An Annoyance

I read a long tedious article in the New Yorker about the Nobel-Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman who now writes a column for the New York Times.

Though much too long, the article was interesting. And disgusting. What a pig Krugman is. First he works as an economic adviser in the Reagan Administration. Then he claims he didn't know it was a conservative Republican administration that favored the rich. Then he works as a consultant for Enron. And claims he didn't know there was anything wrong. Then he marries one of his students. Unless they were a very unusual couple, he was fucking her before they married. Which means he was fucking one of his students. He regularly insults his academic colleagues and then is surprised when they don't like it?

Having worked for Reagan and Enron, he gets angry and huffy when others are not as liberal as he is, now that he has seen the light. And now claims to have just discovered that the distribution of incomes in America has been shifting more and more in favor of the rich since the 1970's? He just now discovered that? Hello? And it is news to him that government policy has something to do with that. Hello, glute-hole! Why does he think we have elections - so we can debate our policy toward Paraguay?

And how much did his seeing the light have to do with getting a plum contract to do a column for the liberal New York Times? (He was still working for Enron when he got the offer from the Times).

The fact that 'New Yorker' writer Larissa MacFarquhar is impressed that he and Mrs. Krugman have really the most cute and wonderfully fashionable little place on St. Croix and wastes a quarter of the article writing about it, shows only that she imagines that that will somehow sugar-coat the fact that her subject is a hypocrite and an asshole. It doesn't. Finally, what kind of buttheads have their picture taken for a nationally distributed magazine holding their cats?