In that post, I pointed out how Reihan Salam took the ridiculous position that Krugman wasn't being hypocritical in accepting an unusually high salary to be involved with an income inequality study at a publicly funded university, because Krugman, in Salam's view, has special abilities that justify an even higher salary.
These statements deserve special attention, not so much because of the obvious contradiction that they are a defense of the thing being called a problem, but because the defense given was a justification for income inequality.
Reading the public response to Krugman's new job at CUNY, including Salam's article at slate.com, was like watching a tragic comedy play out. Over and over, individuals responded with some version of: 'Krugman's unequal pay to participate in the study of inequality, is justified by his special abilities.'
Really.
This common response begs the obvious question: how many people are so crippled in their thinking abilities, that they will give a justification for inequality in their defense of the study of it as a problem?
Consider these reader comments in response to this overview of the Krugman offer at gawker.com, which also includes details about how little other CUNY professors are paid by comparison --
4/16/14 11:47am
Let's not get into a thing about what "irony" means, but suffice to say I don't agree it's "ironic" that a man who cares about income inequality is accepting a salary in proportion to what his credentials merit...
4/16/14 11:44am
He is a Nobel Prize winner. My guess is that $225k for a Nobel Prize winner is pretty reasonable when compared with other Nobel Prize winners.
Let us compare that with a wall street tech. (programmer) who is pulling in 125 - 150 k. So Dr.Krugman call your agent. You should be getting at least 10 times that.
Take some of our current Queen's ( he is as effective as the queen is in changing rhetoric or policy) salary and give it to Dr. Krugman.
In short, defenders of the notion that tax dollars should be used to pay academics to study income inequality, don't have a problem with income inequality, so long as they view the individual being paid a high salary as worth it.
So there you have it. Income inequality is not a problem, provided you are a popular recipient of that inequality.
To save the best for last, and to drive that point home, consider the priceless irony of this reader's comments --
4/16/14 7:34pm
The main thing that the comment threads teach me is that no one has ever read anything Paul Krugman has written. Ever.He has no objections to people getting wealthy. Ever. Let's just go ahead and read what he's actually written, rather than strawmen. He doesn't like two things:
1.) Wealth generated for the sake of wealth. This is all of Wall-Street. They produce no goods or services. He's said this numerous times:
'the movie stars. Yes, a handful of media stars make a lot of money. But they are a trivial part of the story (pdf):
The upper tiers of the income distribution are overwhelmingly occupied by executives of one kind or another — corporate, finance, real estate, and lawyers who are surely more corporate than Perry Mason. And even the biggest names in media aren't real players. Remember, the 40 top-paid hedge fund managers and traders made an average of more than $400 million each in 2012.'
So he hates Wall-Street. That's different than hating all rich people.
2.) He hates people who earn their money by offshoring the responsibility of payments onto taxpayers.
He has consistently criticized Wal-Mart, Amazon, and other companies that get rich because the cost of their operations are subsidized by taxpayers. If these companies had to pay for the health care and welfare that their workers get, then their profits would go down by half. And that would cut down their executive pay. And hey, what's that group of people that he hates? (See post 1).
This is a broad range of people: The entire agriculture business (15 billion per year), oil (between 25 to 75 billion), and so forth. The average recipient of this government largesse is already very, very, very rich:
http://theweek.com/article/index/...
So if you claim that it is hypocritical for him to earn money, you are engaging in a strawman argument. People who produce goods and services should be rewarded but if they are earning rentier profits or earning money because taxpayers are shouldering the burden, then they receive unearned wealth.
It was nice of him to clearly state his extreme bias. He's supposedly summarizing Krugman here, in an approving way --
Wealth generated for the sake of wealth. This is all of Wall-Street. They produce no goods or services.This seems like psychological projection — when he says Wall Street doesn't produce anything, does he mean like a professional academic, paid with tax dollars to study something that can't possibly bring benefit to anyone, like income inequality?
Even if you agree that income inequality is a problem, how is an academic study about it supposed to help those with the lowest incomes? Academics like Krugman certainly don't produce anything that will raise the living standards of the working poor. Short of making those with the lowest incomes more productive — which is the only real solution, that no academic study can achieve — there's only one way to reduce inequality, and that's to force those who earn the most down, by taking away most of their income. This supposed problem has long since been 'solved' by countries like North Korea. So let's stop this pretense that paying an academic to study differences in income will somehow raise the level of fairness of society, when those income differences are justified by differences in individual ability — as Krugman supporters are quick to point out, when it suits them.
And let's pretend for a moment that this reader's absurd claim is true — that no one on Wall Street provides a service. The appropriate response to this claim is: So what -- how does that affect you? If you're convinced that everyone on Wall Street is engaged in graft, don't do business with them. In short, no one is forcing you to pay a financial services company for a service that you consider worthless.
Even if the reader comment above is absolutely correct regarding Wall Street, those that work in financial services would still be morally superior to Krugman and CUNY, because those that work in financial services are not paid with tax dollars, that were taken by force — they're paid from voluntary transactions with customers. Even considering the highly unusual government bailouts during the financial crisis, which Krugman supported, taxpayers aren't forced to pay the salaries of the various executives and hedge fund operators, that the reader complained about in his comment above.
The reader's second claim, regarding 'offshoring the responsibility of payments onto taxpayers', is a commonly used red herring fallacy, where one attempts to make corporations responsible for the costs of the lifestyle choices of their employees, in order to avoid the obvious point that workers can't be paid more than their work is worth on an open market, and so it's obviously individual workers who are being subsidized by welfare payments, and not their employers. In a previous post, I also wrote about this often repeated fallacy, that employers can simply pay to support a certain lifestyle for employees, regardless of how much customers are willing to pay for the services those employees are providing.
The reader then confuses that issue by bringing up the direct subsidies the government pays to certain industries, like agriculture. Certainly, such subsidies aren't fair, but I wonder which subsidy the vast majority of taxpayers would eliminate first, if given the choice — a subsidy for food products they regularly purchase, or a subsidy for a group of academics to study the income of taxpayers?
Overall, this reader's comments did little more than reveal a hateful envious mindset, in that he simply attacked the success of particular professions, based upon his unsupported claim that those professions have no value in all cases, and that everyone in those professions makes an egregiously high salary.
And the reader's closing sentences are a kind of climax of absurdity on this --
So if you claim that it is hypocritical for him to earn money, you are engaging in a straw man argument. ... if they are earning rentier profits or earning money because taxpayers are shouldering the burden, then they receive unearned wealth.Obviously, Krugman isn't being criticized for earning money, or even a lot of money — the criticism is that it's hypocritical to exemplify that which you are calling a problem. If Krugman were instead receiving a multi-million dollar salary as an economic analyst from a private company, there would be no basis for criticizing his income.
And regarding 'earning money because taxpayers are shouldering the burden' — I guess this reader missed the part about CUNY being a publicly funded university, and that Krugman is a perfect example of this criticism, whereas a hedge fund operator is not.
I would certainly like to see some pork barrel spending eliminated, so I don't have to participate in 'shouldering the burden of unearned wealth', and Krugman's job at CUNY, along with all the other 'jobs' at CUNY's Luxemborg Income Study Center, are a good place to start cutting.
Though Krugman is not being hypocritical in regard to burdening taxpayers, since he normally advocates for wasteful government spending, even when it helps no one.
In that sense, studying income inequality at CUNY is Krugman's dream job, since it is paid for largely by taxpayers, and it won't help anyone — other than Krugman.
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