Even for Niall Ferguson, this is pathetic (via):
Speaking at the Tenth Annual Altegris Conference in Carlsbad, Calif., in front of a group of more than 500 financial advisors and investors, Ferguson responded to a question about Keynes’ famous philosophy of self-interest versus the economic philosophy of Edmund Burke, who believed there was a social contract among the living, as well as the dead. Ferguson asked the audience how many children Keynes had. He explained that Keynes had none because he was a homosexual and was married to a ballerina, with whom he likely talked of “poetry” rather than procreated.
[….]Ferguson, who is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University, and author of The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die, says it’s only logical that Keynes would take this selfish worldview because he was an “effete” member of society.
Al Gore is fat, Keynes was gay, Obambi uses a teleprompter.
Update. Corroboration by someone else who was there and heard the remarks.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
I can see a social contract among the living, but what kind of social contract do you have with dead folks?
MomSense
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
Can’t make sense of crazy.
Todd
What is it with Harvard and gadflies? I’ve known two Harvard lawyers who were complete fucking loons, and we were talking this week about another one recently disbarred who apparently displayed incredible amounts of insanity. Corsi and Hewitt are Harvard diplomates, as is Ferguson and a rogues gallery of America’s lesser intellectually imbued sons of privilege.
Todd
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
Maintenance of the social and cultural order, with an emphasis on enhancing the status quo.
ChaseBears
This sounded a little poorly sourced, but it turns out to be independently reported elsewhere. A new low even for Ferguson. Perhaps he’s been driven to distraction by Krugthulu. Ia! Ia!
[quote]I can see a social contract among the living, but what kind of social contract do you have with dead folks?[/quote]
You’re bound to continue the society of your ancestors because they expect you too. gg burke.
Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS)
@ChaseBears: Ok, I can see the argument from tradition, but they’re still dead. It’s not like it’s a “social” contract.
DougJ
@ChaseBears:
The guy who wrote it looks fairly legit. But I’d also like to see some corroboration.
c u n d gulag
Niall, answer me this:
What kind of social contract do the Pope and Catholic priests have, since, if they’re not busy schtupping young boys, they’re likely talking about scripture, and praying, rather than procreating?
INTOLERANT ASSHAT!!!
Omnes Omnibus
To be fair, some of Ferguson’s views on the selfishness of Oxbridge gays may be due to his friendship with Andrew Sullivan when they were Oxford undergrads.
Amir Khalid
Niall Ferguson is the guy whose hatchet-job cover story in Newsweek on Obama didn’t get fact-checked because Tina Brown figured Ferguson was too big and important for such things.
Comrade Jake
@Amir Khalid: I don’t think that was the driver there. I think it had much more to do with page hits and trying to sell copies of a dying rag.
Rafer Janders
So how does Ferguson explain Margaret Thatcher’s famous belief that “there is no such thing as society”? Was her preference for self-interest over the social contract due to the fact that she was married with children…..?
Rafer Janders
@Todd:
At first I was going to get quite personally offended at this. Then I remembered Ted Cruz, so, y’know….
Comrade Jake
All of the faculty I know at Harvard are great people. Of course, they’re all in the engineering school.
Amir Khalid
@Comrade Jake:
You may be right on that point, but it was Tina Brown herself who said Ferguson was too big to fact-check.
NotMax
Read between the lines.
Keynes was gay, therefore all his works are suspect and must be summarily dismissed.
Howard Beale IV
And let it not be missed that divorced his wife so he could procreate with Ayaan al-Hirsi, who is so conveniently a fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University. Nothing like a little family influence there, eh, Niall?
And the fact that he’s best buds with Sully (even when they disagree) is enough to make me fart in his general direction.
Ferguson’s biggest embarassment has to be the Reith lecture he did for Aunite Beeb: his notions of the ‘restore of the rule of law’ and of Taleb’s ‘anti-fragile’ thesis shows that he has clearly lost any sense of how the real world operates.
I actually have pity to those undergrads at Harvard who have to listen to this upper-class twit spew about Bagehot.
different-church-lady
I’m hoping he follows the path Kurtz boldly blazed this week.
Baud
Just as white light turns into a rainbow when it hits a prism, so too are the laws of economics skewed by gayness.
Comrade Jake
By the way, what’s the over under on the number of blog posts Sully has on this? I’m going with over 5.
