Calpundit’s Paul Krugman interview is quite good indeed. So much of the mainstream media’s coverage focuses on Krugman’s contentiousness rather than approaching his work as an opportunity to think through problems and learn something. Calpundit seems genuinely scared and demoralized (rightly so) by Krugman’s assessment that the US is likely to land in financial crisis a la Argentina. What struck me was one of the interview’s sociological predictions:
But it gets harder to have that sort of enlightened social policy when you have a society that’s so radically differentiated. Think of Latin America. The characteristic thing in Latin America is that they have lousy infrastructure and lousy education systems because they’re so polarized on income, and in turn that leads to low development and polarized income. You get this kind of downward spiral. And there’s something like that happening here.
Which makes me wonder how or why he claims that “don’t want to sound like a Marxist” when he argues that the rich are rigging the political game in their class interest. I’ve seen Marxist political analyses with more subtlety than Krugman’s (e.g. his the-media-supports-Iraq-war-because-FCC-keeps-its-hands-off-media thesis). And in any case, his political model DOES draw from Marx, even if his economic impulse repudiates Marxism.
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