Paging Paul Krugman: Toward a Topoi of an Exemplar Public Intellectual in the Natural and Physical Sciences

Introduction

The American economist Paul Krugman has become a highly successful public intellectual in the social sciences, primarily by virtue of his The New York Times editorial column and blog. Krugman shares a few rhetorical characteristics with other public intellectuals in the sciences, but he is also, in a rhetorical sense, a brawler—a scientist and public intellectual who is willing to name names, engage in caustic trash talk, use pathos appeals, and scrap for territory. These decidedly atypical (for public intellectuals in the sciences, anyway) rhetorical strategies have proven highly effective, and they should be adopted by at least some public intellectuals in the natural and physical sciences, especially those scientists who work in the areas of climate change, vaccines, evolution, and genetically modified foods. It is in these areas that many members of the general public remain unpersuaded of science’s evidence and conclusions, a situation that becomes increasingly perilous as, for example, climate change intensifies.

Krugman understands that in today’s increasingly visible and strident antiscience environment, many people are not persuaded by rational arguments and an academic ethos. Other public intellectuals in the sciences either do not recognize this trend or, even if they do, are insufficiently motivated to change their logos- and ethos-focused rhetorical tactics. Because Krugman recognizes that evidence and expertise are not effective arguments for some segments of the lay public, he uses other rhetorical strategies in an attempt to reach these audiences. It is these additional types of appeals that make Krugman so effective and that are the focus of this article. As a case study, this work follows scholarship such as the “Models of Engagement” chapters in Nagy-Zekmi and Hollis’ (2010) edited collection Truth to Power: Public Intellectuals In and Out of Academe. However, to date, few studies have investigated exactly how successful public intellectuals use language. A close examination via rhetorical analyses of the discursive strategies used by successful public intellectuals is needed, and given that a number of the world’s most pressing problems involve scientific research and communication, the study of effective language use by public intellectuals in the sciences is especially vital.

Paul Krugman is an American Nobel laureate (in 2008) economist who has since the late 1970s taught at a number of prestigious universities, including the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Stanford University, Yale University, and the London School of Economics. Most recently, Krugman taught at Princeton University; he retired from that institution in 2015 and is now a distinguished professor of economics at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Krugman has won a host of prizes and awards over the course of his career and was named one of the Top 100 Global Thinkers by Foreign Policy in 2012. Krugman began a career as a public intellectual in 1990 with the publication of his first popular (i.e., nonacademic) book, The Age of Diminished Expectations. (Krugman has also written numerous academic books, journal articles, and economics textbooks.) He later wrote for Fortune magazine and published additional popular books, including The New York Times bestseller The Great Unraveling (2003). In this sense, Krugman follows in the footsteps of other economists such as Adam Smith, Joseph Schumpeter, Milton Friedman, and John Maynard Keynes who also became public intellectuals. Krugman’s first new media venture was with the online news site Slate, where he started writing a monthly column in 1996. In 1999, Krugman began writing his column and blog at The New York Times; the column is syndicated in a number of other newspapers and is excerpted regularly in the online news site Salon. Krugman appears regularly as a talking head on television news programs and has nearly 3.5 million Twitter followers (Socialbakers, 2017). Now a staple of popular culture, Krugman has appeared as a character in the American comic strips “Dilbert” and “This Modern World,” as well as on the cover of the American magazine Newsweek and as a caricature in the form of a puppeteer on the cover of the German magazine Handelsblatt. Krugman’s popularity and influence is now to the point that a March 2015 article in Salon was entitled “What would Paul Krugman do: Imagining the plan that defeats the ultra-rich” (Curry, 2015).

As a result of his success as a public intellectual, Krugman regularly appears at or near the top of lists of the world’s most influential economists, much to the dismay of his detractors, some of whom deplore the “Krugmanization” of discussions of economics in the mainstream media (Krugman, 2014v). The Wall Street Journal ranked Krugman first on a list of influential business thinkers in 2013 (Krugman, 2013i). In a survey of economics professors, Davis, Figgins, Hedengren, and Klein (2011) named Krugman the most favorite living economist under the age of 60; indeed, Krugman ran away with the number one ranking. Bloomberg Markets ranked Krugman Number 30 on its list of the world’s 50 most influential people on financial markets in 2015 (Dieterich, 2015). Finally, broadening its focus to all public intellectuals and not just economists, Salon calls Krugman “America’s most influential pundit” (Isquith, 2016).