Tokyokie
@NotMax: Similarly, John Gielgud was a lousy actor.
EconWatcher
I wonder if Ferguson is a heavy drinker. Hitchens, whose early work i admire, was saying this kind of personally obnoxious stuff (and worse) in his later years. People who knew him at The Nation and elsewhere said the booze had finally gotten to him. Seems like a symptom of late-stage alcoholism.
scav
@Tokyokie: Alan Turing couldn’t count and didn’t care who won the war.
Alex S.
@Todd:
Harvard: also home to economist Rogoff of Reinhart/Rogoff fame and the economists Alesina and Ardagna who wrote the other widely cited pro-austerity paper (also with serious flaws). Something there is rotten…
On the other hand, I’ve wondered for a while now when conservatives finally start to mention Keynes’ homosexuality. It’s such a cheap shot and such a welcome addition to their echo chamber of bigotry and ignorance that someone simply had to do it.
Valdivia
just wow. the guy is all class eh? maybe next he will start talking about Turing and what a deserved fate he had because he was the gay too. ugh.
Thomas Beck
A) This is nothing new – I read this kind of criticism about Keynes decades ago. It’s pure ad hominem nonsense. Math is math, science is science, regardless of who propounds it.
B) I thought self-interest was THE gold standard for conservative behavior – at least, for the top 1% of the top 1% it’s the ONLY justification for anything – Ayn Rand and all that. Suddenly Keynes is a bad guy for promoting it?
Ferguson has some ability as a historian – The Pity of War is a very interesting look at the first world war – but why would anyone listen to him about anything else?
Valdivia
@Omnes Omnibus:
you made me lol. :)
Mike in NC
Ferguson has also written extensively to defend European imperialism and note how it was too good for the mud people.
FlipYrWhig
@EconWatcher: I thought the same thing. It reminds me a lot of Hitchens sliding into a non-pattern of erratic outbursts.
FlipYrWhig
@Mike in NC: true, but while that makes him a reprehensible fuck, it has a certain coherence that “LOL ECON NO HOMO” lacks.
Villago Delenda Est
So, what this tells us is Niall Ferguson failed Logic 101 as a freshman.
This is a blatant ad hominem argument, which means that Ferguson has NOTHING.
Dogshit like Ferguson should be kicked to the curb, then made to stay there. Forever.
Villago Delenda Est
@Rafer Janders:
Now THAT is a pretty good question.
DougJ
@EconWatcher:
Could be, but from what I’ve read, Hitchens was a heavier drinker than most other alcoholics. What was it someone here who waited on him estimated? Four and a half bottles in one sitting.
muddy
Pickles the brain.
Ben Franklin
‘Smear the queer’, or Dizzle the Whizzle.
With that said, the story of how the Pentagon Papers came to be published, as well as the rich history of newspapers publishing government secrets in the public interest, is riveting and serve many important lessons today. In fact, that’s why Goodale wrote the book. He wanted to “apply its lessons to the Obama administration, which continues to pursue leakers and WikiLeaks with unseemly enthusiasm,” he told me this week. “It is a clarion call to journalists to wake up and get Obama to stop.”
More than forty years of national security reporting, from the revelation of the NSA warrantless wiretapping program and CIA secret prisons, to much of today’s reporting on the Obama administration’s secret drone program, could not have been possible without the New York Times taking a stand in the Pentagon Papers case in 1971.
Yet it almost never happened. At the time, Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger was extremely hesitant to run the classified Top Secret Pentagon Papers, fearing he’d be hauled away in handcuffs. Meanwhile, the Times’ influential Vice President Harding Bankcroft lobbied heavily against the idea. Thankfully Goodale’s arguments—that newspapers regularly published government secrets, and this practice fell squarely within First Amendment protected activity—won out. The Times went ahead and published, despite almost certainly knowing they’d be going to war with the Nixon administration in the process.
Two days after the first article on the Pentagon Papers appeared in print, the Times received a telegram from Nixon’s attorney general John Mitchell: either stop publishing the Papers immediately, or Nixon would stop them in court.
https://pressfreedomfoundation.org/blog/2013/05/new-book-compares-pentagon-papers-wikileaks-calls-obama-end-crackdown-whistleblowers
Lurking Canadian
The gay angle is new, but this is based on the old misrepresentation. Keynes said “In the long run we are all dead”, meanig that it was small comfort to the people currently suffering that things might someday get better.
