Monday, July 21, 2014

The Krugman Implication: Proponents of a Gold Standard are Stuck in an Infantile “Anal-Retentiveness.”..

By Ralph Benko


Professor Paul Krugman, in his New York Times blog last week, says my most recent column, about him, is "funny and scary."  Last week’s column here inferred that Prof. Krugman is leaving Princeton in quiet disgrace.  It drew pretty wide attention.

It also drew over 150 comments. Many commentators merrily berated me. (Comes with the territory.)  The column, quite flatteringly, even drew a riposte from Prof. Krugman himself, in his Times blog, entitled Fantasies of Personal Destruction:
A correspondent directs me to a piece in Forbes about yours truly that is both funny and scary.
Yep, scurrying away with my tail between my legs, I am, disgraced for policy views shared only by crazy people likethe IMF’s chief economist (pdf).
One thing I’ve noticed, though, is how many people on the right are drawn to power fantasies in which liberals aren’t just proved wrong and driven from office, but personally destroyed. Does anyone else remember this bit from the O’Reilly scandal?
“Look at Al Franken, one day he’s going to get a knock on his door and life as he’s known it will change forever,” O’Reilly said. “That day will happen, trust me. . . . Ailes knows very powerful people and this goes all the way to the top.”
And people wonder why I don’t treat all of this as a gentlemanly conversation.
English: Paul Krugman at the 2010 Brooklyn Boo...
English: Paul Krugman at the 2010 Brooklyn Book Festival. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
...What’s really odd about Prof. Krugman's Fantasies of Personal Destruction is its abrupt segue into likening my critique to a statement made by someone this columnist never met. What could have motivated this non sequitur?


Perhaps some psychological force is at work? Prof. Krugman, echoing a clever critique by Keynes, himself has invoked Freud as key to understanding proponents of the gold standard.  Freud, speculating on subconscious associations between excrement and money, referenced the Babylonian doctrine that “gold is the feces of Hell.” Thus, implies Prof. Krugman, proponents of a gold standard are stuck in an infantile “anal-retentiveness.”..


Eruditely ridiculing gold proponents as, well, full of s*** is clever. It likely will tickle those readers who find monkeys flinging poo at each other hilarious.  Ridicule is much easier, and cheaper, than grappling with scholarly analyses such as that from the Bank of England which provided, in 2011, Financial Stability Paper No. 13, a genuinely interesting critique of the real world performance of fiduciary currency.

Keynes, perhaps not getting it quite right, alludes to Freud in Auri Sacra Fames (September 1930):
Dr. Freud relates that there are peculiar reasons deep in our subconsciousness why gold in particular should satisfy strong instincts and serve as a symbol.
It presumably is this to which Prof. Krugman obscurely alludes in a blog entitled The She-Devil of Constitution Avenue:
I’ve been saying for a long time that we aren’t having a rational argument over economic policy, that the inflationista position is driven by politics and psychology rather than anything the other side would recognize as analysis. But this really proves it beyond a shadow of a doubt; if you really want to understand what’s going on here, the Austrian you need to read isn’t Friedrich Hayek or Ludwig von Mises, it’s Sigmund Freud.”

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