the United States). As Sachs notes, “both the U.S. and UK economies have cast considerable doubt on Krugman’s oft-repeated view that a robust recovery would require further fiscal stimulus.” Amen.

Of course, Krugman was not alone. Martin Wolf of the Financial Times made much the same arguments. So did Simon Wren-Lewis, Jonathan Portes and others. However, none of these Keynesian authors could match Krugman’s unique combination of over-confidence and toxic rudeness. It was not enough to sneer at George Osborne’s policies; he had to be compared gratuitously to one of Monty Python’s “upper class twits.” Osborne’s consistency – a trait Krugman greatly prizes in himself – was “the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen.” His policy was “a complete conceptual muddle.” Osborne was “the Rt. Honorable Saboteur.” The government was like “the Three Stooges.” Osborne’s 2014 budget was “ludicrous.”

Krugman is of course in thrall to an Englishman who cannot be credibly described as anything but upper class: John Maynard Keynes. In his vainglorious dreams, Krugman is the Keynes of our time – brilliant, caustic, influential. In his journalism, Krugman frequently alludes to his hero’s work – hence “The Economic Consequences of Mr. Osborne.” But to be Keynes you need ultimately to be credible – credible enough for policymakers to pay heed to what you say. In this regard, Krugman’s career is a story of catastrophic failure – a failure only partly explicable by the fact that, unlike Keynes, he is personally obnoxious.

Amongst many offensive traits, Krugman’s chronic inability to acknowledge error is the most troubling to policymakers, who are subjected to far more rigorous scrutiny than he is. Accusing other economists and the Financial Times of “perceptual sleaze,”Krugman recently had the gall to write: “What’s not OK is blurring the distinction between … political analysis and a real analysis of how policy worked. … When people do that kind of blurring to make the case for policies they prefer, it’s deeply sleazy, no matter who they are.” Lack of self-knowledge on this scale borders on the pathological.

It is easy to forget how seriously the British Left once took Krugman. In a speech forBloomberg in August 2010, Ed Balls named him as one of the few intellectuals who were prepared “to stand up now and challenge the current consensus that – however painful – there is no alternative to the Coalition’s austerity and cuts.” Less than a year later, in a speech at the London School of Economics, Balls again made his debt to Krugman clear. And in his 2012 party conference speech, he went the whole way,parroting Krugman’s prediction of a double-dip recession. This was the peak of Krugmania in the UK. In a gushing editorial in January 2013, the Guardian even urged Ed Miliband to appoint Krugman as Shadow Chancellor. Krugman lectures were now attracting throngs of credulous devotees – though Balls was no longer among them. He had belatedly – but too late – woken up to the fact Krugman’s predictions had been worthless.