In this article, I argue that the natural and physical sciences, whose public intellectuals tend to project a somewhat genteel ethos, badly need public intellectuals like the combative and satirical Krugman, and I explain and demonstrate Krugman’s most effective rhetorical strategies, focusing first on two strategies that are similar to those used by other prominent public intellectuals in the sciences and then on a number of other strategies that are starkly different. It is these differences, I contend, that have led to Krugman’s popularity and effectiveness as a public intellectual, and it is these differences that need to be studied and adapted in the natural and physical sciences. My analysis of Krugman’s work is based on a corpus of his The New York Times columns and blogs that range primarily from 2013 (with a few mentions of earlier work) to early 2016. Prior to the rhetorical analysis, I review some of the recent literature on science literacy, public intellectualism in the sciences, and rhetorical analysis of economics discourse. The final section of the article discusses the need for a public intellectual like Krugman in the natural and physical sciences in more detail and lists a number of recommendations to make this type of work even more effective.

In the sciences, public intellectualism has taken on a sense of urgency given the disillusionment with science now prevalent among some segments of society (Camargo & Grant, 2015; McCright, Dentzman, Charters, & Dietz, 2013). Public intellectualism in the sciences is one of many potential sites of science literacy beyond K–12 and college and university science classes themselves, which although they help students learn about the process of science and scientific thinking, they generally do not help them learn to negotiate science as a cultural institution. Other academic sites of science literacy include nonscience college and university courses such as English composition courses required of most first-year university students in the United States and Canada (Moskovitz & Kellogg, 2005; Wolfe, 2010; Zerbe, 2007) and science-themed courses in literature, history, and philosophy. Nonacademic sites of science literacy include science popularization (Perrault, 2013), art (Drumm, Belantara, Dorney, Waters, & Peris, 2015; Gigante, 2012; Rios & Aquiles, 2013), theater (Hodder, 2011; Weitkamp, 2012), film (Sakellari, 2015; Valenti, 2015), music videos (Allgaier, 2013), museums (Henriksen & Frøyland, 2000), editorial cartoons (Domínguez, 2014), video games (Dudo, Cicchirllo, Atkinson, & Marx, 2014), and humor (Pinto, Marçal, & Vaz, 2015; Riesch, 2015) and satire (Brewer & McKnight, 2015; Kalviknes Bore & Reid, 2014; Paradis, 1997; Zerbe, 2016). In an ironic twist, even religion has become a site of science literacy, as some clerics preach about the sanctity of the Earth on the basis of findings in environmental and climate science (Evans, 2012), and participatory science or science citizenship also remains an important site of science literacy (Árnason, 2013; Bonney et al., 2009; Kelly & Maddalena, 2015). Public intellectualism, though, remains one of the most important sites of science literacy given the perceived complexity of science, which leads many lay people to assume that they need an expert to explain it to them.

The recent scholarship of public intellectualism considers the formation of public intellectuals (Zinn, 2008); analyzes different understandings in academia and journalism of what public intellectuals are or ought to be (Townsley, 2006); provides case studies of influential public intellectuals such as Franz Boas (Whitfield, 2010), Lawrence Bragg (Thomson, 2015), Paul Robeson (Von Blum, 2008), and Virginia Woolf (Cuddy-Keane, 2003); and discusses public intellectualism on the basis of one’s field of expertise, for example, bioethics (Parsi & Geraughty, 2004), the social sciences (Gattone, 2012), and geography (Stern, 2009). The importance of creativity, courage, and morality in public intellectuals has been explored in a series of case studies of Nobel Peace Prize laureates (Misztal, 2007). A number of theorists argue that public intellectuals are not as common or as smart as they used to be (Etzioni, 2006; Karger & Hernández, 2004; Posner, 2001); however, Turner and Larson (2015) assert that new technology and new media have produced a different kind of public intellectual—one that, instead of being the traditionally famous literary figure or academic, for example, is now instead a technological entrepreneur like Tim O’Reilly, Stewart Brand, or (back in the 1940s and 1950s) Norbert Wiener. With new technology in mind, a number of studies examine the role of blogs in public intellectualism (Freese, 2009), and another series of works charts the rise of Comedy Central-type satirical newscasters as another type of new public intellectual (MacMullan, 2007).

