This first ran on Splice Today.
_______________________
“If you saw Suzanne Vega years ago, as I did, and wondered if she’s still as good in live performance, she isn’t — she’s better.” A Facebook post by some acquaintance, you think? A tweet? A tumblr? A small blog from some semi-anonymous writer who likes to share their concert-going experiences with their friends? None of the above. This here is Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, and the venue for his clichéd, pedestrian fanboy gushing about Suzanne Vega is the website of the illustrious New York Times.
I’m trying my best here to restrain the snark, because I generally like both Krugman, and Vega, and because I don’t think there’s anything wrong with fanboy gushing. Krugman loves Suzanne Vega, and he wants to share his love with the world — nothing wrong with that. Even if he wants to go on to tell us about his meal afterwards (“The food in Joe’s Pub was very good….”) well, that’s fine. Lots of people use the Internet as a way to share the equivalent of personal letters with friends, and why shouldn’t they?
But (and here’s where the snark comes in) this is not a personal letter. This is a post to the website of the New York Times. Krugman labels the piece as “personal”, but he’s not actually sharing it with friends or family or Uncle Jimmy. He’s sharing it with you, and me, and the rest of the world — this is a piece of cultural criticism on one of the most prestigious websites in the United States. And what does this cultural criticism say? Its says, whoa, Suzanne Vega is awesome and she played some of my favorite songs and then I got food at Joe’s Pub and hey, here’s a picture of me and Suzanne Vega, eat your heart out, losers.
If there’s a trace of bitterness there…well, sure, I’m bitter. I’d like to write cultural criticism for the New York Times, too. But to do that, I have to pitch things, and have ideas, and maybe even employ paragraph transitions. But Krugman can just write a blathery, vacuous numbered list, and hey, presto, there he is on the New York Times, writing immortal lines like “Has there ever been another widely heard song, let alone a massive hit, written in blank verse?” Is that supposed to qualify as insight. As brain activity? Why are the editors letting him print this crap?
They’re letting him print this crap because he’s Paul Krugman, Nobel Prize winning economist, liberal gadfly, puncturer of Republicans, mocker of inflation hawks. Krugman is one of the NYT’s most visible voices and assets; he’s a hugely successful brand. People are not just interested in what he has to say about economics; they’re interested in him, personally, yay, verily, unto the Suzanne Vega worship and what he had for dinner. Krugman is a big enough name that he can print what he wants. If he felt like running his laundry list, I suspect the Times would let him.
This isn’t exactly a new phenomenon — writers from from Sylvia Plath on down have long been public figures and celebrities, and folks have always been interested in their lives as well as in their writing. The Internet though, with its demand for content and its ease of publishing, has made it possible for celebrity writer brands to let their fans in on the minutia of their lives in new and copious ways, whether on social media or from the platform of the Grey Lady.
These developments aren’t all bad. I like the informality of the Internet, and I enjoy the way that blogs can escape the tight confines of a particular pigeonhole. I don’t really want to read Jonathan Bernstein’s (http://www.bloombergview.com/contributors/jonathan-bernstein) baseball posts, but I like that he’s allowed to write them.
But, then, Bernstein actually works on his baseball posts; he has expertise and knowledge, and he takes time to put both in a coherent form. Krugman, on the other hand, seems to be flaunting his half-assedness. It’s like he wants everyone to know that he’s so big, and so important, that he can use the New York Times as his personal social media account. In Internet journalism, it’s not what you write, but who you are — and he’s Paul Krugman. Look on his laundry list, aspiring cultural journalist, and despair.
Noah, man, come on.
It’s his blog, which happens to be on the New York Times. It is 100% incidental to his op-ed columns. I know the blog is popular, but even in today’s social media landscape blah blah web 3.0 or whatever the fuck we’re up to, the column is still the reason he’s there, it’s what NYT is in the first instance publishing, it’s what people read. They publish his columns about economics and political economy, that’s what he’s selling to them, and that’s what they’re selling to us. It’s not like he fills his columns with this kind of “cultural criticism” (and, shit, it’s only a fraction of what’s in the blog).
In conclusion — Splice Today lets you print this crap?
The NYT name is on it; it’s on their space. And it’s lazy crap. It’s not the end of the earth or anything, but it is a sign that who you are matters more than what you say.
Mmmm… I actually think shit like this is the end of the Earth. Who gets to have an opinion about what and where is EVERYTHING to me. Who gets to speak about what? Who gets to never feel uncomfortable or scared? Who is literally protected from offense? Who gets to be heard? Who gets to set the agenda? This is everything.
