Paul Krugman is without question the most accessible Nobel Economist in history. (Not that it's a high bar, but still . . .) Krugman can break down complex economic principles into plain and entertaining language that can be appreciated and understood by anyone except someone impervious to facts and reason -- that is, a derp.
Yesterday, he devoted a blog post to a brief discussion of the difference between urps and derps:
By urp I mean just getting something wrong — and then conceding, as evidence rolls in, that you did indeed get it wrong: “Urp! That was a bad call!” Obviously if someone urps all the time, his credibility is diminished; but everyone is going to do it now and then. To urp is human.
Derp, on the other hand, means being proved wrong but continuing to loudly assert the same thing again and again regardless.
Krugman himself freely admits to having
urped in his analysis of deficits and interest rates in 2003. The difference is that he admitted his mistake and adjusted his analysis based on the evidence.
Derp lerped into prominence recently in an exchange between Erick Erikson and Josh Barro. Barro is an interesting guy. His father, Robert Barro, is a conservative economist at Harvard, who "has been an outspoken opponent of stimulus spending, calling Obama's stimulus bill "garbage" and "the worst bill since the 1930s" Until recently, son Josh followed in his Dad's footsteps, working for the Manhattan Institute. However, being a smart guy, he is coming to realize that continuing to accept ideas that are disproven by reality is unwise, and well, derpy. In a subsequent column, Barro quoted Noah Smith for an excellent definition of derp ("priors" is short for "prior beliefs"):
English has no word for "the constant, repetitive reiteration of strong priors". Yet it is a well-known phenomenon in the world of punditry, debate, and public affairs. On Twitter, we call it "derp".
(It's somewhat similar to the definition of insanity -- "repeating the same mistakes over and over again and expecting different results").*
Barro sums up the derp dilemma for the Erickson and the right:
Basically, Erickson is derpy. And Erickson has big appeal to conservatives because lots of them are derpy. But the country is getting less derpy, and in time the Republican party will have to get less derpy, too. That’s my project, and I don’t expect Erickson to like it.
As that quote shows, Barro still considers himself a Republican, and is trying to be a "reasonable conservative." In another blog post,
Moral Derpitude, Paul Krugman sums up why this is a probably impossible challenge:
The point here is that the virulent opposition to any kind of monetary expansion isn’t just coming from the talk radio types, or the rank and file politicians. We have a modern GOP in which Paul Ryan is considered a policy wonk, the leading intellectual among elected officials — and he gets his ideas about monetary policy by quoting from Atlas Shrugged.
In other words, the GOP today is hopelessly enmeshed in a morass of incurable, chronic infection of derpitude that only a final and definitive rejection by voters can cure.
*wrongly attributed to Albert Einstein, Benjamin Franklin and Mark Twain.