Paul Krugman: evaluation

Transcript context

…What’s the structural reason why that’s become worse? As you said, it was once much better. I think it’s two things. One is simply, I do believe that, in the end, there’s a pretty strong correlation between income inequality and partisan polarization. Political scientists who measure polarization have found that’s a really strong correlation. It makes sense. In effect, the increasing weight to the right tail of the income distribution has dragged one party off in its direction. That’s opened up a large gap so that the center really just did not hold. There used to be at least some overlap on economic issues between the parties, and there is none now. The other, which is uglier . . . One of the bases of some degree of bipartisan shift in our politics was, in fact, the overt racism. We used to have two dimensions in American politics, one of which was race — this is what the political science modelers tell us — one of which was race, the other of which was essentially left/right on economics. Those have collapsed into a single dimension now. That means that you no longer have the populist Southern senator that used to provide part of what was, in bad ways, the political center. That’s another piece. I have to admit, when all is said and done, I find it a little bit mysterious. It’s hard for me to quite understand. I can talk about it. I think that the role of money in politics has created . . . a lot of people in political life now have spent their entire lives within a partisan ecosystem, never really having to step outside. Any independence in judgment, any demonstration of an independent conscience is actually career destroying. So the kind of people you get are people who are basically bad people, at the very least very cynical people. I still find it hard to understand how people can be quite as cynical as they have become. Hayek wrote a famous essay, “Why the Worst Get to the Top in Politics.” At the time, he seemed to think it was a fairly universal tendency, which maybe in the 1940s was a reasonable thing to believe. But there seems to be a lot of variation. What’s your underlying model for why the worst sometimes do or do not get to the top?…

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