Conservatives have always pretended he meant, “Don’t worry about saddling your children with debt. Woohoo! T-bones and cadillacs all around!”
reflectionephemeral
It’s not that much of a surprise.
The austerian side was always attitude-heavy and data-averse, and they can’t even gin up much of a plausible argument anymore, in light of the events of the past few years.
I mean, you have Reinhart & Rogoff– who are actually highly competent economists– fending off criticisms by attacking straw men.
Ferguson is apparently a respected economic historian, but he’s always risked veering into Hannity territory on anything else.
It’s not a surprise to me to see him lash out like this. He doesn’t have the facts to substantiate an argument, and he doesn’t have the temperament or maturity to keep his bigoted thoughts to himself.
catclub
@Tokyokie: Not to mention Lawrence Olivier.
Villago Delenda Est
@reflectionephemeral:
He also can’t think things through, because if Keynes were straight, then obviously his arguments were perfectly valid, from the perspective of a Ferguson.
So the validity of any argument on economics (or, for that matter, on forecasting Presidential elections) is solely dependent on the sexual orientation of the forecaster.
Whew! Glad we cleared THAT up!
Villago Delenda Est
@catclub:
I’m thinking of that restored scene between Olivier and Tony Curtis in Spartacus where they discuss oysters and matters of taste.
Comrade Jake
Courtesy of Josh Barrow on Twitter:
@jbarro: Someone should ask Niall Ferguson if the lack of interest in climate change action on the right is because conservatives are gay.
SatanicPanic
Academic discussion is not what I remember it being
reflectionephemeral
Incidentally, economist Andrew Gellman chronicled Ferguson’s “crossing the John Yoo line” from academic to hack awhile back: “John Yoo, of course, became a hack because, I assume, he had nothing left to lose. In contrast, historian Niall Ferguson has reportedly been moved to hackery because he has so much to gain.”
And: “Ferguson gets and keeps the big-money audience is by telling them not what he (Ferguson) wants to say—not by giving them his unique insights and understanding—but rather by telling his audience what they want to hear.”
Omnes Omnibus
@SatanicPanic: You should read C. P. Snow’s The Masters if you think academic discussion ever was what you remember it being.
scav
Anybody clear up the truth status of research by someone who came out after raising a family? what about turkey-baster artificial insemination children? adoption? really really favorite nieces? Has he thought through the whole Lesbians are totally more capable of higher long-term thought than gay men consequences of his insight?
Frankensteinbeck
I’m confused. As liberals, don’t we argue for Keynesian stimulus because we do believe in a social contract, while Principled Burkeans believe we should fuck the poor because every man for himself?
Runt
By the time Niall Ferguson left Britain to tell American conservatives what they want to hear and make tons of money from it, he had inspired an award-winning play about a contrarian history hack. Fun fact: The character inspired by Ferguson turns out to be gay…
Sly
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
One of the principle organs of conservative ideology is the fomenting of an obligation of the living to the dead. In America, they talk ceaselessly about the wishes and aims of the Founding Generation, as if George Washington’s ghost is peering over our shoulder, evaluating everything we do, and ready to smite us over the smallest transgression. As if Thomas Jefferson or James Madison, if we could commune with them, would have anything useful to say about any aspect of the modern regulatory state or the present relationships between Federal, state, and local power, and that we would ignore their advice at our peril.
It’s history without historical context, which is useless. If Alexander Hamilton were transported from his deathbed to the year 2013 and asked his opinion on the sequester, that opinion would have the same (or perhaps much less) relevance to us as Henry VIII’s opinion on whether or not the Continental Congress should pursue an alliance with France in 1776.
But it provides an odd kind of legitimacy, in their minds, about the maintenance of whatever privileges they hold dear and are fearful of losing.
reflectionephemeral
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yeah, I may have been too quick to attribute Ferguson’s bigoted remarks to heartfelt bigotry. Probably, they don’t reflect any larger belief or argument of his other than “I don’t like Keynes”.
Had Keynes and his wife had 6 children, Ferguson would have said that Keynes was too busy procreating to think through his writing on economics.
Comrade Jake
You almost wonder if Ferguson said this because he feels like he hasn’t been on Fox News enough lately.
