There's a certain stylishness in the way Bill Kristol attempts the pundit's bluff today and tries to turn his economic illiteracy into some sort of intellectual virtue. Points for effort, I guess. But it's sort of a sad column. Kristol isn't even confused by the hard things. He's confused by the easy ones. For instance: He appears to think Wall Street is mainly staffed by academic economists, and the financial collapse is an indictment of the profession. "After all," he asks, "wasn’t it excessive confidence in complex economic models and sophisticated financial instruments on the part of people well educated in modern economics that helped get us into the current mess?" Well, no. For better or for worse, the economics profession wasn't terribly aware of most sophisticated financial instruments. "Finance" is different than "economics," even though they both deal with money. Most economists didn't know what a mortgage-backed security was. Most financiers don't subscribe to the Quarterly Journal of Economics. Kristol doesn't know that, though, and so argues that we shouldn't trust economists on the need for a large stimulus package, either. Sigh. The final line of the column, at least on the interwebs, is a little editor's note informing us that "Paul Krugman is off today." Yeah. We noticed.
