My Home About Me

Back in 1999, when Paul Krugman had some semblance of decency, he wrote this in a Slate column:

"...I do not think of myself as an all-purpose pundit. I remember once (during the air phase of the Gulf War) seeing John Kenneth Galbraith making pronouncements on TV about the military situation, and telling friends that if I ever start pontificating in public about a technical subject I don't understand, they should gag me."

How things have changed. In his New York Times column today -- "The Arithmetic of Failure" -- he opines,

Iraq is a lost cause. It's just a matter of arithmetic: given the violence of the environment, with ethnic groups and rival militias at each other's throats, American forces there are large enough to suffer terrible losses, but far too small to stabilize the country. ...

Afghanistan, on the other hand, is a war we haven't yet lost, and it's just possible that a new commitment of forces there might turn things around.

The moral is clear -- we need to get out of Iraq, not because we want to cut and run, but because our continuing presence is doing nothing but wasting American lives. And if we do free up our forces ..., we might still be able to save Afghanistan.

Krugman buttresses his unqualified opinion with a rhetorical fallacy: the repeated claim that his judgment on military affairs is only a matterarithmeticmetic" -- as though no mere opinion were involved, but rather the cold inevitability of two-plus-two-equals-four. He appeals to authority by citing a "classic analysis of the arithmetic of insurgencies is a 1995 article by James T. Quinlivan, an analyst at the Rand Corporation." The study, of course, is merely an author's opinion based on a reading of history -- "the number of troops that peacekeeping forces have historically needed to maintain order." And Krugman's column is even less -- it is an author's opinin basewd on the reading of another author.

If Krugman's opinion on what we ought to do in Iraq and Afghanistan is valid, why can't he just argue for it straight? Why tell the lie that it is "arithmetic," rather than opinion?

Amateur Investors   assets   bailout   behavioral finance   bottom   climactic   Commodity ETFs   credit crunch   Currency ETFs   day trading   Deron Wagner   Dow 1929 Crash   economic data   Emini's Nas 100   emini's S&P 500   ETF buy setups   ETFs (exchange traded funds)   Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs)   Goldman Sachs   inflation