In "Wonking Out: Russian Gas, Acid Raid and Industrial Scaremongers,"Paul Krugman -- who is very smart and a pretty good economist -- seems almost surprised to impart the following "big lesson" to us:
The big lesson here is that you can’t trust industries to provide a reliable, or even honest, assessment of the economic impact of policies that might hurt their bottom line.
Of course, that's a major common sense premise of Alt-QAnon, although Alt-QAnon takes us much farther and deeper.
He goes on:
This runs counter to the instincts of many people, including politicians. As I said, Germany’s leaders seem to have decided to believe industrialists who say they can’t live without Russian gas and have lashed out at economists who disagree. And in a way I can understand this attitude: Surely executives who actually run companies, who deal every day with business problems, know more about economic reality than nerdy guys in think tanks. Right?
So if you've read my various explanations of Alt-QAnon and WRAITHS in this blog, and have said to yourself something like "everyone knows that," here is Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman telling you that not everybody does, and lots of people think the opposite. It even almost seems like Krugman himself is only just figuring this out, and just starting to analyze it:
But this presumption has been wrong time and again. I think for two reasons. First, industrialists who weigh in on policy issues that affect them have a huge incentive to talk their own book — to throw out numbers that are meant to scare the public into leaving them alone, rather than to provide realistic assessments.
Very Alt-QAnon-esque, although he is still thinking of the "industrialists" as individuals, acting in their own interests -- which is certainly true -- while the broader point is that the "industrialists" here have little volition whatsoever. They are part of an artificially intelligent organism, and they are simply playing the role that has been assigned to them. They would not have achieved that position if they had not been determined to be good for that role, so they will not deviate from it.
Krugman still is not sure that he's been persuasive:
Oh, and for anyone saying that fine upstanding business leaders wouldn’t do something like that, remember Dieselgate — the massive fraud perpetrated by German automakers to make their cars seem far less polluting than they were.
Dieselgate is certainly a fine example, but it weakens his argument to point to one single foreign example to support his point, when this has been the basic way that industries have worked since the time of the East India Company and before. Instead of just listing dieselgate, he could have easily listed hundreds if not of thousands of similarly egregious examples. I've discussed other examples in various places in this blog, for example here,. and yet another one that comes to mind is the "ethyl" industry's push to put lead into gasoline despite lead's known toxicity, and the many.millions of deaths that caused.
But Krugman feels a need to bolster the argument with yet another point:
Second, executives within an industry do indeed know a lot about how things work in their business right now. There’s much less reason to believe that they have a good sense of how things might be done differently — of the adaptations and innovations they might be able to make in the face of a drastically changed situation. It’s like what happens in financial crises: Wall Street types are infinitely better than academics at guessing what will happen day to day, but when things fall apart, economists familiar with economic history tend to do better than those immersed in normal trading.
This may be a decent point, but it diminishes the basic point by seeming to suggest that perhaps the "industries know best" in times when there are no issues of change. Going back to his first point (and Alt-QAnon's premise), businesses that are doing well will ALWAYS be resistant to change, unless they can see a way that the change benefits them. Given that "change" is always a possibility, this is also a statement about industry's bias in favor of the status quo. So the "second" point adds nothing to the first, and actually is a little bit dangerous -- it implies that when things are going well and there are no external sources of change, we can trust businesses. But that's just not right -- there is always the possibility of beneficial change, and they will always resist it.
And now he has to tell us that the lessons go beyond the immediate point of his column:
The lessons here go well beyond the immediate scandal of Germany’s timid response to Russian atrocities. The same considerations apply to policies that are even more important: actions to limit climate change, which looks more than ever like an existential threat. Business leaders and the politicians who listen to them always claim that the economic costs of adequate action would be unsupportable. Don’t believe them.
So maybe he is slowly inventing something like Alt-QAnon for himself, even though it's been sitting there in front of all of us all of this time.
Not to belabor the point, but this all reduces to what Henry Hazlitt said in Economics in One Lesson -- that industries will hire the "best buyable minds" to make the best arguments that can be made for a given position. An argument by an industry will necessarily support that industry's profit-making interests and if there is a better argument out there that does not support the industry, the industry will necessarily oppose it.
Note the subcaption of the article:
