...but in the end, I still read him. (The man's a !@#$%ing PhD and Nobel Prize winner in Economics, for pity's sake. I read Galbraith because of him. I might read Keynes because of him.)
If I have to put a finger on how I feel about him is, he's an incredibly smart man with very a literate temper. I can feel the frustration oozing off the page at times. (A not-so-veiled "Oh my God, you really don't get it" tone that I often hear from Professors -- you hear that, Dad?).
I think his Math is impeccable, and the predictions connected to them are unusually on the mark, at least in the neighborhood. (So far, he was wrong that the Stimulus wasn't big enough to turn around the economy, but right that it was small enough lead to a jobless recovery.) I don't think he gives as much acknowledgment to Political realities as he should (see: frustration), but he will acknowledge when he's made a mistake.
And I also love his acknowledgment of the "shit sandwich" concept (no, he doesn't use those exact words, but you'll get what I mean), of which the Senate Health Care Bill is one:
Health care and Iraq
Steve Benen is right: for the most part the debate among progressives about whether the final product on health reform is worth supporting has been edifying. Serious people are making serious arguments, in a way that puts conservatives, who have offered nothing but smears and lies, very much to shame.
That said, some of the arguments here annoy me — in particular the line I’ve been hearing from some quarters that progressives who say we should hold our noses and pass the flawed Senate bill are just like the “liberal hawks” who supported the Iraq war.
No, they aren’t. And I don’t say that just because, as it happens, I stuck my neck way out in opposing Iraq, and was more or less the only columnist with a spot in a major newspaper to say outright that the Bush administration was misleading us into war.
Look, I don’t know for sure what motivated the liberal hawks; you’ll have to ask them. Some, I hope, were genuinely naive: despite all the signs that we were being sold a bill of goods, they just couldn’t believe that an American president would start a war on false pretenses. Others, I suspect, were being careerists, aligning themselves with where the power seemed to lie; sad to say, their career calculations were justified, since to this day you’re generally not considered “serious” on national security unless you were wrong about the war.
What’s going on with health care is very different. Those who grudgingly say “pass the thing” — a camp I have reluctantly joined — aren’t naive: by and large they’re wonks who have looked at the legislation quite carefully, understand both its virtues and its flaws, and have decided that it’s a lot better than nothing. And there isn’t much careerism involved: if you’re a progressive pundit or wonk, the risks of alienating the people to your left are at least a match for the risks of alienating people to your right.
Now, the pass-the-thing people could be wrong. Maybe hopes of improving the new health care system over time, the way Social Security has been improved, will prove to have been fantasies; or maybe rejecting this bill and trying again, a strategy that has failed many times in the past, would work this time. But it’s a carefully thought-out, honest position. And arriving at that position has, in my case at least, required a lot of agonized soul-searching.
And maybe I’m being unfair, but I don’t seem to see the same degree of soul-searching on the other side. Too much of what I read seems to come from people who haven’t really faced up to what it will mean for progressive hopes — not to mention America’s uninsured — if health care reform crashes and burns, yet again.
This is a moment of truth; it’s not a time for cheap shots or name-calling.
