So, in Paul Krugman's latest he takes on Paul Ryan's latest:
http://www.nytimes.com/...
Krugman makes the point that Ryan pretends to have opinions
backed up by studies, but doesn't really... Krugman, on the other
hand does have them: you can find disincentive effects in welfare
programs, but they're clearly fairly small, and nothing worth
worrying about; on the other hand you can find positive effects
that are worth something, where access to welfare when
young clearly leads to success later in life.
If you follow Krugman, there's nothing surprising in any of this:
he often telegraphs what he's going to say in his blog.
The interesting thing here is in the NYT comment section--
it's now hidden behind their latest re-design (or de-design, as I
think of it), but it's still there: look for the word "Comments"
somewhere off to the right, and click on it.
What you'll see is their old three tab design: "All Comments",
"Reader's Picks", and "NYT picks", with the NYT picks tab active,
effectively hiding the other choices from people unfamiliar with
the system.
The Times comment system lets anyone post, and anyone vote on
which posts they like, but the editors reserve the right to choose
the one's they want to feature: this is an interesting balance
between the old newspaper letters column and the newer internet
style of doing things.
If you look at the NYT times picks, they're all lengthy
conservative spin product, including one that tries to claim that
Krugman is being inconsistent in what he's saying in just this
one column-- which is pretty easily refuted just by reading the
column, which is of course pretty short, and as always Krugman's
writing is very clear.
Then if you look at the Reader's Picks (with popularity ratings
around 100 times higher than the NYT picks), you'll see that the
ones at the top are all relatively liberal, relatively
intelligent comments.
The NYT editors could no doubt defend their decision to try to
feature contrary opinions, but these aren't very good contrary
opinions, and it's hard to shake the feeling that they're doing
their best to support the conservative narrative that Paul
Krugman is some sort of extreme outsider.