Blog by Sumana Harihareswara, Changeset founder

21 Oct 2003, 9:37 a.m.

J. Bradford DeLong's "Semi-Daily Journal" runs on a brittle installation…

Hi, reader. I wrote this in 2003 and it's now more than five years old. So it may be very out of date; the world, and I, have changed a lot since I wrote it! I'm keeping this up for historical archive purposes, but the me of today may 100% disagree with what I said then. I rarely edit posts after publishing them, but if I do, I usually leave a note in italics to mark the edit and the reason. If this post is particularly offensive or breaches someone's privacy, please contact me.

J. Bradford DeLong's "Semi-Daily Journal" runs on a brittle installation of Movable Type on a slow server in the economics department at UC Berkeley. I generally start loading up the page and then go make a cup of tea. And I don't know economics beyond the introductory undergrad stuff that turned me off the subject (no offense to Christina Romer, a great teacher). But I try to read or at least skim all his posts. Here he's laughing at certain writers who attack Paul Krugman:

Note that [Andrew] Sullivan has absolutely no complaints to make about Paul Krugman's writings--how could he? Does he want to argue that the Bush administration was clear and straight with America on the reasons it went into Iraq? That Bush economic policy would not be better if it had been made by bonobos? That Bush social policy is a light unto the nations?

So he adopts a bizarre rhetorical strategy--that to call someone a "Krugman" is to call them something bad, but that he cannot be bothered to explain or even mention anything Paul Krugman has written that is wrong.

Now that the robust NewsBruiser has comments, maybe DeLong will consider making the switch so we can enjoy his work better. Then again, just moving to a better server would help.