Niall Ferguson Fights Back Against Smear Campaign by Fact-checkers, Facts (Jon Chait)

[swag]

Last edited Mon Jun 15, 2015, 01:00 PM - Edit history (1)

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/niall-ferguson-fights-back-against-fact-checkers.html

Committing the odd factual error is an occupational hazard in journalism. For Niall Ferguson, the commission of error is more than a hazard. It’s a cherished way of life. Ferguson’s distinct contribution to the contemporary political debate is the fascinating juxtaposition of his prestige — author, Harvard professor, resident faculty member of the Minda de Gunzburg Center for European Studies, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, omnipresent talking head, and all-around handsome authority figure — with an inability to get his facts straight. There is, of course, a link between the two aspects of Ferguson’s profile: Only a figure of his standing would have the ability to publish wildly erroneous claims in major mainstream publications.

Ferguson has finally put his practice into theory. Apparently aware that his habits require a broader defense than “whoops,” his latest Spectator column assails his many fact-checkers for their literalness, and gestures toward a novel theory of truth.

Ferguson’s column attacks “correct politicalness,” a tendency he defines as “seek[ing] to undermine an irrefutable argument by claiming loudly and repetitively to have found an error in it.” The most recent example of “correct politicalness” is the humiliation Ferguson suffered when the Financial Times was forced to correct his recent column there. Ferguson, the FT concedes, “incorrectly stated that at no point after May 2010 did business confidence sink back to where it had been throughout the past two years of Gordon Brown’s premiership.” Ferguson likewise committed an act of extreme deception. He wrote, “Weekly earnings are up by more than 8 per cent; in the private sector, the figure is above 10 per cent. Inflation is below 2 per cent and falling.’” That passage would seem to convey that wages had grown sharply and stayed well above the rate of inflation. In fact, the opposite is true. As the FT concedes, “Real wage growth was negative from 2010 until September 2014.” Ferguson defended fiscal austerity on the basis that it produced higher wages, when in reality it produced lower wages.

As Ferguson notes, this episode is not the first time he has been victimized by correct politicalness, which, he reports, “has been tried on me once before, when I wrote a Newsweek cover story in 2012 that argued against the re-election of President Obama on the grounds that his economic policies were bad and his foreign policy worse.”

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[jeff47]

1. You appear to have forgotten the link. (nt)

[Jim__]

2. Here's a link

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2015/06/niall-ferguson-fights-back-against-fact-checkers.html

[swag]

4. Thanks!

[swag]

5. Sorry, coffee hadn't sunk in yet.

[Joe Chi Minh]

3. Ferguson is so close to the far-right of the politico-economic specturm,

as was said of Rudyard Kipling, 'any further and he'd fall off the end.'

I hope the less clumsy, economic mavens make it a game, who can be the first to spot the Maister's next accidental gaff, that looks like an exercise in dissembling; who can find the most. That should keep him on his toes.

I wonder if he would have congratulated Lord Raglan, after the charge of the Light Brigade, on eschewing the temptation to be politically correct. It seems fact-checking is a squalid undertaking, unworthy of a professional person!

We had a daft old Master of the Rolls in England called Lord Denning, who asserted that a professional person could not blunder, but only make an error of judgment. Never mind that a surgeon excising the wrong kidney or amputating the wrong limb commits a blunder of the first magnitude. In this sphere, an error of judgment is far more lamentable than a blunder, which is not necessarily the preserve of seniors having an eponymous 'moment'. Professionals often have a friend or colleague proof their work. But perhaps there is a palpable Gonzo dimension to all proclamations of right-wing economists.

[T_i_B]

6. Ferguson is a historian, not an economist

Although he likes to pretend to be something of an economic know it all.

And then there's David Starkey, another right wing historian who is trying even harder to turn himself into the new Katie Hopkins, spouting any old bigoted rubbish for the sake of publicity.

[Joe Chi Minh]

7. Ah, but now we know there's only one Gonzo historian-dilettante economist.... Well,

by right-wing standards, anyway; there are plenty in reality.

The right always see the Ten Commandments through a filter. But as St Augustine said: "If you believe what you like in the gospels, and reject what you don't like, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourself."

He sure was one very wise dude. Pope Francis has pointed out that his theology has much wider practical application than that of St Thomas Aquinas. I've just been looking through a whole list of his sayings. Here is another one for the advocates of small government: "Charity is no substitute for justice withheld. "

[jakeXT]

8. Pinochet saved Chilean democracy according to him in "Ascent of Money"

Ferguson will also brook no criticism of the international organs of finance and their 'Washington Consensus'. As far as he's concerned, the IMF was blameless in its response to the Asian financial crisis of the mid-1990s (which many regard as the nadir of neoliberal policy making), Pinochet saved Chilean democracy by following Milton Friedman's monetarist orthodoxy, while Robert Zoellick of the World Bank quickly metamorphoses into the familiar 'Bob.' The anti-globalisation critiques of Naomi Klein, Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman are clearly in his sights, but Ferguson uncharacteristically pulls his punches in this mostly anodyne text.

Instead of an inquiring history, what we are left with is a reverential panorama of neoliberal capitalism. Above all, there is little investigation of the losers in the zero-sum game of money's ascent. The only possible cloud Ferguson spies on the future horizon of finance is democratic accountability, with its 'rules and regulations [that] can make previously good traits suddenly disadvantageous'. Quite where the Bear Stearns bail out and bank nationalisation fit into the picture is unclear.

http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/nov/02/money-niall-ferguson

[Joe Chi Minh]

9. Absolutely! He's a nutter. He saved it from torture I expect, too. Well, until

now Hunter Thompson's demise had left a big gap in our lives. But Ferguson's a decent stop-gap, if well below the mark set by Thompson.

[Joe Chi Minh]

10. Yes, Starkey doesn't impress, does he? There's something about histrionic academics

that bespeaks a sorry lack of plain common sense. They're always gong to be right-wingers.

[T_i_B]

11. I would disagree with that

The problem isn't that they are historical academics.

The problem is that they will spout any old rubbish for money. And that all too often gets in the way of being good historians IMHO.

[Joe Chi Minh]

12. You misread my post. I said, ''histrionic', not 'historic'.

[T_i_B]

13. I thought it was meant to be historic....

....just as Ferguson and Starkey are meant to be historians!

[Joe Chi Minh]

14. I guessed you took it as a 'typo' when scanning it. I'm in editing mode a lot of the time

when I read on the Internet. Well, when I read books some of the time.