Over at Cato.org, Alan Reynolds shows how Paul Krugman’s turned out to be a sloppy, careless columnist. In assessing the tax policies of the 1970s and 80s, Krugman cherry picks his figures, and even gets the starting date of a recession wrong – by about a year. Krugman’s blog makes mistakes like this ever more frequently (recently about Paul Ryan’s Roadmap for America).
He’s a world-class economist who’s a mediocre columnist, mostly phoning his columns in. He calls his column “The Conscience of a Liberal,” but there are myriad liberal columnists and bloggers who write better, more accurate posts than Krugman.