Finally, and most importantly for this work, several theorists have investigated use of language by public intellectuals in the sciences specifically. Following up her coauthored 2004 work on bioethicists as public intellectuals, Parsi (2011) writes that the use of satire by biologists can be helpful, noting that “the satirist as public intellectual serves to speak truth to power but in a more subtle, less blunt way” (p. 5) and that “the effective public intellectual has to be less the pedant and more the artful catalyst for independent thought” (p. 6). As I demonstrate in the following, this observation is only partially true with respect to Krugman’s work: He is quite satirical, but he is by no means subtle. In addition, in Prophets, Gurus, and Pundits: Rhetorical Style & Public Engagement, Young (2014) describes a number of distinct rhetorical styles for public intellectuals, one of which is a “scientist style” that she characterizes as “the little black dress of public intellectual rhetorical styles … always in fashion” (p. 127). “The Scientist,” Young continues, “conceal[s] his or her intimidating intellectualism from the broader public … ” (pp. 127–128). Then, Young speaks to audience reaction to scientist style: “while Americans hold visceral disdain for those who espouse social revolutions à la Noam Chomsky, we embrace the geeks… ” (p. 128). As with Parsi’s description of scientist public intellectuals, though, Young’s portrayal misses the mark when it comes to Krugman: Krugman flaunts his intellectualism, and as a result, he doesn’t come across as much of a geek.

Although it is couched in the language of objectivity, scientific discourse is now widely acknowledged to be just as argumentative as all other forms of human discourse (Bazerman, 1988; Campbell, 1986; Ceccarelli, 2001, 2013; Condit & Lynch, 2012; Fahnestock, 1999; Gross, 1990; Halloran & Bradford, 1984; Harris, 1991; Miller, 1992; Prelli, 1989; Selzer, 1993; Wander, 1976). Rhetorical analyses of work in both the natural and physical sciences as well as the social sciences have been performed, and given the importance and visibility of economics, economic discourse has received its share of attention. McCloskey (1985) pioneered work in this area with The Rhetoric of Economics (a second edition was released in 1998). Aune (2001) scrutinized dominant narratives in economics in Selling the Free Market: The Rhetoric of Economic Correctness, while Smart (2006) focused more specifically on the language of banking in Canada in Writing the Economy: Activity, Genre and Technology in the World of Banking. More recently, scholarship in economic rhetoric has analyzed the language associated with the worldwide recession that began in 2008. “Bubble denial”—in this case, denial that there was any risk of a housing bubble in the United States in the mid-2000s decade—has been studied within the context of risk communication by Columbini (2015), who references several of Krugman’s The New York Times columns or blogs in her work, and by Goodnight and Green (2010). Dankse Bank’s “public listening” campaign during the recession has been investigated by Hoff-Clausen (2013). Speeches related to the financial crisis given by U.S. presidential candidates in 2008 and 2012 have been analyzed by Murphy (2009) and Levasseur and Gring-Pemble (2015), respectively. All of this work is especially relevant to Krugman’s public discourse given that he often writes about the financial crisis.

The Similarities

Let’s begin a discussion of Krugman’s work as a public intellectual with a look at the familiar. Krugman shares a number of rhetorical features of other public intellectuals in the sciences such as the late Carl Sagan, the late Stephen Jay Gould, Sam Harris, E. O. Wilson, Michio Kaku, Neil deGrasse Tyson, and Bill Nye the Science Guy. First and foremost, as with these other public intellectuals who are also scientists, Krugman is relentlessly logocentric: In other words, it’s all about the empirically derived evidence. An example of a cause-and-effect argument from Krugman (2015y) is that middle-class values come from the availability of middle-class jobs:

[I]t should be obvious that middle-class values only flourish in an economy that offers middle-class jobs … Lagging wages—actually declining in real terms for half of working men—and work instability have been followed by sharp declines in marriage, rising births out of wedlock, and more.

