Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Your second book is An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by the 18th-century British philosopher David Hume. You read this in college and it really changed your life.
Yes. I was at that stage, a college sophomore or thereabouts, when you’re searching around, looking for belief systems. I think it’s actually a point when you’re quite vulnerable, because you are looking for someone who is going to offer you all the answers. Some people turn to religious orthodoxy, other people turn to Ayn Rand. One of my favourite lines – and I haven’t been able to find out who came up with it – is that “There’s an age when boys read one of two books. Either they read Ayn Rand or they read Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings. One of these books leaves you with no grasp on reality and a deeply warped sense of fantasy in place of real life. The other one is about hobbits and orcs.”
Then I read Hume’s Enquiry, this wonderful, humane book saying that nobody has all the answers. What we know is what we have evidence for. We do the best we can, but anybody who claims to be able to deduce or have revelation about The Truth – with both Ts capitalised – is wrong. It doesn’t work that way. The only reasonable way to approach life is with an attitude of humane scepticism. I felt that a great weight had been lifted from my shoulders when I read that book.
Because before that you felt the pressure to adopt a particular belief system?
I felt the pull of them. You look at people who are very certain, and have these beliefs of one form or another and you think, “Maybe they really know something!” And what Hume says is, “Actually, no. They don’t.”
Wouldn’t some people accuse you of having an extremely strong belief system? Isn’t there a sense among liberals that, “We’re in the right so we don’t have to pay too much attention to conservative or Republican arguments”?
In my experience with these things – which I find both within economics and more broadly – is that if you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, “What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?” A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don’t think it’s right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can’t do it. They can’t get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, “What do liberals want?” You get this bizarre stuff – for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism. You just have to look at the realities of the way each side talks and what they know. One side of the picture is open-minded and sceptical. We have views that are different, but they’re arrived at through paying attention. The other side has dogmatic views.
In one of the books by Keynes you recommended, he quotes Clissold saying of the Labour Party – the left in England at the time – that they have “feelings in place of ideas”. Is that a valid critique of the left?
That’s hardly true of Keynes. What a deeply reasoned piece of work that book is! And I don’t think it’s true of someone like me. Yes, I do have feelings, but take a look, for example, at the debate that’s playing out over healthcare right now. I’d like to say I bring in evidence. I’m not saying, “Here is the way the world ought to be, so it must be that way.” I try to show how different systems work.
As all other developed countries already have universal healthcare, it certainly seems like the right thing for the US to finally do.
But then the question is whether it’s feasible. What does it take? This is the right thing to do, but how do you do it? It’s a combination of modelling it, of looking at evidence from other systems, of looking at evidence from our own system. And provided the thing [The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act] isn’t overturned in the next couple of years, provided we can make it to 2014 when the system is fully in place, it will become a completely natural feature of American life. It’s not the system I would have designed if I didn’t have to worry about the politics, but I’ll take this highly imperfect system.
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Paul Krugman is an economics professor at Princeton. He was the winner of the 2008 Nobel prize in economics for his work on trade theory and economic geography. He writes a twice-weekly column for The New York Times and is the author of a number of popular books. In its review of The Conscience of a Liberal, The New York Review of Books called him “the most consistent and courageous – and unapologetic – liberal partisan in American journalism”.
