Entertainingly Pompous Moments in Self-Refutation

There are multiple ways to indirectly inform people that your arguments are terrible, and Niall Ferguson avails himself of all of them. For example, attacking people by comparing cvs rather than addressing their arguments. The thing is, arguments like “inflation is really over 10% per annum” and “if people aren’t paying federal income taxes they therefore aren’t paying any taxes” are either right or wrong, and as it happens they are in this case wrong. Having once written a pretty good book about World War I many years ago (followed by some increasingly terrible books about other subjects) doesn’t prevent you from being a complete hack in your role as a public intellectual.

But when your deep resentment of being routinely being demonstrated to be wrong by a more successful intellectual leads you to say things this asinine, it’s not so much an argument as a cry for help:

The inflationary crisis currently being experienced by the likes of Smith is not difficult to quantify in the age of Twitter: just divide the number of followers by the number of tweets. The resulting index of influence is revealing. It shows that the majority of my most vehement online critics are in fact writing more than they are being read, as the number of their tweets substantially exceeds the number of their followers.

First of all, I wonder who will get the next Nobel Prize in Economics — Justin Beiber or Katy Perry? And second, since Krugman doesn’t tweet at all and has over a million followers, by Ferguson’s own deeply serious metric I declare Krugman infinity times better than Ferguson. I’m glad we could resolve this disagreement!

…Famously doctrinaire left-winger and Paul Krugman sycophant Josh Barro has more.