James Fallows just rips Niall Ferguson to shreds. This is a thing of beauty.
As a Harvard Alum, I Apologize
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3 AUG 20 2012, 12:00 PM ET
Yes, I know, you could imagine many sentences that would follow that headline. But here is what I have in mind right now: A tenured professor of history at my undergraduate alma mater has written a cover story for Daily Beast/Newsweek that is so careless and unconvincing that I wonder how he will presume to sit in judgment of the next set of student papers he has to grade. It's by the irrepressible Niall Ferguson, it is headlined "Obama's Gotta Go," .........
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Again, anyone can be wrong, and I often have been. But scholars are supposed to be different from mere pamphleteers and journalists. We give the judgments of academics -- like those of doctors, scientists, renowned jurists, etc. -- extra weight because we assume that they have considered evidence, precedent, and probabilities more carefully before offering conclusions. Think: E.O. Wilson on ants and ecological patterns more broadly.
The big claims and conclusions Ferguson has offered in recent years, with the extra authority of his academic standing, have been attention-getting and mostly wrong. Joe Weisenthal of Business Insider has an analysis here (and please also see this from Noah Smith). For instance:
- U.S. budget deficits were going to lead to a US-China breakup. They didn't.
- U.S. budget deficits were going to drive bond rates sky high. The opposite has occurred.
- U.S. budget deficits will make us like Greece. They have not.
- A year ago, Ferguson warned that we were on the verge of a damaging new round of inflation. We were not.
You can say these things if you're a talk-show host or a combatant on some cable-news gabfest. To me this is not what the tradition of Veritas and the search for scholarly enlightenment is supposed to exemplify. Seriously, I wonder if one of Ferguson's students will have the panache to turn in a similar paper to see how it fares.
THE REST (REALLY GOOD!):
http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/08/as-a-harvard-alum-i-apologize/261308/
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