In addition to cause-and-effect arguments, Krugman (2015x) regularly identifies patterns and correlations, as with this discussion (based on a Bloomberg report) of financial contributions to American political parties:

The Democrats are, not too surprisingly, the party of Big Labor (or what’s left of it) and Big Law: unions and lawyers are the most pro-Democratic major interest groups. Republicans are the party of Big Energy and Big Food: they dominate contributions from extractive industries and agribusiness. And they are, in particular, the party of Big Pizza … Pizza Hut gives a remarkable 99 percent of its money to Republicans.

A third type of logos argument is precedent, and Krugman (2015mm) regularly uses this type of reasoning in his work, as with this comparison of the austerity demands on Greece by the European Union with similar demands placed on Germany at the end of World War I: “Austerity, it turns out, has devastated Greece just about as much as defeat in total war devastated imperial Germany. The idea of demanding that this [Greek] economy triple the size of its primary surplus is … disturbing.” A graph accompanying the blog post shows the roughly equal damage done to German and Greece by war and austerity demands, respectively. The harsh conditions imposed on Germany following World War I are generally viewed as a mistake, and Krugman’s argument is that the austerity measures inflict similar unnecessary and ultimately unwise damage on Greece.

An adherence to logos arguments requires a person to defend counterintuitive ideas if evidence supports them and to modify her or his position on issues if new evidence points in that direction. Krugman demonstrates both of these propensities. Understanding that many people view debt negatively, Krugman (2015h) argues for a reconception in this column:

Rand Paul said something funny the other day….[H]e decried the irresponsibility of American fiscal policy, declaring, “The last time the United States was debt free was 1835”….But is the point simply that public debt isn’t as bad as legend has it? Or can government debt actually be a good thing? Believe it or not, many economists argue that the economy needs a sufficient amount of public debt out there to function well.

Krugman (2015g) will not change his views without good reason, though. He resists the change-for-change’s sake temptation to which some people succumb, as this blog post indicates:

As I’ve written many times, economists who knew their [20th-century British economist] Hicks have actually done extremely well at predicting the effects of monetary and fiscal policy since the 2008 crisis, whereas those who sneered at this old-fashioned stuff have been wrong about almost everything.

In his writing, Krugman frequently provides graphs, charts, and links to data and reports that support his arguments. However, Krugman (2016d) does have a logos limit: He says that data and evidence can lose their punch if they are overly complex, as he explains in this blog post:

I’m … skeptical about the persuasive power of complicated econometrics; my sense is that mind-changing empirical work almost always involves not much more than simple correlations, usually from natural experiments….On the other hand, I would argue that empirical work isn’t the only thing that can change minds: really clear analytical arguments can do it too, by letting economists see things that were in front of their noses but overlooked because they didn’t have a framework.

It is important to note that Krugman would like to live in a world where arguments are won and lost on the basis of logic and evidence—the logos appeals described earlier. Indeed, he occasionally and publicly longs for it, as in this blog post in which Krugman (2015c) criticizes reliance on testimonials from unqualified individuals:

Look, in general you should argue based on logic and evidence, not authority figures, whenever possible. Sometimes there is technical detail that forces reliance on experts to summarize the evidence — but in that case you should cite experts in the relevant area, not people who are or were important for reasons that have nothing to do with the subject. Arguments from irrelevant authority are a sign that you don’t have a substantive case, you’re lazy, or both.

The second rhetorical strategy that Krugman shares with other public intellectuals in the sciences is that he promotes an unmistakably scholarly ethos. Academics generally project a confident but humble, calm, and generous ¹ ethos as public intellectuals: They are experts in their field who are willing to share their expertise with the general public and who make some effort to ensure that the ideas they explain are understandable to the public—by not using a lot of specialized language, for example, as when Krugman (2014k) uses the term rock-bottom economics to explain what a “liquidity trap” is for readers who are not economists.

