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Friday, February 17, 2012

Moneybox: Krugman vs. Brooks

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Moneybox
Krugman vs. Brooks
The Times' columnists are brawling about Charles Murray's new book. They are both wrong.
By Matthew Yglesias
Posted Friday, Feb 17, 2012, at 09:16 PM ET

Paul Krugman and David Brooks are titans of the columnist scene, the best and most influential pundits the left and right have to offer. They're also co-workers at the New York Times, an institution that seems to prohibit its op-ed writers from directly engaging with one another. The result can be amusing.

On Jan. 31, for example, Brooks hailed Charles Murray's Coming Apart: The State of White America, 1960-2010 as almost certainly the most important book of the year. On Feb. 9, Krugman, without mentioning Brooks by name, denounced the book as "the heart of the conservative pushback" against Occupy Wall Street's focus on income inequality. The real source of working-class woes, according to Krugman, are not the personal virtues cited by Brooks and Murray, but simple economic decline. Things reached the point of true absurdity this week when Brooks wrote a column about "The Materialist Fallacy" adhered to by unnamed "liberal economists" who've created a situation in which "the public debate is dominated by people who stopped thinking in 1975."

It's too bad Brooks and Krugman can't—or won't—engage directly, because if they did, they might see that they're both making good points about each other's wrongness—and that there's little reason to give credence to either the liberal or the conservative narrative of decline.

Let's start with a good point from Brooks, who rightly says "I don't care how many factory jobs have been lost ...

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