Why only ‘special’ people think Paul Krugman is wrong about austerity

Paul Krugman has a great blog post on the sloppiness of both Michael Kinsley and Charles Lane in their attacks on Krugman’s opposition to austerity.Kinsey and Lane both wrote long and rather tedious articles predicated on the belief that they had noticed an economic principle the Nobel prizewinner in economics had not considered. You won’t be surprised to hear that both are wrong.
Kinsley’s argument merely confirmed Krugman’s longstanding hypothesis that the austerians think economic policy is a morality play, and that the poor must suffer for the sins of Wall Street.
Lane argued that economic stimulus is easier to start than to stop, an argument Krugman had addressed two weeks earlier in the New York Times. This sloppiness leads Krugman to ask:

Whence cometh this epidemic of sheer sloppiness?
I’m not really sure, but in these cases I suspect it has a lot to do with the famed TNR/Slate premium on being “counterintuitive”, which in practice meant skewering supposed liberal pieties. (Kinsley himself joked that TNR should be renamed “Even the liberal New Republic”).

Paul Krugman 

There is actually a very good reason that journalists value counterintuitive thinking more than (say) academics. Journalists are paid to be interesting rather than right. An ingenious argument that the reader hasn’t seen before is much more interesting than a simple rehash of conventional platitudes.
As usual though, Krugman sticks the knife in, but leaves it to the reader to do the actual twisting. Kinsley and Lane are merely rehashing the smalltalk of the beltway folk, their arguments are only ‘counterintuitive’ in their own minds.
But why stop at journalism? It seems to me that the fetish for counterintuitive thinking is actually at the root of a lot of policy blundering as well. Here is how it happens…
When people get elected (or appointed) to positions of high power there is a natural tendency for them to ask ‘why me?’ This naturally leads them to the conclusion, ‘because I am very special’. Which in turn leads to the question, ‘why am I so special?’ And the answer, ‘because only people like me understand that common wisdom might be wrong.’
And so, the very fact that everyone thinks something is right only provides more evidence to the ‘counterintuitive’ thinker that it is wrong. If you have ever wondered why it is so hard to convince a repugican that climate change is a fact, it’s because you don’t understand that only such a special person as they could see through all that ‘sciency stuff’.
The idea that they are so special is of course pure conceit: The real reason the shlub got to where they are is pure luck, or if I am to be generous, both are ‘special’ at running for state office.  Neither did terribly well at the federal level. And in any case, their skill at winning state elections says nothing about their intellect or the wisdom of their positions. Yet both think that they are special because only they dare to think what others dare not.
This is how the Reagan junta ended up supplying Iran, designated as a state sponsor of terrorism, with spare parts for its planes and other military equipment, and illegally using the proceeds to fund terrorists attempting to topple the government of Nicaragua. Reagan must have told himself that only a really innovative, counterintuitive thinker could have ever thought up such a special plan.
This is also how the shrub junta ended up in the torture chambers of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. The fact that they could compass such extraordinary measures was to the Bushies simply proof that they were extraordinary men.
And it is how Margaret Thatcher ended up begging Gorbachev to send in the tanks to put down the protests in East Germany in 1989. While everyone else thought that the end of Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe was a good thing, the Iron Lady knew that she was special because she could see that change might be bad.
In each case the conventional wisdom was completely correct, and the self-styled ‘extraordinary thinkers’ were proved wrong. The reunification of Germany did not threaten NATO security as Thatcher feared, the security of NATO was strengthened. Use of torture did not assist the war on terror, it gave the terrorists their main recruiting call. And Iran-Contra damaged US interests in both Iran and Nicaragua.
Apologists for the shrub and Reagan have always maintained that the Iran-Contra and Abu-Ghraib scandals were the work of subordinates acting beyond their authority. And the schemes were so contrary to common sense that it seems only common sense that the likes of Lynndie England and Oliver North must have imagined such things, rather than Dick Cheney and Caspar Weinberger.
But whatever else their faults, Lynndie England and Oliver North were not the sort of people who had to ask themselves what extraordinary qualities had put them in their current position, and find a clever answer. Only people at the very top of an organization have the special kind of conceit necessary for grasping at the dumbest answer around, and anointing it the most brilliant.