Frank Kogan

What I wrote above really does leave too much out,* which is why it ends up confusing you. What I SEEM to you to be saying isn't what I actually meant.

I changed my mind a couple of times in how to word it; I originally had "apparently misleading text" before altering it to read "misleading text — apparently deliberately misleading." I should have either kept it as I'd had it originally, or gone with "apparently misleading — and apparently deliberately so." And then written a slightly different followup.

Fwiw, what I decided I definitely don't need to explore further is whether what Ferguson wrote was misleading. I'm taking it for granted — without checking the Ferguson piece or the CBO report myself — that Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. couldn't themselves have misread or distorted (deliberately or otherwise) either Ferguson's piece or the CBO report so badly that they were wrong about Ferguson's passage being misleading. That is, (1) Krugman, DeLong, Klein, et al. are correct about what the CBO report actually says, which is that the Affordable Care Act doesn't increase the deficit, and, (2) not only does the Ferguson passage as quoted make it seem as if the CBO report says that the Affordable Care Act does increase the deficit, there isn't anything a few sentences further in Ferguson's piece that makes it clear that the CBO report is stating that the Affordable Care Act doesn't increase the deficit. So I'm assuming with 99.99999...% certainty that you don't have each of ten or so of these guys in Krugman's circle either botching it or deciding to deliberately mislead us; in fact, I doubt that you'd even have two: they wouldn't allow each other to botch something so simple, or to deceive.

As for the second issue, I don't care so much about whether Ferguson was misleading the reader on purpose; but in fact, though I haven't made up my mind about that (and may never), I do think further research, such as reading the Ferguson piece in full, reading other Ferguson posts and writings, etc., could give me a better or even definitive idea on this. So I indeed gave you the wrong impression. And though I don't care that much about Ferguson's state of mind, I do think it's an interesting issue, though I'm probably not going to explore it further unless Krugman or DeLong or someone one of them links continues to bring it to my attention. My guess (emphasize guess) is that Krugman and Klein (at least) are jumping too quickly to assumptions about Ferguson's attributes and intentions, even if I bear in mind that they've been reading him for years whereas I've only seen him quoted a few times. Not knowing much about Ferguson other than "professor of history at Harvard," my intuition is to find it incredible that he'd think he could deliberately mislead on something so checkable and get away with it ("getting away with it" meaning something different to a Harvard professor than to a right-wing radio pundit). But "lazy" or "stupid" doesn't seem correct either (though it would in reference to a lot of the general public, as would "poorly informed"). Initially, "editor or copy editor screwing up the paragraph" crossed my mind as a possibility, but Ferguson's followup (as reported by some of the other bloggers) precludes it. Klein was originally going to at least allow for the possibility of "mistaken" and "confused," since Klein says there was more than one CBO report, only one of which made a statement about the ACA's overall impact on the deficit. But he thinks that Ferguson's own followup eliminates that and brings us solidly to "deliberately misleading." I'm not so sure; I think "hurried and confused, and later too macho or embarrassed to admit to it" is a possibility (the mildest). "Something else going wrong with the guy" is also possible (but I need to emphasize again that I've not read Ferguson except as quoted by others).

I think what's keeping me interested is the question, "Is someone here willing or able to recover from being wrong?" — "someone here" most crucially being "people at Newsweek."

*Didn't want to go into my thoughts too much, wanting to save for a later post.