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I Think Clive Crook Is Right and Wrong...

Clive Crook comes to Paul Krugman's defense, apropos of Paul Krugman's rebuttal of Ruth Marcus's shameful Washington Post op-ed column:

Clive Crook: Krugman and Krugman and Social Security: I think Paul's rebuttal is correct, so far as the "circumstances" [i.e., the economics of Social Security] are concerned...

I think so too.

He then moves on to other issues, where I think Clive Crook goes astray. I think that Clive Crook stays on the right track here:

...But the circumstances [i.e., the economics of Social Security] are of course not the only thing to have changed since he opined on this topic in the past. [Paul Krugman's] modes of analysis and expression have changed too, and radically, in ways that often seem calculated to obscure the fact that he is one of the four or five most brilliant economists of his generation. This is not incompetence or inadvertence on his part; it appears to be a conscientious choice...

But then he goes badly astray. This is simply wrong:

...[Paul Krugman] wants to fuel the rage of the administration's opponents more than he wants to help people think through the arguments. He feels that this now serves the greater good. Bush and his people are too wicked for dispassionate analysis, he believes; there will be time for Seriousness later...

Here Clive Crook is 180 degrees wrong. "Dispassionate analysis" begins with the observation that Bush lies, those on Bush's payroll lie, and Bush's other mouthpieces lie. By beginning his analyses with the presumption that Bush and company (including people like Ruth Marcus) are informed public-spirited people making serious arguments in good faith, Clive Crook is misinforming his readers. Indeed, by paragraph 11 of this very post Clive Crook is writing that "the Bush administration’s focus on social security reform was... deliberately misleading"--a conclusion that belongs much higher up in the article.

Here, however, Clive Crook is right:

...In my view, for what little it may be worth, this is a disservice to Paul's own remarkable talents...

In an ideal counterfactual world, Paul could indeed be using his remarkable talents more productively. But we do not live in the Republic of Plato, we live in the Sewer of Romulus. So here and now Clive is wrong when he writes:

...this is a disservice... as well as to the greater good...

If somebody else were holding down the reality-based slot on the New York Times op-ed page, that would be one thing. But nobody is--hence I don't see that Paul as a moral agent has a choice: he has to keep doing what he is doing.

And here Clive is right:

...But this is a complaint which, by now, he has heard a thousand times...

There follow some smart observations about Social Security, like:

On an important point, [Democrats] are right: no great fiscal crisis lies in wait for social security. On present policies, the retirement of the baby boomers is going to push the programme into a gently increasing deficit over the next few decades, but tweaks will be enough to deal with it.... A fiscal crisis is indeed looming over the next few decades – but its cause is Medicare, not social security. For the US, the real fiscal enemy is not the ageing of the population, but the relentless rise in healthcare costs.... [T]he Bush administration’s focus on social security reform was both ill-conceived and, no doubt, deliberately misleading....

And:

The case for [Social Security reform] has little to do with fiscal arithmetic.... Private saving in the US is roughly zero.... households have... relied on house-price inflation to provide capital to support them in retirement. Those bets are going bad at the moment. Many Americans, especially the least well off, are going to be much more tightly squeezed after they retire than they expect. Social security gives them a base that should not be jeopardised – but for many of the not-rich, with few other resources to draw down, it is not enough.

Politicians should be asking themselves how best to encourage more saving – and Democrats should co-opt “the ownership society” as a slogan of their own. So simple: just rebrand it “ownership for all”.

A big theme of Democratic thinking is the need to spread the benefits of capitalism more broadly. Middle-class anxiety is real. Support for liberal trade is collapsing. The answer, Democrats say, is shared prosperity: the rewards of globalisation should go not just to the shareholder class, but to workers too. Quite right. But does this spreading have to be mediated exclusively through higher taxes and higher spending on welfare programmes? Is there not a good liberal case for widening the shareholder class as well?

For genuine social security reformers, that is the real prize. Shore up the system for the least well-off, to be sure, and make the safety net more secure. Then add a new layer, through partial privatisation, of wider participation in equity ownership...

And one not-so-smart observation about Social Security:

Properly conceived, this is a programme for empowering the less well-off, supporting their financial independence and widening access to the benefits of capitalism. No doubt, Republicans have a self-interested tactical reason to support the idea: more shareholders might nudge the electorate their way. But is the Democrats’ equal and opposite reason for denouncing the idea any more noble or public-spirited?

I think Clive Crook has forgotten his recent history. Bush's Social Security "reform" plan was emphatically not "shore up the system for the least well-off" and "add a new layer... of wider participation in equity ownership." Remember Gene Sperling's slogan: "personal accounts as an add-on, not a carve-out"? That was a Democratic program (originally Ned Gramlich's)--not Bush's. It would be a good program. But it is not a program that you can get to if you start rom the idea--as Ruth Marcus and company do--that Social Security faces an imminent crisis.

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