The Ideological Turing Test, Bryan Caplan | EconLog | Library of Economics and Liberty - 0 views
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[I]f you ask a liberal or a saltwater economist, "What would somebody on the other side of this divide say here? What would their version of it be?" A liberal can do that. A liberal can talk coherently about what the conservative view is because people like me actually do listen. We don't think it's right, but we pay enough attention to see what the other person is trying to get at. The reverse is not true. You try to get someone who is fiercely anti-Keynesian to even explain what a Keynesian economic argument is, they can't do it. They can't get it remotely right. Or if you ask a conservative, "What do liberals want?" You get this bizarre stuff - for example, that liberals want everybody to ride trains, because it makes people more susceptible to collectivism.
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It's easy to scoff at Krugman's self-congratulation, but at the meta-level, he's on to something.
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There are important caveats. Don Boudreaux wisely observes that we should compare liberal intellectuals to non-liberal intellectuals, and liberal entertainers to non-liberal entertainers, not say Krugman to Beck. I'd add that we should compare people in the same field: Rand's inability to explain Keynesian economics would be no more telling than Krugman's inability to explain Nozickian political philosophy. (Of course, if Krugman could correctly explain Nozickian political philosophy, that would be fairly impressive).
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I still don't know what to make of this, but it's worth investigating, if only to put it to rest or flog it with a whip made of angry horses. "According to Krugman, liberals have the ability to simulate conservatives, but conservatives lack the ability to simulate liberals" Thanks to Adam Gurri for nudging me toward this line of inquiry.