Sentence of the Year

"If one spends too much time knocking down and polemicizing against weak arguments, sooner or later all opposing arguments start looking weak."

Here is the full version of Tyler Cowen's biting rebuttal to Paul Krugman's needless nastiness.

For background here is another post where Cowen explains why he is generally disappointed with Krugman, who he thinks is spurning his chance to be a truly great public intellectual by not being charitable to opposing positions. Krugman responds here, arguing that being polemical increases his power in the grand intellectual battle he sees himself as fighting. Here is what someone articulate from the Marginal Revolution comments makes of the situation:

Yes, he definitely targets weak arguments, but that’s because he’s conducting a war, not a debate. Krugman believes (or at least he’s said so on many occasions) that his opponents — Republicans and “right-wing” (his term) economists — are either themselves malicious or dupes of malicious people, who (consciously or not) are pursuing goals that will result in massive negative results, on the order of trillions of dollars of loss, hardship and death. He believes he needs to win this battle on the stage of national opinion (and for better or worse, he is on it), or these terrible things will happen. 

Picayune details like whether or not specific little arguments are right or wrong are irrelevant, and that’s why he reacts so rudely to you — as an average person might to the argument that “at least the trains ran on time.” He thinks that if he grants any ground to you or any other “right-wing” footsoldiers, he may lose the war, and then the truly evil (again, his words) will use that as ammunition to enact policies that will harm billions of people. I imagine that’s why he rarely repeats all the free trade stuff that he wrote in the 90′s — that position has been overrun by the enemy. He no doubt continues to believe those words then to be true, but talking about them today doesn’t serve the greater purpose. 

I don’t want to armchair psychologize or demonize Krugman, because I feel everyone tends to think like that: when you’re opposing something that is truly wrong, no one goes out of their way to analyze their arguments, or take care to ensure they’re addressing only the strongest points of the apologists. I feel like he’s taken a form of Pascal’s wager: when the risk is so great, can he afford to let any doubts fester? 

It is cool to see such a widely-read economics debate take a turn towards philosophy. The question of whether people do better by picturing their intellectual interactions as group play or as wars is quite a deep one I think, but not so deep that it isn't totally obvious who is right in this case!