Krugman vs. Ferguson

Here's a great article from the TimesOnline discussing the knock-down, old school brawl between two intellectual titans: Professor Paul Krugman, the world's most conspicuous apologist for Keynesian fiscal policies and Niall Ferguson, a brilliant British historian. What makes it fascinating is not simply the content but also the biting (and hilarious) salvos launched back and forth between the two. I'm delighted to learn that Krugman has more than met his match in Ferguson, as he (Krugman) is unbearably arrogant and patronizing, although George Will dispatched him pretty well yesterday on ABC's This Week: Roundtable.

Academic spats can, of course, be famously catty. Ludwig Wittgenstein once tossed a poker at his fellow philosopher Karl Popper at a meeting of the Cambridge Moral Science Club as they argued about whether issues in philosophy were real or just linguistic puzzles. At least Krugman and Ferguson haven’t come to blows yet, although at their next meeting it might be better to hide the blunt instruments. Still, it is a long time since the academic world witnessed a dispute as gladiatorial as this one.

Henry Kissinger, who knows a bit about fights, both political and intellectual, once observed that the reason academic tussles were so vicious was “because the stakes are so small”. And although that is true in one sense — it doesn’t matter very much whether the professor from Princeton doesn’t like his rival from Harvard — it is wrong in another. The stakes in this row are pretty high.

The argument is about whether the huge stimulus programmes launched by governments around the world, and the way central banks are furiously printing money, are lifting the global economy out of recession. Or whether they are just teeing up the next crisis — hyper-inflation and an even worse economic collapse.