Better history, please

Why oh why does anyone take Amity Shlaes seriously? I mean, gadzooks. She’s a terrible economist and an even worse historian. These conditions that are not necessarily related to her lack of training in either discipline. It’s entirely possible, I would imagine, that someone with a degree in literature from Yale could eventually turn into something other than a dishonest hack. Regardless, Shlaes’ misuse of data is scandalous and can only be understood as deliberate; her work wouldn’t earn a passing grade in an undergraduate history course, much less pass through the gauntlet of peer review. (I know, I know. For a paper that just offered a scholarship to Bill Kristol after he was booted from the Times for growing weed in his dorm room, factual errancy is, as the kids say, a feature rather than a bug.)

Dean Baker compares her work to creationists and Flat Earthers, a comparison that is in the very least unkind to the latter, to whom we can’t ascribe a bad-faith ideological agenda. We’d do better to wonder when the Post will be reminding us that congressional reconstruction forced a prostrate South to submit itself to Negro Domination.