Forbes – James Marshall Crotty
“In an op-ed entitled “Knowledge Isn’t Power,” in the February 23 New York Times, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman argued that “soaring inequality isn’t about education; it’s about power.” Because of my own “preference for diversity,” I welcome Mr. Krugman’s well-meaning and learned viewpoint. Unfortunately, like other bright, beloved and left-leaning public intellectuals – such as Krugman’s fellow MIT grad Noam Chomsky (whose remedy for the ills he diagnosed in Manufacturing Consent was a global system of kibbutzim) – Mr. Krugman is great at articulating capitalism’s flaws (his take on the contagion effects of highly leveraged financial institutions was spot on), but weak at prescribing workable real-world remedies. In eschewing education as a solvency to income inequality, Mr. Krugman argues that we should, instead, place “higher taxes on corporations and the wealthy, and invest the proceeds in programs that help working families.” Never mind that those “programs” would inexorably center on job training (i.e., education), unless the Princeton University Professor merely plans to give a man a fish while failing to teach him how to fish.”(more)