It turns out that Bree Nordenson's true beef with Paul Krugman is that Paul "fails to reveal [in his column] that during... [2000-2005] incomes dropped for [the median] household."
The idea that somebody could accuse Paul Krugman of being "partisan" for failing to reveal to his readers that median household incomes have fallen during the Bush administration... well, words really do fail me. That really doesn't pass the laugh test.
Funniest thing I have heard all month.
Here's what Bree Nordenson has to say, on the record. Not believing that she really wanted to call Krugman "partisan" and "slippery" for "fail[ing] to reveal" that median household incomes have fallen during the Bush dministration, I gave her a chance to amend it. She declined:
Dear Mr. DeLong:
Here is my response to be posted in its entirety (or not at all) on your blog (not simply the comments section):
Leaving aside the question of whether "typical" households can be characterized as "median" (rather than, say, "average" or "neighbors of Paul Krugman"), we stand by our conclusion that Mr. Krugman's statistic was cherry-picked and utterly unsupportive of his argument.
We wonder whether Professor DeLong's economics students would be permitted to look at the median personal income of college graduates in two separate years, chosen at random, and then present a paper suggesting that this data alone sheds light on the question of education's effect on income inequality. Mr. Krugman notes that the (median) real income of college graduates was lower in 2005, compared to 2000, and offers this as evidence that education does not improve income disparities. But he fails to reveal that during the same time frame, incomes dropped for all households, regardless of their level of education (see http://www.census.gov/prod/2006pubs/p60-231.pdf, p. 31). To determine whether a gap between the incomes of two groups has narrowed, one must know the incomes of both groups.
And unless the objective is merely to win the argument, rather than identify the truth, it is also necessary to test one's hypothesis against a range of years and other information. Krugman compares college graduates' incomes in 2000 and 2005, because that suits his ends. An entirely different picture emerges, however, if we compare the median incomes of college graduate in, say, 2004 to those in 2005. During that time frame, the number increases (after adjusting for inflation, of course).
Ideology passed off as science is the essence of demagoguery. An economist of Professor DeLong's stature should know this.
Sincerely,
Bree Nordenson
Assistant Editor, Columbia Journalism Review
Her boss Mark Mitchell, assistant managing editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, backs her up at the price of damage to his own reputation, and says that Paul Krugman is indeed culpable for suppressing knowledge that median incomes have fallen during the Bush administration (I think this is a fair summary quote from our conversation):
If you are talking about income inequality, you cannot just take the statistic of one group's income dropping over a period of time and not compare it to the other group's income. I am surprised that the Berkeley economics department cannot figure this out...
And--of course--never any attempt by Bree Nordenson (or anybody else) to talk to Paul Krugman or any labor economist about where the numbers were coming from, and whether they were reasonable.
Can there be any reaction other than "Wow. Look at the circular firing squad of flying journamalistic attack monkeys?"
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