Hoodie
Ferguson is and has seemingly always been a vile piece of shit. I remember him a few years back trying to place blame for a supposed decline of American civilization on teachers’ unions. He’s a nastier version of Bobo, and there’s little doubt he does it for the money and attention.
Roger Moore
@reflectionephemeral:
Ding, ding, ding! We have a winner. Very Serious People are not going to accept Keynes, because doing so would require admitting to what a bunch of selfish fuckups they are. If the alternative to admitting they’re wrong is to use any dumb, fallacious argument they can find, then dumb fallacy it is.
TriassicSands
Details matter.
Mino
@Omnes Omnibus: Ouch.
Mino
@Frankensteinbeck: I would guess the social contract for conservatives IS with the dead. They certainly have none with the currently alive.
jamick6000
@c u n d gulag: Ferguson is an atheist.
The Republic of Stupidity
@Brother Machine Gun of Desirable Mindfulness (fka AWS):
Well… given the frequency w/ which conservatives bring up the memory of Reagan, apparently a pretty active one…
Villago Delenda Est
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Yeah, but it’s fantasy Ronald Reagan, the guy who was the Gipper. Not the real one. The real one actually did do heretical things like raise taxes when it seemed necessary.
jamick6000
@TriassicSands: hahahah nice
Pink Snapdragon
@Comrade Jake: Since when does Harvard have an engineering school? Are you confusing it with Princeton? Or maybe this is supposed to be snark??
Rex Everything
I’m not sure it’s “pathetic” so much as fucking insane. As Tom Kostigen points out, this is a huge smear against homosexuality that “takes gay-bashing to new heights.”
SatanicPanic
@Omnes Omnibus: I was just being silly
matt
That kind of moronic personal attack went out with the Bull Moose Party. Why is this cartoonish piece of garbage treated seriously?
Omnes Omnibus
@SatanicPanic: It is still a worthwhile read.
trollhattan
Take away the accent and nobody would pay Ferguson any attention. But like our Sully, he has a place at the table despite being a whackaloon.
His take, for example, on the LIBOR scandal:
Did you see that? He swept aside the very thought of, say, regulation by law (Holy shit, Cleetus, two-THOUSAND pages? Gorsh, that’s like four reams iffn’ you don’t print double-sided.”) and instead embraces the mighty power of the RAISED EYEBROW.
An actual, not metaphorical tool.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/hardtalk/9734979.stm
dmsilev
@Pink Snapdragon:
Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
I know some folks there. They do very very good work.
Rex Everything
@trollhattan: It’s mind-boggling. He not only has a place at the table, he’s a freaking HARVARD PROFESSOR.
Why do we do this? The Brits aren’t giving Oxbridge fellowships to Joe Scarborough or McMegan.
scav
@trollhattan: If one objects to the scandal and not specifically to the practice, then the time-honoured arched eyebrow does suffice and, moreover, probably more evenly distributes the wages among the truly deserving in the contract of society.
Comrade Jake
@Pink Snapdragon: lol Google is your friend here. I’m an engineering prof, and spent a sabbatical at Harvard.
p.a.
@Mino: and feti. Strong contract with feti. Seems to break when the umbilical does.
p.a.
Could not use fe+uses, must be blocked.
Kyle
So Niall Ferguson, totally bereft of any legitimate point to make, has now resorted to the level of discourse found in YouTube comments, where any discussion descends quickly to “Ur a fag.”
Nutella
@Rex Everything:
But they’re giving them to Ferguson, whose list of current gigs on Wikipedia is:
“He is the Laurence A. Tisch Professor of History at Harvard University. He is also a Senior Research Fellow of Jesus College, University of Oxford, and a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institution, Stanford University.”
Tonal Crow
So tell me, why don’t Republicans care about global warming? Is it because they’re all “effete homosexuals” without children?
trollhattan
@Nutella:
Hoover Institute? Figures. Maybe he’s Condi’s beard at institute social events.
MomSense
@Rex Everything:
He’s a chaired professor which means a rich dude wanted to install someone who shared his ideology at Harvard. It happens all the time. In fact a bunch of right wing douchebags decided about 1970 or so to make sure that every college and university had a think tank or a chaired professorship. This is why their stupid ideology and Orwellian language is so widespread.
Bill E Pilgrim
Just a little reminder about who this is we’re talking about:
Yes, they will insist on criticizing you for the most innocent things, like trying to salvage your failed economics arguments by being a raging bigot. Annoying, really.
eemom
This asshole and Sullivan are what is wrong with our immigration laws.
