Paul Krugman
London: Allen Lane, 2003, h/b, £18.99
I only caught up with this at Christmas. Krugman writes a column for the New York Times and this is a collection of those columns. Krugman is an academic economist at Princeton and saw pretty early that Enron and others similar were just frauds, and that it was all going to end in tears. Much of this is a delight to read, despite the gloomy content. But this brief notice is here to enable me to quote the following. One of his themes is the American media’s refusal to even describe what Bush and co. have been doing, let alone investigate it. (Robert Parry in the previous review has the same complaint.) This means that the American public has no idea what is going on. He reports that in 2001,
‘When focus groups were asked to react to Republican proposals for a retroactive corporate tax cut….. members of the focus groups literally refused to believe the group leader’s description of the policy‘ (p.4 emphasis added).