It’s like when I was told that the stakes were low in the Humanities. I disagree. The constitution of the subject and the formulation of universal truths and tastes. It’s everything.
Noah is hacked that an amateur has the NYT stage for personal blog musings about food, recreation, and cultural criticism. Only because he is a stabled Nobel prize winning, NYT op ed writer. That does raise broader questions, for sure, per Nix 66.
But in the particulars of Krugman’s profession and his OpEd writing, those questions have even more force. Krugman is rather famous among “New Monetarist” economists for his resistance to accepting, or even taking seriously their analyses and theories about how money works, and why. He has the audience, and would seem to have the overall understanding, to provide additional exposure to their work and ideas. It’s frustrating to them, because they see it as complementary to and supportive of the theory he uses as a basis for mocking the inflation hawks.
In fact, he may be right about inflation, not for the reasons he writes about, but for reasons contained in new monetary theory that he essentially will not acknowledge, let alone write seriously about.
As Nix 66 writes “Who gets to be heard? Who gets to set the agenda? This is everything.”
Ooof, jealous much? Definitely understandable, and a normal response but still funny.
Burroughs quote I’ve had rattling around in my head since I was a teen. The scene is people-on-the-street interviews on drug policy:
“And here’s this black cat working on an underground rail. He straightens up and says: ‘I think if someone uses drugs it’s his own business!’
Boy, did they yank that mic out of his face. The freedom of the press to say what they want to hear and call it the voice of the people! He couldn’t even get the word out!”
Translation: Paul Krugman gets plenty of mic time. And democracy must be rooted in a plurality.
I think Krugman stepping out of his Serious Expert role to tell his audience about the show he saw and the dinner he had makes him more relateble to his readers, which makes him a better pop economist…
For example, does Marginal Revolution’s Tyler Cowen have such a large audience because people he’s brilliant, or because he writes short pithy book and restaurant recommendations?
Maybe it’s unfair to say that economics writing is serious and should only be attempted by experts, while pop pop culture reviewing is not that serious and can be done by anyone… but honestly I think serious academics having a blog on the side where they’re not experts and write about relatable makes them more effective at spreading their ideas.
Exactly. On the side. Not on the New York Times.
Well, the NYT is where his readers know to find him…
What’s wrong with having in-house writers who are more rounded? We don’t really want our country’s economic policy decided by robots who never go out to eat and catch a show, do we?
Mark Bittman writes about all kinds of other stuff besides cooking on his cooking blog, once you’ve got that household name status you’ve got that leeway.
I mean, I was against Bono’s column in the NYT because it seemed unearned… but for the folks who have established themselves as writers I don’t see what’s so terrible about letting them use their regular platform for off-message stuff from time to time. It’s not like they’re taking NYT column inches away from other writers, it’s the internet.
You don’t think his fans could Google to find his private blog like lickity-split? You don’t think he’d still have more readers than someone more qualified and lesser known? You honestly think he’d be unsearchable without using the platform of the NYT? Paul Krugman can afford to sit down. There is no shame in sitting down.
ARS, the piece is definitely meant to be kind of funny because I’m jealous and bitter.
I do actually like it when folks aren’t on message all the time; I think I mention in the piece that I like that Jonathan Bernstein does baseball posts, even though I don’t care about baseball pretty much at all. It’s just that Krugman really has nothing to say in that column; he really is using it as a social media update for friends about where he went out to dinner. It just seems really presumptuous to use your space at one of the biggest media outlets in the world to say nothing of interest. It’s the laziness of it that gets to me, I guess.
I get a “fiddling while Rome burns” vibe off that op-ed. After a long day playing to the middle-row on economic policy, Krugman takes in a concert, has a nice meal, and writes a blog post. Then again, I was a little cranky when I read it. Maybe I’d feel differently about it had I not just read a bunch of stuff about the UK elections.
Krugman’s always been a lazy writer, from what I can tell. I went through 8 years of his column archives once, and he’s repetitious and pedantic. There’s no denying he’s been milking that Nobel Prize to frickin’ death.
Hmm would you object to a cultural critic of similar prominence writing tossed-off posts about economics? I mean the equivalent to this would be, what, non-economic writers gushing about the Piketty book a year ago? Seems like that happened a lot.
No…it’s not about expertise. It’s that he doesn’t even give a shit. If Krugman wanted to talk at some length about why he loves some pop culture or other, I’d be fine with that. His economic knowledge could provide an interesting perspective, even. And I’m all for non-economists criticizing economists; that doesn’t happen enough, as far as I’m concerned.
It’s the half-assed nature of the post that annoys me.