On Friday David Brooks and Paul Krugman share space on the New York Times Op-Ed page. Sometimes, the contrast between the quality of writing is embarrassing. Today, I noticed the transitions between paragraphs. Here’s how Bobo starts each paragraph after the first:
I guess I’d say
But many Republicans
“We have a sense
To Republican eyes,
America’s economic stagnation
In America as in Europe
The welfare model favors
This is the source of Republican extremism
Mitt Romney hasn’t put it this way
Democrats have had trouble grasping
In his speech
Obama championed
This is what this election is about
Republicans and Democrats have different perceptions
Sometimes it ties the previous paragraph to the next one. But more often than not it’s jarring. Oh here’s a new idea. Maybe there are connections, but you’ll have to make them yourself. Compare that to K-thug.
Never mind
In the remarks
You can see
So would getting rid of teachers, police officers, and firefighters help the American people?
But the more relevant question
First of all
And, if we had those extra jobs
The really decisive evidence
But recovery never came
And the point is
So the former governor
Actually, it’s kind of ironic
And that’s not just an inference
In fact
Needless to say
Whatever you think of Krugman’s argument in this piece, you can see the way he ties one paragraph into another pretty much every time.
Krugman has a Nobel Prize, Brooks doesn’t, and it shows. Not only in their writing, but in their thinking. Sure, Krugman’s prize isn’t a literature prize, or even a “real” Nobel prize, but only a “memorial” prize established by a bank in memory of Alfred Nobel; but it’s still more than Brooks has. Krugman is a smart and literate guy; Brooks, well, he’s just a flack. You don’t expect much from a flack. I don’t understand why NYT paired Krugman with a flack. They should’ve gotten Stiglitz or someone like him to write the second column.
Other lauded Nobel Prize winners:
Albert Gore, Jr.
Yassir Arafat
Barack Obama
The Nobel doesn’t mean shit.
If you read Mr. Brooks’ screed, what you see is he’s blaming falling middle class living standards despite rising productivity on “the welfare state.” Somehow “the welfare state” is responsible for capital instead of labor taking 60% of GDP, a reversal of where we were 30 years ago. That must be a result of unions getting stronger, although he doesn’t say so.
But you’ve got to give Mr. Brooks high marks for honesty in laying out the Republican agenda: Less education, less health care, less safety net for those times when capitalism implodes, as it surely will again. (Back in the late 1800s, when we had the kind of society Republicans envision having again, major financial panics and depressions occurred about every five years.) These things, Republicans believe, are “obsolete.”
Let’s think this through. If our twentieth-century mode of living is obsolete, why stop with getting rid of education, health care, police and fire protection, Social Security and Medicare unemployment benefits, and food stamps? Why not also get rid of cars, trains, planes, computers, freezers, and anything else that runs on oil or electricity? Let’s also get rid of aircraft carriers, submarines, helicopters, jet bombers and fighters, drones, missiles, satellites, and NSA listening arrays; and suit our fighting men up in armor, mount them on horses, and send them out to defend us with wooden lances and steel broadswords? There’s no logical reason why a conservative revival can’t take us all the way back to the 12th century.
@2 “The Nobel doesn’t mean shit.”
I’ll agree if they give one to you.
Rabbit, you are mixing your technical axioms with your social axioms. I don’t see why tech has to retreat because social norms have.
In fact, higher tech will make it so much easier to monitor the serfs and cull any sort of rebellion. Drones and sub-dermal RDIF tags will be great for tracking runaway serfs.
I don’t think any conservative wants to get rid of tech, they just want to keep all their money so they can buy it and have higher social status than the proles.
@5 You’re right; they want to get rid of teachers so we can buy more missile-firing drones. It won’t matter if our kids can’t read the manual because we can hire Chinese kids to operate them.
[Deleted — by Carl, see HA Comment Policy]
Carl, good point.
Brooks’ writing, beyond its horrific wankery, is just so usually poor and forced.
Krugman, in addition to being technically adapt, has really developed as a writer. And the subject matter Krugman deals with has proven historically hard for academics in the field of economics to put into understandable prose.
Krugman’s blog, The Conscience of a Liberal, is a first stop on the blogosphere.
Lastly, while Krugman tries to keep it civil with his less talented and less intelligent colleague at the NYT, Krugman zinged him hard this week.
In response to BoBo’s tour de force of stupid, The Follower Problem, Krugman had this to say in his blog post, Historical Echoes, 4 days later: “But remember, the big problem is that the public isn’t showing enough deference to the elite.” Ouch!
@2. bob the babbler,
As someone whose most significant achievement was “winning” the toy surprise in a box of Cracker Jacks, your quick and shallow criticism of people who have been recognized by others and those others that take the time to recognize would win a prize, if only there was one, for pathetic.
Krugman has a Nobel Prize because it was “politically correct” to give him one, just like Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. Was Obama’s Nobel Prize appropriate, given that we’re still in Afghanistan up to our eyebrows? I guess you could say he “ended” the Iraqi mess, but the “end” was most likely due to our government’s and the Iraqi government’s inability to reach a Status of Forces Agreement, so our military left.
But don’t worry, Middle Eastern interventionists, we’ve still got lots of military involvement in Iraq: the government’s just hiding it by using “independent contractors” and other such illusions in order to meddle in Iraq’s affairs.
@10 Obama deserves a Nobel at least as much as Kissinger does.
@10 “in order to meddle in Iraq’s affairs”
Are you kidding? Bush turned Iraq into the 51st state. You don’t think we’re going to walk away from an investment of $1 trillion and 4,400 American lives in Iraq’s oil, do you?
You’re a complete bozo, relentlessly talking out your ass about things you clearly do not understand.
If the Democrats would stop throwing Trillions down the drain, 6 trillion in 4 years, one Hell of a lot of the problems in Amaerica could be solved!
As it sits, in a few years, the debt interest payments will consume the entire government’s budget, with nothing left over to run a country!