re: say it ain't so, Paul

["Devine, James" <jdevine@xxxxxxx>]

I wrote:
>Frankly, I don't think that Paul Krugman is corrupt, at least not in the
>sense of personal venality.

Carl writes:> How do you define personal venality?  PK got $50K for a
do-nothing advisory position transparently concocted to give Enron greater
intellectual respectability.  As someone who has had $0 in earnings since
being laid off last April, I think Nobel-laureate-in-waiting PK's sweetheart
deal with this pack of felons stinks.<

My point is that the system is corrupt. Since the vast majority of people in
the US seem to accept this corruption, lambasting someone like PK for going
along with the system seems futile at best. I think it's more useful to
point to the structural corruption.

Also, like with Lawrence Lindsay, PK probably believed pretty much what the
same before he got the $$ from Enron as he did afterwards. It was a mutually
beneficial transaction, right?  He seems perfectly willing to criticize both
Enron and Dubya nowadays.

BTW, I don't think he's going to get a Nobel. His "new international trade"
stuff isn't seen as that important to the orthodoxy. (Please correct me if
I'm wrong.) If it is important, it opens the way to heresy... His pundrity
doesn't help him win the big N.
JD