Today our favorite Nobel Laureate in Economics takes apart those who are by whisper and innuendo attempting to prevent Janet Yellen - whom he calls
by any objective standard, she’s the best-qualified person in America to take over when Ben Bernanke steps down as chairman
- from becoming the next head of the Federal Reserve.
This is a vintage Krugman column. When the Princeton Professor decides to target someone, he does so with precision and with devastating effect.
He points out there are two campaigns, one where the sexism is implied, the other which is "raw misogyny"
And both campaigns manage to combine sexism with very bad economic analysis.
Please keep reading.
Krugman starts with an editorial from the New York Sun (to which he links but I won't), which was titled "The Female Dollar." HE rightly describes the paper as "a marginal publication, with strong gold-bug tendencies" that normally we could ignore, especially when the editorial in question not only is totally wrong on recent Fed history, basing its argument on the idea that the Fed has been following "disastrously inflaionary monetary policy for years" (even though as Krugman points out, inflation is now at a 50 year low).
And it warned that things would get even worse if the dollar were to become merely “gender-backed.” I am not making this up.
What gives this notion "legs" (or as I might sardonically put it, "gravitas") among conservatives who might otherwise ignore such a marginal publication is that
The Wall Street Journal immediately followed up with its own editorial along the same lines, in the course of which it approvingly quoted The Sun piece, female dollar and all.
The other campaign against Ms. Yellen has been subtler, involving repeated suggestions — almost always off the record — that she lacks the “gravitas” to lead the Fed.
To this Krugman first responds by listing Yellen's notable credentials, then asks a blunt question, to which he offers his own blunt answer:
Would anyone suggest that a man with those credentials was somehow unqualified for office?
Sorry, but it’s hard to escape the conclusion that gravitas, in this context, mainly means possessing a Y chromosome.
Having belittled both lines of attack, Krugman now gets serious by noting that not only are both sexist (and should be condemned for that reason), but they are based on bad economic analysis.
This is the heart of the column.
In the case of the “female dollar” types, the wrongheadedness of the economics is as raw and obvious as the sexism.
He ties this people firmly to the wrong-headed ideas about supposedly runaway inflation, notes they have been wrong "every step of the way" and are unwilling to ever admit they were wrong, before describing them as
the last people in the world you should listen to when it comes to monetary policy.
But what he does with the "gravitas" crowd is magnificent. He considers it subtler than the directly misogynistic "female dollar" crowd.
But to the extent that having gravitas means something other than being male, it means being what I like to call a Very Serious Person — the kind of person who talks a lot about the need to make tough decisions, which somehow always involves demanding sacrifices on the part of ordinary families while treating the wealthy with kid gloves. And here’s the thing: The Very Serious People have been almost as consistently wrong, although not as spectacularly, as the inflation hysterics.
They "hijack the national conversation" to focus on the supposedly exploding deficits that will inevitably create a fiscal crisis that never seems to come instead of on the job creation that we need.
They are equally wrong on monetary policy. For evidence Krugman turns to the analysis of the news division of the Wall Street Journal (which for years has been superb even as the editorial page has gone increasingly off the rails - my analysis), which examined the predicting track records of hawks (Fed doing too much to fight unemployment( and doves (doing too little) at the Fed, found that doves were consistently more accurate in their predictions
with the best forecaster of all being the most prominent of the doves — Janet Yellen.
Krugman provides
this link for the Journal's analysis. It is worth not only reading, but bookmarking and passing along to anyone who might have any influence upon the President as he makes his decision - be those people policy makers, opinion writers, or if you know any influential personal friends of Obama.
Remember, the news division of the WSJ has been superb for years. Its Washington bureau used to be headed by Al Hunt, and my friend David Wessel who is their economics editor won his second Pulitzer as the Journal, after having previously won one as part of a team at the Boston Globe. The journalism of the WSJ is reality based, even if the editorial page has long been in Lala-land.
Krugman is not arguing that Yellen is the only possible candidate to head the Fed, but that the decision should be made on the merits of the candidates, which is not what has been happening.
He also offers this paragraph:
The point is that while the gravitas types like to think of themselves as serious men (and I do mean men) who are willing to do what needs to be done, recent history suggests that they’re actually men who are eager to prove their seriousness by doing what doesn’t need to be done, at the public’s expense.
When I read that, I tried to think of a single woman who has ever headed a major Wall Street or Money Center bank. I do not believe there ever has been a woman, although we have had women in key positions in regulatory agencies, for example, Brooksley Born. We have seen women as governors, as heads of Fortune 500 companies (more likely of those in the high tech industry). They have headed many cabinet positions, including Justice and State, in the latter case three of the last 5 Secretaries having been females.
The two areas in which sexism remains rampant have been the military and finance, and no woman has ever headed Defense or Treasury. I note this given the increasing possibility that the next President will be a female: it is hard to imagine anyone more qualified for the Oval Office than Hillary Clinton, and have to wonder whether the kinds of sexism offered against Yellen will be offered by Republicans should Clinton be the Democratic nominee. I know there will be whisper campaigns - that she is too old (although she will be younger than Saint Ronnie Reagan was when he was elected). If anyone ever tries to say she is not tough enough, I am tempted to bring out the occasion where she outmatched John McCain in vodka shots!
Be that as it may.
I think there is a truly key line from Krugman: men who are eager to prove their seriousness by doing what doesn’t need to be done, at the public’s expense. Perhaps what we do need is someone who thinks differently, for whatever reason, and is willing to step outside the box of conventional thinking being pushed by so many.
Perhaps if those "serious" men want to make it about gender, we should throw it back into their faces - it was men who ran the economy into the ground from Wall Street and from Washington, it was men who took us into an illegal and unproductive and wasteful war in Iraq. If they don't consider Janet Yellen one of the boys, that might be the strongest indication of why we should pick her - she has not been afraid of offering a different point of view, because she didn't feel a need to be part of their club.
Oh, and remember that different point of view has been right when the "boys" were wrong. The Wall Street Journal has provided all the evidence we need.
Sex, Money and Gravitas
An appropriate framing.
The "no girls allowed" treehouse of the "serious men" whose "gravitas" consists primarily in the weight of how wrong their opinion are is plain for all to see.
Is the President secure enough to recognize the truth and appoint Yellen?
The ball is in your court, Mr. President.