And Taft Reminds Me Of Homer Simpson, Because Of The Girth And The Four Fingers

Niall Ferguson in the Financial Times:

President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US as he takes a well-earned summer break after just over six months in the world’s biggest and toughest job.

Jason Zengerle at TNR:

I’m surprised Ferguson would write such a thing. I’m even more surprised his editor at the Financial Times didn’t save him from himself

Matt Yglesias:

I really enjoyed The Pity of War and have spent years being amazed by how nutty Ferguson is as a columnist and pundit.

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I’m sure Ferguson has the sort of brain-power that could extinguishes galaxies. I read this lede, and said to myself “I shouldn’t be so offended, so politically correct, that I don’t actually read the guys column.

I don’t think that was a smart decision. I found the piece to basically be a long-winded concern-troll. And then it ends with this:

Even Felix the Cat’s luck ran out during the Depression. His creator Pat Sullivan drank himself to death in 1933, baffled that audiences now preferred mice like Mickey and Jerry. President Obama should take note.
Right. Obama should take note. From a cat. Because, you know, the cat is black too. Like Obama.

Jim Fallows:

Hu Jintao is Kaiser Wilhelm; Obama is a black cartoon cat. I look forward to Ferguson’s discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.

UPDATE: Paul Krugman:

I cannot fathom the state of mind that led Ferguson to think this was a good way to introduce a column; admittedly, it doesn’t really distract from his larger point, since as far as I can tell he doesn’t have one.

But what I really can’t fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages. I occasionally use an unfortunate turn of phrase; when I do, my copy editor politely suggests that I find another. And if it’s borderline, Andy Rosenthal will weigh in. I don’t think anything like this could show up in the Times — certainly not as the lede.

Ferguson responds to critics at HuffPo:

So it’s racist to compare President Obama with Felix the Cat? Oh dear, the seemingly dead body of political correctness just twitched. Let’s try logic, shall we?

1. Black cats are proverbially lucky.

2. Felix the cartoon character was a black cat, not an African-American cat – in other words, he was not one of the (quite numerous) 1920s figures in popular entertainment that mocked the mannerisms of the descendants of slaves.

3. Obama is a lucky president — so far. Compare his first six months with Carter’s and Clinton’s if you don’t get that bit.

4. As for the word “black”, it’s the same one used by the Congressional Black Caucus and the Harvard Black Alumni Society, among others.

The piece made an important point about the biggest threat to Obama’s presidency: the seemingly uncontrollable deficit. That’s the issue the Huffington Post should be focusing on, not politically correct claptrap.

Coates:

The problems with this post are rather incredible. It’s nice to know that Ferguson’s comparison wasn’t racist. Of course if you click through the link you’ll see that HuffPo accuses him of no such thing. But Ferguson is too good to let the facts stand in the way of flamboyant argument. Hence, the Racist Card.

Look, it’s not so bad to say something stupid. Writers who work at high volume are bound to do so from time to time–the expectation of perfection is absurd. Less absurd is the expectation of intellectual honesty, of a writer saying “You know what, I had a point, but I blew the lede.” Less absurd is the expectation of respect for the reader, of the writer engaging critics without lying about the actual criticism. Less absurd is the expectation that the writer actually understands the tropes he’s employing, that he knows the difference between a four-leaf clover (good luck) and a black cat (bad luck).

I understand the impulse to double-down when you’re under attack. But I don’t think it’s too much to ask people, fortunate enough to think for a living, to do their job. I don’t think it’s too much to ask writers to refrain from intellectual cowardice. I don’t think it’s too much to ask Niall Ferguson to, for God’s sake, stop digging.

UPDATE #2: James Fallows:

Let me tell this one in order:

On August 11, last Tuesday, Niall Ferguson wrote an op-ed in the Financial Times whose theme was that Barack Obama reminded him of Felix the Cat? Why? “Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky.”

Later that day, I did an item marveling at the column. Its final line was, ” I look forward to Ferguson’s discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates.”

Two days later, on August 13, I got an irritated note from Ferguson. Its subject line was “Rubbish.” It included a quote from H.L. Gates saying that there was no problem with the Felix line — the reported quote from Gates was “What a load of rubbish” — and it ended with a request that I publish it. To be exact, a challenge: “I shall be interested to see if you post this on your blog.”