Tonal Crow
@p.a.:
JC still hasn’t figured out how to fix the “spam filter”. Perhaps he’ll make it a higher priority if we buy him a dual dog-massager with built-in steak dispenser, automatic groomer, self-walker, and military-grade Tunchproofing.
Bruce S
@Rafer Janders:
So called “conservatives” who believe in the primacy of the “free market” in economic affairs have their heads totally up their own (self-interested) asses, because unbridled capitalism is far more effective at upending societies, tradition, families, neighborhoods, small businesses, every mode of production and communication – everything – than “revolutionary” cabals of leftists have ever been. There is nothing “conservative” about unbridled markets. These folks like Ferguson are preaching one set of values, rules, accountability to the little people and another for themselves and their fellow elites.
Harvard needs to clean its fucking house – Ferguson and the R&R ugliness prove IMHO that our country has a huge “entitlement problem” – our self-dealing elites and their ability to get away with self-serving, dishonest shit. Ferguson is an example in academia of “too big to fail.” Fuck this piece of shit. He should be (metaphorically) drawn and quartered and left to rot in the public square. It’s kind of pathetic that even a journeyman asshole like Howard Kurtz can lose his job for scrawling bogus horseshit and embarrassing the likes of a Tina Brown insofar as that’s possible, but Harvard professors, not so much. What does that say?
Bill E Pilgrim
Ferguson apologizes:
I was hoping that he’d keep going and get to “145th: Roosevelt’s New Deal didn’t cause the great Depression. 146th: Barack Obama was not President in early 2008 when the market tanked” and so on. Alas.
Jay C
@Comrade Jake:
Hope you didn’t bet TOO much: as of posting time, he’s so far not mentioned it at all.
Comrade Jake
Ferguson has issued an actual apology. It reads pretty well, so far as these things go.
Cheryl from Maryland
@Villago Delenda Est: Or Olivier acting Othello with Ralph Richardson as Iago — Olivier thought the key was that Othello and Iago had a “Freudian” relationship. Richardson is reported to have patted Olivier’s hand and said — there, there dear boy, calm down.
It is generally thought that Olivier was somewhat bi (he honestly discussed males who attracted him), but he also had three wives, children and several hetero affairs).
schrodinger's cat
I don’t see why anyone is surprised, Ferguson has always been this vile. What more can one expect from an apologist of the Empire.
Bruce S
@trollhattan:
No – he’s married to a professional Islamophobe who is a fellow at AEI. Hirsan Ali – she has a horrible personal story of growing up in an orthodox Muslim family in North Africa but unfortunately she’s gone way off the deep end, turned her experiences into a career of demonizing Muslims and explicitly serving the Neo-Con Middle East narrative and their prescriptions for US foreign policy.
Davis X. Machina
@dmsilev: As its people will remind you, unbidden, Harvard SEAS, in its original form as the Lawrence Scientific School (1847), is roughly 20 years older than The Voke. (M.I.T, 1865)
Lemondrop
@Pink Snapdragon: http://seas.harvard.edu School of Engineering and Applied Sciences
reflectionephemeral
@Comrade Jake: ‘course, his apology for the “Keynes was a fag so he didn’t care about the future” thing contains an out-of-context misreading of Keynes’ famous quote.
Keynes never said that we shouldn’t care about the future; rather, he wrote, “In the long run we are all dead. Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the ocean is flat again.” That is, economists should work hard to understand policies that ameliorate real-world conditions right now, not just cite models that suggest that things will work out OK in the end if we just wait around.
Ferguson knows from experience that he can lie with impunity about economics; he apologizes for the slur, not the lie, because that’s the only thing that might affect his bank account.
Comment edited after posting because I wanted to edit it.
Bruce S
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I don’t really give much of a shit about apologies from folks who are getting paid big bucks to tell us what they think in public forums. This guy is a Harvard professor giving a public presentation – not some shlub who made a thoughtless comment at a dinner party. We now know even more about how Ferguson thinks. He’s a serial “killer” when it comes to intellectual honesty and integrity. This is actually a good thing in the necessary process of discrediting him as a public intellectual. Since this crap is part of a pattern (as your great snark demonstrates) I’m not interested in taking his moment of scrambling to cover his professional ass as an “apology.” More like a requisite career move. Ferguson is beyond redemption IMHO. He is perfectly suitable as a regular guest in the circles of the ridiculous, like Morning Joe, but his reputation as a “deep thinker” deserves nothing less than to be stomped on mercilessly.
