{"id":187182,"date":"2013-05-24T20:24:00","date_gmt":"2013-05-25T01:24:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/24\/things-that-pundits-do-not-understand\/"},"modified":"2013-05-24T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T01:24:00","slug":"things-that-pundits-do-not-understand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/2013\/05\/24\/things-that-pundits-do-not-understand\/","title":{"rendered":"Things that Pundits do Not Understand"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>To paraphrase Paul Krugman, <a href=\"http:\/\/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com\/2013\/05\/23\/its-not-about-you-3\/\">it&#8217;s not all about them<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>He&#8217;s right, of course, but I think that he misses the dynamic:&nbsp; Pundits are <b>supposed<\/b> to be narcissistic sociopaths.&nbsp; It&#8217;s the nature of the medium:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><span style=\"color: blue;\"><a href=\"http:\/\/delong.typepad.com\/sdj\/2013\/05\/michael-kinsleys-repeated-factual-errors-why-oh-why-cant-we-have-a-better-press-corps.html\">Brad DeLong<\/a> and <a href=\"http:\/\/drezner.foreignpolicy.com\/posts\/2013\/05\/23\/sometimes_a_factual_error_is_just_a_factual_error\">Dan Drezner<\/a>  wearily continue the policing of Michael Kinsley. I\u2019ll leave it in  their hands. But may I say that there is a serious pundit lesson here \u2014  namely, that <i>it\u2019s not about you<\/i>. <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>Basically, Kinsley has been on a jihad against Krugman because <b>other people<\/b> took apart Kinsley&#8217;s essay on austerity, which was both wrong on the basic history, and fetishized other people&#8217;s suffering.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;m not sure why patron saint of dumb-f%$# mindless contrarianism is upset with Paul Krugman, but being wrong is what Michael Kinsley does best.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>To paraphrase Paul Krugman, it&#8217;s not all about them. He&#8217;s right, of course, but I think that he misses the dynamic:&nbsp; Pundits are supposed to be narcissistic sociopaths.&nbsp; It&#8217;s the nature of the medium: Brad DeLong and Dan Drezner wearily continue the policing of Michael Kinsley. I\u2019ll leave it in their hands. But may I &hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[973,1002,1011,1166,1050],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-187182","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economy","category-good-writing","category-history","category-michael-kinsley-disease","category-snark"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187182"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=187182"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/187182\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=187182"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=187182"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.panix.com\/~msaroff\/40years\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=187182"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}