Monday 14 October 2013

Niall Ferguson's incessant whinging

Niall Ferguson continues his crusade to whinge and cry foul at every left-of-far-right blogger on the Internet.  This time he's summarily swatted away by the Politics Editor of Business Inside, no less.
One final note. In the process of criticizing me, Ferguson writes: "If you are defending someone against a charge of incivility..." I'm going to stop him right there. I'm not defending anybody against a charge of incivility. Paul Krugman is often quite uncivil. I am sometimes uncivil too, for example in this blog post. 
The reason Ferguson wants to talk about civility is that he can't talk about not being full of crap. Ferguson trades on his academic credentials to write popular articles that contain misleading and false claims. His writing causes readers to come away with a worse understanding of the economy than they entered with. He is changing the world for the worse. 
My contention is not that we haven't been uncivil to Ferguson. We definitely have. My contention is that he deserves it.
Well, that's my schadenfreude fix for the day.