Tonal Crow
@Bruce S: Another “42 percent” moment from the Greedy Orc Party.
TR
@MomSense:
That’s not how a chaired professorship works. Yes, a rich person donates he money, but they have no say in who gets it. The dean and the department chair often decide such things, but the person they pick is almost always a member of he department first.
Ultimately, it’s the fault of the Harvard history department that he’s a member of its faculty. Blame for this cant be outsourced,
Bill E Pilgrim
@Bruce S: I agree and I think the apology won’t help much, I mean even he admits that he recognizes how despicable what he said was, plus how absurd the reasoning involved was.
I don’t think their making ridiculous spreadsheet errors and insanely homophobic not to mention idiotic statements should be necessary to discredit the Austerions, but hey if it helps even a little, I’ll take it.
Nickws
I suspect Ferguson’s knowledge of Keynes’ sexual ambiguity comes from the same source I first read about it in, Paul Johnson’s The Offshore Islanders, in which case he wouldn’t have learned about this particular tragic detail, because fagg0t! fagg0t! fagg0t! is the entire point arch-tory Johnson was trying to make about JMK. I don’t believe for a second Niall has ever been arsed enough to plough through the dedicated Keynes bios written by guys like Skidelsky, because borrrring.
Gotta say, while I think Pity of War is worthwhile, it’s essentially something a British version of Daniel Larison would write; clever anti-war polemic by a single-minded conservative nationalist. (Ironic that I compare Ferguson to a guy who’s on the other side of post-911 Rightwing politics. But while Larison might hate neocons, he’s also a neoconfederate, which isn’t too far removed from Ferguson’s belief that the British Empire and Gilded Age economics are great Lost Causes.)
schrodinger's cat
Harvard should change its name to Hacks R Us.
Bruce S
@Bill E Pilgrim:
Yeah – I don’t really think R&R are as shitty as Ferguson, but as Krugman points out their worst sin isn’t publishing a dubious paper that cherry-picks metrics and contains a sophomore-level data error, but that it’s taken their moment of public humiliation to question the conclusions that were drawn from it in policy circles…conclusions already firmly in place but that were driving the accolades and love-fest for their “research.” It was opportunistic and shameful (shameless?) at best. Apparently their book of economic history is pretty decent, but Paul Ryan et al haven’t read it, never will and don’t give a shit about any evidence or research that doesn’t support their ideologically-driven obsessions. Their public acclaim was based on something that wasn’t just wrong, but deeply hurtful to folks who are trying to make it on a small sliver of a Harvard professor’s compensation.
Bill E Pilgrim
Krugman just now on how despicably dishonest people like Ferguson are in deliberately misinterpreting the “in the long run” statement by Keynes, even without the gay-bashing:
trollhattan
@reflectionephemeral:
Wow, that Fallows piece is something. Ferguson is rather more than a delusional hack–he’s actually a lying propagandist, but we can be sure his lies are for the “greater good” i.e., saving us from ourselves.
Blecch.
Tyro
@Runt: this is the academic version of BBC actors leaving the UK to get on what’s called the “Hollywood movie villain gravy train.”
There’s a market out there for people who want to hear evil things articulated with a British accent.
Bruce S
@Bill E Pilgrim:
I think it was sly of Krugman not even to mention Ferguson in this post – knowing that this quote will be circling the blogosphere, he eviscerates an aspect of Ferguson’s BS that he’s not apologizing for and implicitly doubles down on.
Ferguson’s problem isn’t that he’s an insensitive jerk – it’s that he’s not honest, and worse not held accountable, in his role as “distinguished public intellectual” – not even at the level that a college sophomore would be held to.
Chris
@Bruce S:
AHA isn’t in the same ballpark as Ayn Rand (there are few who are), but there’s more than a touch of similarity. Really shitty origin story leads to massive overreaction, exploited and trumpeted loudly by the wingnuts of the West for their own purposes.
GregB
I heard that Niall Ferguson used to fuck goats with Mickey Kaus and Erick Erickson.
