Cochrane: "You lie, Krugman!"

The essence of an insult is contemptuous rudeness, and that characteristic is what distinguishes it from ordinary criticism. It is a distinction lost on John Cochrane, a professor in the business school at the University of Chicago, and that confusion pervades his response to Paul Krugman's recent analysis of the state of macroeconomics in the New York Times Magazine. Cochrane is much exercised about what he calls Krugman's insults, though a sober analysis of Krugman's article reveals many criticisms but no insults. Cochrane's response, by contrast, seethes with insults and indignation.

By my count at least 20 of his 56 paragraphs featured contemptuous and rude insults. Examples:

In par 2 Krugman is compared to creationists and a list of other discredited denialists. In para 3, "he makes stuff up," "hints at dark conspiracies" and more.

My favorite, mostly for comic relief, comes from para 37: "Hello, Paul, where have you been for the last 30 years?" Aside from illustrating the puerile character of Cochrane's discourse, this invites some pretty good answers: doing the work that won the 2008 Nobel, writing books, and writing a widely praised economics and politics column for the NYT. Oh yeah, and winning the Clark medal.

Cochrane is most indignant about the fact that Krugman repeats a widely publicized quote of Cochrane's that makes him look bad. Out of context, he says, and "Krugman follows that with a lie," allegedly attributing a quote to him that he never uttered (para 43). Cross checking with Krugman's article reveals that Krugman in no way attributed the words to Cochrane - they were rather Krugman's analysis of the implications of Cochrane's quote.

That kind of tempermental wrongheadedness inhabits every aspect of his essay. Krugman writes a popular account of an important issue in political economy, and Cochrane rails at him for writing popular material on politics and economics. Krugman argues that excessive trust in mathematical models unsupported by evidence is a hazard to economics and Cochrane flies into a tizzy about Krugman trying to drive math out of economics.

Amid the flailing wrath, there are a couple of substantive points of disagreement between Cochrane and Krugman. They concern, respectively, the Efficient Market Hypothesis and Barro's Ricardian Equivalence Theorem. I intend to deal with them in a separate post.