Soon thereafter, I did indeed publish it. I sent Ferguson a note saying that I had done so, with the explanation that I took his note as a request that I share his views.

An hour later, he wrote back and requested that I remove the item from the Atlantic’s site so that he could check further with Gates. Within minutes I did that, putting up this placeholder announcement instead. Since the original had been up for a while, it survived in many search caches. But I saw no reason to be difficult  — or to pretend I didn’t get Ferguson’s “please take it down” note; so I complied.

Over the weekend, I didn’t hear from Ferguson, and on the “life is short” policy resolved to let the matter drop.

Then this afternoon, I received a followup note — sent jointly to me and Paul Krugman, who had written in a similar vein. In its entirety it says:

Dear Paul and James,

As you both took exception to my comparison of the President with Felix the Cat, my favorite cartoon character, implying it was racist and recommending I consult Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., I have now done so. He has taken the trouble to consult others in the field of African-American Studies, including our colleague Lawrence D. Bobo, the W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, and has written to me as follows:

“None of us thought of Felix as black, unlike some of the racially-questionable caricatures Disney used.  Felix’s blackness, like Mickey’s and Minnie’s, was like a suit of clothes, not a skin color. … You are safe on this one.”

As he has made clear, you are free to publish this on your blogs. I hope that you will, and that you will also add an apology to me for the imputation of racism as well as, in Paul’s case, the gratuitous and puerile accusation of “whining” (i.e., defending myself against a slur). I remain of the view that you took this line to avoid engaging with my central points that President Obama’s administration has no visible plan for stabilizing the finances of the federal government even over ten years, and that Congress will likely impede whatever steps he may take in this direction.

Yours,

Niall Ferguson.

On the requested “apology”: Sadly, No. I don’t think and didn’t say that Niall Ferguson is a racist. Probably like him, I lament the way indiscriminate use of that label — or  “sexist,” “anti-Semite,” now “socialist” — can shut down discussion. But there’s no getting around the clumsiness of what he wrote. If Felix the Cat’s blackness is a barely noticeable aspect of his identity, why on earth would anyone begin a comparison of Obama to Felix by saying “Felix was not only black”? Thought experiment: Suppose I wrote a column about Jackie Chan — or Cabinet members Steven Chu and Eric Shinseki, or Yo-Yo Ma, or new PGA champion Y.E. Yang — that began exactly the way Ferguson’s did. “Jackie Chan reminds me of Pluto. One of the best-loved characters from the Disney studio, Pluto was not only yellow. He was also very, very likable.”

Paul Krugman:

What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American. The mind reels.

For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.

I think he’s a poseur.

I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.

And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.

If “Back To The Future” Was Made Today, Marty McFly Goes Back To 1979

Brink Lindsey has a piece in Reason called Nostalgianomics about liberal pinning for the 50s. Specifically, he’s speaking of Paul Krugman, income inequality and social progress. The last two graphs:

Paul Krugman may long for the return of selfdenying corporate workers who declined to seek better opportunities out of organizational loyalty, and thus kept wages artificially suppressed, but these are creatures of a bygone ethos—an ethos that also included uncritical acceptance of racist and sexist traditions and often brutish intolerance of deviations from mainstream lifestyles and sensibilities.

The rise in income inequality does raise issues of legitimate public concern. And reasonable people disagree hotly about what ought to be done to ensure that our prosperity is widely shared. But the caricature of postwar history put forward by Krugman and other purveyors of nostalgianomics won’t lead us anywhere. Reactionary fantasies never do.

Veronique de Rugy at The Corner

Jim Manzi:

Brink goes on to argue that the political and social changes that have allowed growing inequality – and have in turn been reinforced by it – are good things, not bad things. These include greater freedom for women, acceptance of diversity and non-conformism and so on. I broadly agree with this diagnosis, though I think that Krugman paints too rosy a picture of the 1950s and Brink pays too rosy a picture of the current era. The trade-offs involved in policies that allow or encourage growing inequality are not nearly as one-sided as either Brink or Krugman asserts. They are uncomfortable.

