The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way In The New Century – Paul Krugman, Norton (2003) 426pp.

For at least the past five years, Princeton economist Paul Krugman has been a constant and unflinching voice twice a week in the editorial pages of the New York Times. Few have lowered the boom on the Bush administration with such accuracy, consistency, and fearlessness, as has Mr. Krugman. In times when the radical right runs three branches of the federal government and has so many shrill voices in the corporate media that together form a cacophonous roar, this courage can not be understated.

In October of 2000, before the debacle we have come to know as the 2000 presidential election, Krugman made an exceedingly prescient observation, even though at the time he was specifically addressing how Bush’s tax cut proposals didn’t quite add up: “Mr. Bush has made an important political discovery. Really big misstatements, it turns out, can not be effectively challenged, because voters can’t believe that a man who seems so likable would do that sort of thing.”(p.196) The biggest misstatements, however, were yet to come; those that got a country into war on a carpet of false pretenses. But Krugman was among the first to boldly and simply call the Bush campaign’s bluff, and for this alone he deserves our utmost respect and praise.

In dissecting the Bush machine’s modus operandi, there is no one more on the ball than Krugman. In one column in June 2002, he shrewdly notes how the Bush team uses crisis exploitation (be it a poor economy, 9/11, etc.) to push through legislation faithful to a pre-existing ideology (i.e. tax cuts, increased defense budgets). He also makes mention of the politicization of terror threats: “Clearly George W. Bush believes that real-world problems will solve themselves, or at least won’t make the evening news, because by pure coincidence they will be pre-empted by terror alerts.”(p.255) How refreshing it is to have someone actually spell out what so many suspect but are too afraid to say out loud or put to the written word.

Another method is internal sabotage of the government with the appointment of under-qualified people to critical positions. The disastrous results of this policy recently manifested themselves during the hurricane Katrina disaster, with Michael Brown at the head of FEMA. Krugman calls it the “Pitt Principle” named after Harvey Pitt, the former chairman of the SEC. “The Pitt Principle tells us that sometimes incompetence is exactly what the people in charge want.”(p.264) This, Krugman writes, can be applied all the way to the position of commander-in-chief.

Saving his most conservative positions for last, Krugman in his final pages, spells out a defense of globalization and free markets. While he connects the dots in earlier essays with regards to the real reason of war with Iraq (i.e. oil and imperial expansion), Krugman somehow misses the boat when it come to how war is often pursued in the name of opening or protecting free market. Relatively, this is a very small objection to pick over, since elsewhere he is more than vindicated in his analysis. If the reader is looking for a lucid description of what exactly went wrong in the first couple of years of the new century, one could not do better than to read this collection of op-ed columns by a man in the know.