Krugman (2015o) writes with a confidence of a scholar who knows his field well, and he discusses economic issues and concepts with fluidity and clarity. He cites other economists’ work regularly, from both professional colleagues with whom he agrees and with whom he disagrees. He is not afraid to tackle complex topics in his field, often putting the word “wonkish” in parentheses after the title of a blog post to alert readers to an especially specialized or technical post. All of these features are evident in the blog post excerpted in the following. The first line is the title of the post:

Is the Economy Self-Correcting? (Wonkish)

What I want to focus on in this post is the suggestion by Brad DeLong that I missed a failed implication of Hicksian analysis — that demand shocks should be short-term in their effect. Actually, and very unusually, I think Brad has this wrong. The proposition of a long-run tendency toward full employment isn’t a primitive axiom in IS-LM. It’s derived from the model, under certain assumptions. But there’s good reason to believe that even under “normal” conditions it’s a very weak, slow process. And under liquidity trap conditions it’s not a process we expect to see operate at all.

In contrast to his confidence, Krugman can at times be quite humble. For instance, even when he cites his own work, Krugman sometimes includes an “um” or some similar hedge to indicate a hesitation that may be interpreted as a reluctance to proverbially toot his own horn. For example, speaking of a report on interest rate yield curves released in 2011 by Merrill Lynch, Krugman (2011f) writes,

But what amazes me here is that this is presented as a fresh and surprising insight. Um, if you thought at all in terms of economic models, this was obvious right from the beginning. Here’s me in December 2008, yes, 2008…

A second feature of Krugman’s humility is his willingness to admit mistakes. In a November 2015 blog post about the real estate bubble that preceded the Great Recession of the mid-2000s, Krugman (2015ee) is his characteristically blunt self. He correctly predicted the real estate bubble but did not foresee the broader financial crunch: “I was clueless about that, and didn’t see the financial crisis coming at all.” Krugman (2014a) also readily admits when he doesn’t know something, as this post on the U.S. labor market shows:

How much slack is there in the U.S. labor market? Good question. The measured unemployment rate is fairly low, but labor force participation also seems low, and I have doubts about studies purporting to say that it’s overwhelmingly long-term demographics. Wage gains are still slow. My guess is that there’s considerably more slack than the unemployment number might lead you to suspect, but the truth is that I don’t know.

A third aspect of Krugman’s humility is his occasional use of a self-deprecating sense of humor. Krugman was ranked 96th on a Worth Magazine list of the 100 most powerful people in finance, the annual Power 100. Krugman (2013j) criticizes the list because it contains names of people who have been repeatedly wrong in their economic forecasts; as a result, he questions the legitimacy of the list and in doing so pokes fun at himself, saying “on the other hand, maybe that list itself is another roll of dishonor. If you ask me, anyone who made that list should automatically be considered a person of dubious character. Especially people around rank 96 or so.” Krugman sarcastically implicates himself here because of his inclusion—at Number 96—on the list.

Finally, Krugman demonstrates humility by apologizing to readers. Mostly, Krugman (2014f) apologizes in his blog if he has been inactive for a time, as when he writes, “sorry about slow posting—I’ve been busy drinking too much port at high table both giving talks at Oxford and grading final papers from Princeton.” The strikethrough is Krugman’s; it is another example of his self-deprecation at work.

The Differences

Krugman’s laser-like focus on empirical evidence, as well as his scholarly ethos, puts him firmly in the camp of traditional public intellectuals in the sciences. However, it is what Krugman does in addition to using these two rhetorical strategies that sets him apart from his peers. First, although Krugman adopts a confident and humble ethos, he also often displays a much more brash approach. For example, Krugman (2014h) does not miss an opportunity—indeed, he is relentless—to tell readers when he has been proven correct and his opponents have been proven wrong, as this blog post on the liquidity trap in which Krugman goes after hedge fund manager and financial analyst Cliff Asness demonstrates:

Clearly, Asness has never read anything at all on the subject—not what I’ve written, not what Mike Woodford has written, not what Ben Bernanke has written….Now, I understand that busy people can’t keep track of everything, and even that you can sometimes be a successful money manager without reading up on monetary economics. But if you’re one of those people who don’t have time to understand the monetary debate, I have a simple piece of advice: Don’t lecture the chairman of the Fed on monetary policy. [Emphasis in original]

Krugman (2015d) criticizes both opponents and allies, and he makes a clear effort to be fair, as when he chided (now former) U.S. Federal Reserve Chair Ben Bernanke—with whom he often agreed—for being too nice:

Anyway, I think Ben Bernanke did us a bit of a disservice by not linking to whoever it is he’s arguing with. It would help to know that John Taylor and the BIS [Bank for International Settlements] are on the other side, because this would let readers place their position here in context with their other positions.

