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Little Statesmen and Philosophers

By Paul Krugman
February 23, 2013, 11:38 am

So, people want me to comment on the Moody’s downgrade of Britain [ http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/business/global/daily-euro-zone-watch.html ]. No real news there. As a guide to the future, ratings agency judgments are literally worse than useless; remember, US bond yields actually fell after the 2011 S&P downgrade. Still, it’s kind of a poke in the eye for Cameron/Osborne, who are subjecting their country to pointless austerity because confidence!

But they won’t change course; basically, they can’t, for careerist reasons. And that’s the story of a lot of what’s going on now.

Ralph Waldo Emerson understood this. The original version of his famous quote [ http://www.bartleby.com/100/420.47.html ] — I had forgotten this — reads:

A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.

I don’t know about the divines bit, but the little statesmen thing is completely accurate. Suppose George Osborne were to admit that austerity isn’t working. What, then, would be left of his claim to be qualified to do, well, anything? He has to stick it out until something turns up, no matter how many lives it destroys.

Pretty much the same thing is going on among pundits now stuck in what Jonathan Chait [ http://nymag.com/author/jonathan%20chait/ (the 2/22/13 piece; that one and one of Chait's 2/20/13 pieces linked in the post to which this is a reply)] memorably calls the “fever swamp of the center”. Suppose that some pundit who has spent his whole career calling for bipartisanship, a compromise between the extremes of left and right, were to admit the plain fact that Obama is very much a centrist, who is in particular proposing deficit reduction through exactly the kind of mix of tax hikes and spending cuts “centrist” pundits demand — and that the GOP, by contrast, is an extremist organization whose extremism is almost solely responsible for the bitterness of the partisan divide. A pundit making that admission would in effect be saying that everything he has said and done for the past several years was not just useless but harmful, actively misleading readers about the state of the debate. He just can’t do it.

The point is that a large part of the reason we’re locked into such a mess is careerism. And yes, that’s quite vile, if you think about it: politicians and pundits alike letting the world burn — probably unconsciously, but still — because their personal position would be hurt if they admitted to past mistakes.

© 2013 The New York Times Company

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/little-statesmen-and-philosophers/ [with comments]