Bruce S
@Chris:
Just learned by following that “update” link that she is now a Fellow @ Harvard Kennedy School of Government. That’s pretty good for someone with a masters degree in poli sci…
reflectionephemeral
@trollhattan:
The Gellman quotes above are quite perceptive and chilling. Ferguson’s lying and record of being wrong about everything just don’t matter, as to his incentives, and to the role he plays in the public discourse. He’s playing for Team Republican, so he says what he has to say. Tina Brown will just put it on the cover of Newsweek without fact-checking it, if it can be spun as buzzworthy.
pseudonymous in nc
Niall Ferguson farms off all of his research onto his graduate students, in exchange for a leg-up in academia, politics or journalism. Not that he does much primary research these days anyway.
He had a crazy messy divorce from his first wife, who was the person who got him his own leg-up, turning him into the social climber and kiss-up, kick-down person he is now. And speaking of procreation, the main reason Ferguson married Sue Douglas was that he got her pregnant.
Oh, and when he was teaching at Oxford, he annoyed the students so much that half of the rugby team pissed in his open-top Mazda.
pseudonymous in nc
@Todd:
Blame Larry Summers for headhunting Fergie from NYU because he wanted celebrity hires. That’s fairly well-documented.
Ruckus
@Bill E Pilgrim:
R&R didn’t make ridiculous spreadsheet errors. They did what they did on purpose to get the results they were looking for. Do you honestly think they don’t know how to use a spreadsheet? I am a machinist. I have for decades made things to high tolerances, sometimes having to interpret what a designer/engineer means on a print so that the parts work. I didn’t get good at this by not understanding how the tools of my trade work, I did it by using them and learning their uses and limitations. So people telling me they are renowned economists while they make asinine mistakes with a basic tool of their profession just does not compute.
Rex Everything
@Nutella: God damn, that’s just appalling.
Rex Everything
@MomSense: Good info to have. Thanks.
Rex Everything
@Bill E Pilgrim: Good for him for apologizing. He’s still an absolute shit, of course.
Mandalay
@Comrade Jake:
His apology is a carefully crafted lie. He claims:
Yet in a review of Ferguson’s book “The Pity Of War”:
It’s one thing for Ferguson to argue that he misspoke in off-the-cuff remarks. But that doesn’t explain how he came to put gratuitous homophobic speculation about Keynes in a book as well.
patroclus
@Nickws: Actually, the Skidelsky multi-volume biography of Keynes is NOT boring and I highly recommend it to the Balloon Juice commentariat if they want to learn about the real Keynes. Keynes did have numerous gay affairs when he was at university and in the few years thereafter and this is fairly well documented. But he settled down and conformed to the straight lifestyle thereafter (or else he was so discreet that there wasn’t any evidence of his gayness later). But he also had hetero affairs as well while young, so a perhaps better explanation of his sexuality is that he experimented heavily while young with both sexes and then settled down into a monogamous hetero relationship for the remainder of his life. Skidelsky does mention that he enjoyed being around good looking young men (who were interested in economics) but I’m not sure what one can draw from that. He and his wife tried to have children but evidently failed – there was at least one “miscarriage.”
This, of course, has nothing to do with Keynes’ actual pathbreaking work in economics. Expansionary policies remain expansionary policies and contractionary policies remain contractionary policies regardless of Keynes’ sexuality. I’m surprised that Niall Ferguson is a homophobic bigot – I used to think, while I disagreed with him on virtually everything, that he at least had a good mind and was a reasonable person. After this episode, I will pay no attention whatsoever to his bleatings any more. He should be shunned by all respectable people.
Bruce S
@Mandalay:
This isn’t original to Ferguson. Not that it bears repetition…
El Cruzado
Author of “The Great Degeneration: How Institutions Decay and Economies Die”?
It’s good to see he practices what he preaches.
Bruce S
“In fairness” to Ferguson, he’s just repeating some shit that anti-Keynesian polemicists of a dickish bent have been using to trash Keynes for years. Here’s Billy Kristol’s mama, Gertrude Himmelfarb, writing in the Neo-Con rag Commentary back in 1985, when Reaganomics was all the rage and there was a full-on attempt to bury the fag Keynes:
http://www.facingthechallenge.org/himmelfarb.php
Unfortunately, even Joseph Schumpeter had nudged up against this line. Ferguson is just repeating some standard Neo-Con, supply-sider shit ginned up by folks who have pretty much been wrong about everything, foreign and domestic, for more than 30 years and who love them some ad hominem to bolster their weak shit.