As part of the rhetorical combat in which he engages, Krugman (2015q) also brings up work that he did many years ago that has proven to be correct or has been ground that he covered well before anyone else, saying in a post about American commentator Larry Kudlow that “people keep rolling out arguments I showed were wrong all those years ago, or trotting out arguments I made back then as something new and somehow a challenge to conventional wisdom.” Krugman, then, recognizes that too much humility becomes counterproductive and that more aggressive rhetorical tactics are sometimes needed.

And it’s not just fellow economists that Krugman goes after. Krugman (2015s) launches withering attacks on politicians such as U.S. House of Representatives Speaker Paul Ryan, as this blog post (written when Ryan was deciding whether or not to run for Speaker) shows:

As the Paul Ryan clamor [to run for the post of Speaker] gets louder, a public service reminder: he’s a con man. I don’t mean that I disagree with his policy ideas, although I do. I mean that his reputation as a serious thinker is based on deception, both about what he has actually proposed and how it has or hasn’t been vetted.

Rarely, Krugman’s (2015q, 2015s) condemnations get somewhat personal, as with his preceding characterization of Paul Ryan as a “con man” and this sentence in which he mocks Larry Kudlow’s wardrobe: “I don’t think it’s an accident that Kudlow still dresses like Gordon Gekko after all these years.” (Gordon Gekko is the fictional, money-obsessed antagonist from the 1987 film Wall Street and its 2010 sequel Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps.) Several of Krugman’s opponents have complained about this alleged lack of civility. Krugman (2014z) has little patience for these complaints, though, parrying them with assertions that he will treat opponents and their arguments more respectfully if and when they (a) bring better (i.e., logos-centered) arguments to the discussion rather than rely on gut feeling, instinct, and irrelevant data and (b) admit when they make mistakes:

[C]ivility is a gesture of respect—and sure enough, the loudest demands for civility come from those who have done nothing to earn that respect….And if you look at the uncivil remarks by people like, well, me, you’ll find that they are … aimed at people arguing in bad faith.

Krugman (2015bb) also makes the point that it is not evidence-challenged opponents who deserve respect; it’s his readers who do, as he explains in this column in which he (among other things) castigates the Republican candidates who sought their party’s 2016 presidential nomination:

I know that it’s disturbing to read columns that portray the entire field [of candidates] as a bunch of cranks. But it would be a dereliction of duty, basically an act of dishonest reporting, to pretend that they aren’t. I’m all for respect here—but the people who deserve respect, in the form of honest assessment, are my readers.

Another nontraditional aspect of ethos that Krugman displays in his writing is his willingness to allow readers to see parts of his life that do not have much to do with economics or have nothing to do with the field at all. For example, Krugman makes sure that his readers know that he is not just an ivory tower academic who spends all of his time pontificating: He has real work to do. In a blog post explaining why he had not been posting too often, Krugman (2013o) explains that he has been grading term papers from his Princeton University students:

No, really (and mostly)—they’re the source of limited posting recently. While I wouldn’t mind having a bit, um, fewer papers to read, it’s a real joy when you get papers from young people that provide fresh thinking and tell you things you really didn’t know. And I had a bunch of those this semester. It’s been a fine experience reading and grading. And thank God it’s over.

In his blog, Krugman often gets away from economics and university teaching entirely. The most common example of this strategy is Krugman’s (2015m) weekly Friday Night Music post in which he briefly recommends some end-of-the-work-week relaxation and musical enjoyment for his readers and includes a link to a YouTube video of the musical group he has recently (re)discovered. Here is an example:

I’m at a conference, and won’t have an opportunity to post later. Also haven’t seen much new music lately. But for some reason I’ve been going back to this performance quite a lot, and I’ve only featured Quilt once. So here’s the 60s, reimagined: [link to a YouTube video of the band Quilt performing a song entitled “Secondary Swan”].

