Podcast #142: Paul Krugman on Fake News, Lying Candidates, and What Public Intellectuals Need to Do
Paul Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist and beloved columnist for the New York Times. A prolific writer, he has published books for both an academic and general audience, including End This Depression Now!, The Conscience of a Liberal, and The Self-Organizing Economy. For this week's episode of the New York Public Library Podcast, we're proud to present Paul Krugman discussing fake news, lying candidates, and what public intellectuals need to do.
Discussing the recent election, Krugman noted that this was not the first time that America has faced the lies of candidates for public office:
"Presidential candidates, even presidents, saying things that aren't true is not a new phenomenon. Even things that are grossly not true. In my early years at the New York Times, I was doing a lot on a fellow by the name of George Bush who was claiming that his tax cut, which was overwhelmingly plutocrat friendly, was actually aimed at the middle class. That was during the 2000 campaign. A couple years later, I think in the light of recent outrages, we forget how shocking some of the things then were: the constant insinuation that we need to invade Iraq because Saddam Hussein was behind 9/11, which was always obvious nonsense but never stopped being implied. That was a pretty shocking thing. We used to think being brought to war on false pretenses, but now we know better. These days you see some kinds of people trying to hold up Mitt Romney as the honorable man. Don't forget that during the whole of that 2012 campaign one of his constant theme was denouncing President Obama for his apology tour of the world, apologizing for America, which of course never happened. So there was a lot of blatant untruth in some previous political campaigns. But now, what this campaign behind us was on a completely different level where you had that it ran across multiple levels of inquiry, of policy."
In analyzing the election, many have focused on the role of fake news. Krugman pointed out that dishonesty is often appealing to readers; it is easier to believe a story that confirms what we already believe to be true:
"It turns out the institutions that should be gatekeepers on sense in our public discourse by and large are not doing it, and then it just turns out that it's not just the fault of media, fake or allegedly non-fake. It's also appealing stories will play. If you tell the people who used to work in the coal industry or whose parents used to work in the coal industry, 'I can bring back the coal jobs,' that's a story they want to hear. In fact, do a little homework and you find out it's completely impossible. We didn't lose coal jobs because of environmental policy or because or foreign competition. We lost them because we get our coal these days by strip mining and mountain top removal, which doesn't really employ many people. But people don't want to hear that. Appealing falsehoods, it turns out there's no effective check in our public discourse, at least there wasn't this year. That's been a really rude shock."
Looking forward, Krugman laid out several goals for public intellectuals. Mostly, he argued that public intellectuals cannot afford to remain isolated but must work on conveying their ideas in ways that are more broadly accessible:
"The temptation to take it easy and not do the work of translating abstractions into something more concrete that people can understand is very great, and we need to fight that. Part of it is, again, we just need to find ways to skip not just the jargon words but the hard to understand ways of framing things. Long, long ago, my great mentor in graduate school, the late Darb, he said if you're writing for a popular audience, you do not start by saying, 'Consider a small, open economy..' You say, 'In Belgium.' You know I don't want to be in the position of just saying do what I've been doing; everybody should be just like me. I've actually been doing some soul-searching myself, and one thing that I think is important that I don't do and it does not come naturally, so I'm going to have to learn how to do it and force myself, is individualizing stories about people. That is really not my style. It's not my natural style. Certainly, I'm not the kind of person who flies to a country, meets somebody, a wise local person who sounds somehow exactly like me. But also, I'm not the kind of person who does pound the pavement reporting and finds a family who's been afflicted. But there's a reason. It always used to annoy me, still does annoy me, when politicians give speeches and say, 'Let me tell you about the Garcia family.' But they do that for a very good reason. That's how most people relate. You have to make it personal. So that's something that even public intellectuals, even people where one part of their life is extremely rarefied work, need to find a way to do."
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