Sean
The asshole only apologized because Harvard wants no bad publicity, and though he probably wasn’t explicitly pressured by his bosses, he has to know that he must protect the institution’s brand, and the quickly escalating problem was only going to get worse for him.
He’s a shit stain no matter how you slice it.
Mandalay
@Bruce S: Great link! Based on that I withdraw my insult that Ferguson is a lying homophobe…
He is a plagiarizing lying homophobe.
Mandalay
@Sean:
I doubt that he gives a shit about what Harvard wants.
What he needs to protect is the Ferguson Brand so he can continue to command $75k speaking fees. Going homophobic brings those fees down from the stratosphere.
Bruce S
@Mandalay:
I stumbled on it following a Google trail, but I just discovered that Brad DeLong posted it early this morning. That’s why he’s a tenured professor and I do blog comments.
nancydarling
“As those who know me and my work are well aware, I detest all prejudice, sexual or otherwise.”—from Ferguson’s apology.
I can’t decide who is the bigger asshole, Ferguson or Kevin Williamson of National Review who didn’t apologize, but doubled down on his remarks about Gabby Giffords.
Both of them are so full of themselves that there is no room left for detestation of anything.
Both of them think they are the smartest guys in the room and make no attempt to disguise it.
Joseph Nobles
@Mandalay: Whoops.
I was about to add my acknowledgment of Ferguson’s actual apology, which did read like one and not the usual “sorry if you were offended” baloney. It even mentions that Keynes’ wife had a miscarriage at one point. But the “off-the-cuff” assertion pales next to that quote from his book.
Jonah Goldberg at NRO, however, got into the “it’s a time-honored critique of Keynes to dismiss him for being a gay” defense in his recent dropping-off over at their little website.
pseudonymous in nc
@Mandalay:
Although he apparently thought it was fine for a gathering of Wall Street’s Finest, who lap up that shit. Perhaps he’s thinking about the TV deals and the book advances? He does like those.
Anya
@Bruce S: If your sole expertise is being a brown ex-muslim who lies about Islam and vilifies Muslims then your academic credentials are not that important.
Ruckus
@nancydarling:
They may be the smartest guys in the room. OK in a pretty small room. That still doesn’t keep them from being some of the biggest assholes in any room.
oldster
Do you know how morally bankrupt Andrew Sullivan is?
A lot of you were probably wondering this, so I thought I’d tell you:
he is so morally bankrupt, that he is even willing to betray the cause of gay rights, if it conflicts with class solidarity and Oxford chumminess.
You see, Ferguson and Sullivan are old chums from Oxford. And they both belong to the same class–the rich pundit class that shits on the rest of us. They’re just Tom Friedman with a UK accent.
So when Ferguson says something viciously, undeniably homophobic–the worst, most contemptible sort of gay-bashing–Sullivan immediately forgives him. Sullivan assures us that he can see into Ferguson’s heart, and there is no homophobia there.
Of course, if anyone else had said what Ferguson said, then Sullivan would commence a relentless jihad against him. But Ferguson is different. Ferguson is a friend, and an Oxonian. They vacation together. They are of the same class. Other gay people aren’t.
You know, it doesn’t matter how far gay rights advances. There will always be scum like Sullivan, a fifth column working to betray it.
Chris T.
@Bruce S:(excerpt of quote of quote)
Aside from the obvious stupidity, this is also obviously stupid: in the long run, our children, our grandchildren, their kids, and so on, are also all dead. It’s all a question of how long … which is the point: we must consider all runs, short, medium, long, and only after that, the next 10 billion years, or whatever.
Villago Delenda Est
The only apology I’ll entertain from the Ferguson shitstain is a Captain Needa apology.
scav
Guardian finally caught up to it (Apology stage). I do love some of their comments.
Sean
@pseudonymous in nc:
That’s my point – he said what he said because he thought he was on friendly turf to make a locker room-style crack about Teh Ghey. That crowd will pay him MORE money to say shit like that.
Only he can’t get away with it now, because he’s an academic, and he needs some veneer of credibility in order to spout his shit and play hismschtick. The Harvard bona fides he gets to keep by saying he is sorry is the name of the game.
Bob h
Ferguson and Sullivan are testimony to the bankability of an Oxonian accent.