Tornado Alley (PROG)

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Bruce Bartlett Is A Mensch

November 27, 2012, 7:01 am 94 Comments

A mensch, at least as I was taught the term, is someone who takes responsibility for his actions, including his mistakes. Alas, menschlichkeit is a rare virtue in modern America, certainly in the political sphere, where nobody ever admits being wrong about anything.

So all hail Bruce Bartlett, who writes movingly .. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/revenge-of-the-reality-based-community/ .. [ http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=81839934 ] about how he came to realize that movement conservatism and its economic doctrine weren’t what he imagined them to be, and in particular how he came to realize that Keynesian analysis had a point.

Bartlett’s essay only drives home, of course, how very few economists — whether in the policy/think tank world or in academia — have been willing to do the same.

You have to wonder in particular about the prominent economists who threw their support behind Mitt Romney in the late unlamented campaign. They have to have known that he was talking nonsense, that his numbers didn’t remotely add up; and some of them made what sure look like patently disingenuous arguments about taxes, the business cycle, and more. Was it a case of political allegiance trumping professional standards? Or was it personal ambition above all?

And no, it’s not symmetric: Obama and his people do play some number games, but not to anything like the same degree — it’s more about packaging than about trying to tell a fundamentally false story.

Anyway, I have in the past been a bit hard on Bartlett, wondering why it took him so long to see the obvious. But never mind that: he has shown character, in a nation where that is hard to find.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/11/27/bruce-bartlett-is-a-mensch/?_r=0