Greatest Intellectual/Writer Alive Today?

[giblets]

The difference is that Paul Krugman's field is actually relevant to his politics, unlike Chomsky.

Anyone who can say "anarcho-syndicalist" with a straight face is automatically not worth listening to.

How open minded. Anyone who disagrees with me to a significant degree is a fool.

[Jaguar]

Anarcho-syndicalism is observably silly because different trades require different amounts of capital per worker. Communist societies and capitalist societies both get around this by letting some workers raise capital for other workers. Anarcho-syndicalists avoid taking on this problem because they don't actually have an answer for it. Theirs is a silly philosophy that can't actually persist in the real world. They deserve mockery.

Having an "open mind" doesn't mean you listen to every crackpot. You dismiss the people who don't know what they're talking about. I read Paul Krugman regularly. I wouldn't go near Noam Chomsky's writing on econ.

[giblets]

I have a feeling that capital-worker ratios had nothing to do with HC's dismissive attitude toward anarcho-syndicalism.

[Hauldren Collider]

It was about 50% the fact that the philosophy is laughable and 50% the fact that the term "anarcho-syndicalism" sounds like it should be the title of a parody of a humanities thesis.

Anarcho-anything is indicative of someone who has been sucked into the deepest, darkest vortex of lefty academia.

[Hauldren Collider]

Here's a fun list:

Anarcho-capitalism
Anarcho-primitivism
Anarcho-naturism
Anarcho-pacifism
Anarcho-syndicalist
Anarcho-feminism

How many of these would you be willing to take seriously?

[DinoDoc]

N. Gregory Mankiw, John Mearsheimer, and Stephen Walt would be my choices.

[giblets]

It was about 50% the fact that the philosophy is laughable and 50% the fact that the term "anarcho-syndicalism" sounds like it should be the title of a parody of a humanities thesis.

Anarcho-anything is indicative of someone who has been sucked into the deepest, darkest vortex of lefty academia.

Anarcho-capitalism being the exception, since they're in the deepest, darkest vortex of right wing academia.

[Lorizael]

Anarcho-capitalism is not a product of lefty academia.

x-post

[Hauldren Collider]

Anarcho-capitalism being the exception, since they're in the deepest, darkest vortex of right wing academia.

OK, fine, I guess that one could qualify as right wing, but my point still stands.

[Imran Siddiqui]

The thing about Paul Krugman is a publication bias of sorts. His economic views, on the whole, are fairly mainstream center or center-left for an economist. There are plenty of times where - if you pressed him - he would be forced to criticize US politics from the right. But he deliberately ignores those subject matters.

For example, take a recent blog post of his on Simpson-Bowles. (He doesn't like it.)

So, a public service reminder: Simpson-Bowles is terrible. It mucks around with taxes, but is obsessed with lowering marginal rates despite a complete absence of evidence that this is important.

What I object to, here, is not what it includes, but rather, what it excludes. Krugman doesn't talk about what Bowles-Simpson does to lower those marginal rates; it eliminates a variety of tax deductions that complicate the tax code - the biggest of which is the mortgage interest deduction. The consensus of economists on the mortgage interest deduction is very clear. It rewards people for borrowing large sums of money, and comparatively punishes people who rent their living space instead, and most economists (about 85%+) think this is a bad idea. I'm pretty sure Paul Krugman is with the 85%.

Krugman doesn't want to lie, and he doesn't want to admit Simpson-Bowles has an idea he likes, so instead he just ignores this very substantial part of the Simpson-Bowles proposal. It wouldn't be a big deal if he did this on occasion. Everyone does. But Paul Krugman does it so frequently that you can't really get a coherent, complete economic vision from him anymore.

This is likely one of the greatest posts on this site . Also another reason why I'm glad you came back to posting here.

[DaShi]

Bill Nye the Science Guy

Flaming liberal.

[Fake Boris]

The difference is that Paul Krugman's field is actually relevant to his politics, unlike Chomsky.

Anyone who can say "anarcho-syndicalist" with a straight face is automatically not worth listening to.

What do you know about anarcho-syndicalism?

[Al B. Sure!]

What makes Richard Dawkins great? As far as I can tell the biggest thing he has on his resume is engaging in debates about religion, which is sort of like beating cripples at kickboxing.

While much erroneously maligned, the Selfish Gene did much to popularize modern biology.



As for Clarence Thomas Sowell (yes, I'm giving them the Rand Paul Ryan treatment)... I get sick and tired every time a conservative trots one of them out. It has the opposite effect of what is intended; that is, it really illuminates the lack of Blacks on the conservative side. It's made worse when their Blackness, and the apparent impossibility of racism on the conservative side demonstrated by their existence, is mentioned.

Especially when it's presented like this:

Since we all know Conservatives are racist, I'm going to nominate Clarence Thomas.

[giblets]

Always amusing to see how proud some people are of their token black conservatives.

[Tupac Shakur]

There are no great intellectuals alive today. Would've been better to ask this question in 2008, when Samuel Huntington and James Q. Wilson were still living.