But the United States didn’t just wake up in 1980 and decide to make a set of uncomfortable trade-offs through a process of abstract reasoning, or even entirely through organic social developments, we were pushed. What I think is missing from the debate as presented in Brink’s piece is international competition.

Manzi links to Jonah Goldberg, who writes about nostalgia for an even earlier time:

It seems to me that all of the new New Deal talk fails to grasp that the extent to which nostalgia drives our assumptions of “what works.” Even if you give the most charitable reading of the New Deal and the postwar period, the simple fact remains that those times aren’t like these times.

Goldberg is discussing the Niall Ferguson Financial Times article about Keynes and Krugman. Krugman had this blog post on Ferguson in early May. Here’s Paul Krugman‘s column on inflation, published a day before Ferguson. The New York Review of Books symposium with Krugman, Ferguson, Roubini, etc… Andrew Stuttaford excerpts part of the Ferguson piece at The Corner:

Of course, Mr Krugman knew what I meant. “The only thing that might drive up interest rates,” he acknowledged during our debate, “is that people may grow dubious about the financial solvency of governments.” Might? May? The fact is that people – not least the Chinese government – are already distinctly dubious. They understand that US fiscal policy implies big purchases of government bonds by the Fed this year, since neither foreign nor private domestic purchases will suffice to fund the deficit. This policy is known as printing money and it is what many governments tried in the 1970s, with inflationary consequences you do not need to be a historian to recall.

This fight between Ferguson and Krugman has gotten a lot of blog press.

Henry Blodget at Clusterstock

Noam Scheiber at TNR

Sheldon Filger at HuffPo

Gideon Rachman in FT

Cees Bruggemans in iAfrica sums it up:

But as history has shown, this may actually be very rational, demanding upfront that policymakers show it can work and thereby earning the compliance of bondholders rather than merely naively assume such compliance to be blindly forthcoming. Mr Ferguson goes wrong in claiming with the expectations crowd that governments are always wrong. In the present global crisis the Keynesian medication is needed and will work and to decry it merely suggests an inability to distinguish good from bad policy.

[…]So was this clash of titans useful? It most certainly helped in seeing where both gentlemen are going right, but also where they err. This aside of personal pettiness which suggests real big egos can’t have a normal conversation without completely missing the point of each other.

UPDATE: Daniel Gross in Slate

Ruminate On Regulate

Niall Ferguson‘s piece in the Sunday New York Times, arguing that we often overreact to financial crisis and that bad regulation is more to blame than deregulation.

For reasons to do with human psychology and the failure of most educational institutions to teach financial history, we are always more amazed when such things happen than we should be. As a result, 9 times out of 10 we overreact. The usual response is to introduce a raft of new laws and regulations designed to prevent the crisis from repeating itself. In the months ahead, the world will reverberate to the sound of stable doors being shut long after the horses have bolted, and history suggests that many of the new measures will do more harm than good. The classic example is the legislation passed during the British South-Sea Bubble to restrict the formation of joint-stock companies. The so-called Bubble Act of 1720 remained a needless handicap on the British economy for more than a century.

Piece is linked to by Tyler Cowen, Veronique de Rugy, and Andrew Stuttaford.

Free Exchange:

It’s important to remember that the crisis still has not fully played out. So it’s premature to label the Anglo-Saxon model as a failure. On balance it still has delivered increased prosperity to many of the world’s citizens.

Mr Ferguson rightly points out that thoughtless and hasty regulation actually does more harm than good. The Basel accords, for example, may have encouraged banks to hold toxic assets and take on a silly amount of leverage. Regulation can also breed a false sense of security.

Matt Y and Kevin Drum dissent with the idea that deregulation is responsible for growth. The chart is from Matt Y’s blog. Kevin Drum:

This is a kissing cousin to the question everyone is raising these days about financial innovation.  It goes like this: the basic benefit of all the financial innovation we’ve seen over the past few decades has been to make credit more easily available, and that clearly had something to do with the credit boom and subsequent bust.  This in turn begs the obvious question: was it really a good idea to make credit so easily available?  If the answer is no — if the only result was to mask stagnant wages and produce a fake consumption boom — then maybe all that innovation wasn’t such a hot idea in the first place.

And a bit of Warren G, from a previous boom era:

Updates when I find them.

UPDATE: Ezra Klein