In addition to popular music—Krugman has also quoted lyrics from the Rolling Stones (Krugman, 2011c), Buffalo Springfield (Krugman, 2015w), and Aretha Franklin (Krugman, 2015bb)—and personal matters, Krugman regularly alludes to the popular, nonprofessional topics such as the following:

The weather (Krugman, 2014j)

Film: mentions of or lines (some with slight modifications) from Star Wars (Krugman, 2013p, 2016c), Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Krugman, 2013l, 2015bb), Groundhog Day (Krugman, 2011b), Field of Dreams (Krugman, 2011f), The Fly (Krugman, 2014l), The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (Krugman, 2015z), Die Hard (Krugman, 2016a), The Princess Bride (Krugman, 2015b), and A Few Good Men (Krugman, 2013q). (Krugman must like A Few Good Men; he has on several occasions used versions of the film’s iconic line “You can’t handle the truth!” delivered by actor Jack Nicholson.)

Television: Star Trek (Krugman, 2015l, among many other examples)

Book: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (Krugman, 2014s)

Pop culture staples: Charlie Brown (Krugman, 2015gg, among multiple other examples), zombies (Krugman, 2015ii), and ComicCon (Krugman, 2016c).

In his work, Krugman includes many allusions to high culture as well as to popular culture. He has mentioned (or alluded to with an obvious play on words) Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot (Krugman, 2015ll), St. Augustine (e.g., Krugman, 2015dd), Machiavelli (Krugman, 2015f), George Orwell (e.g., Krugman, 2015t), Robert Burns (Krugman, 2015v), Cassandra from Greek mythology (Krugman, 2013k), Upton Sinclair (e.g., Krugman, 2014r), William Butler Yeats (Krugman, 2014u), Milton’s Paradise Lost (e.g., Krugman, 2013h), Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities (Krugman, 2015a), Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (Krugman, 2013r), Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (Krugman, 2013a), Shakespeare’s Hamlet (Krugman, 2015ff) and Love’s Labour’s Lost (Krugman, 2013g), novelist Doris Lessing, after whom Krugman named his cat, as he tells readers (Krugman, 2013d), and the musical My Fair Lady (Krugman, 2015i). Krugman also incorporates a lot of history into his work; he is an admirer of American Civil War general and later U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant (Krugman, 2013f) and enjoys studying the Roman Empire (Krugman, 2014x). (In this just-referenced blog post title, Krugman even shows off some Latin.) The name of Krugman’s blog, “The Conscience of a Liberal,” is a play on the book The Conscience of a Conservative published by an American Senator, Barry Goldwater, and a coauthor in 1960. (Goldwater became the Republican nominee for president in 1964.) Not surprisingly, as an economist, Krugman mentions historical lessons from the Great Depression (e.g., Krugman, 2015gg). Including these high-culture allusions fortifies Krugman’s relationship with the well-educated readers who form the bulk of The New York Times’ audience. In addition, a knowledge of history enables Krugman to bolster his logos-centered precedent arguments.

Another significant difference between Krugman’s work and the work of other more traditional public intellectuals in the sciences is Krugman’s use of pathos appeals. Given that climate change denialists, vaccine denialists, and the like are unmoved by logos appeals typically associated with empirical data, and given that these groups are also unmoved by ethos appeals because of their lack of respect and interest in expertise, which in the United States is part of a strong current of anti-intellectualism more generally, it can be argued with a strong degree of confidence that pathos appeals are currently the most important kind of persuasive appeal.

Krugman’s (2011d) approach to pathos is multilayered. On one hand, he wants readers who are inclined to collect and interpret data or think through a well-conceived analysis to feel exasperated—just as he does—when other people don’t do so:

I see that [American economist] Arnold Kling is exasperated when I cite continuing low interest rates as evidence that concerns about crowding out are wrong, citing the Reagan years as a counterexample. Let me exasperate right back. The Reagan years were marked by two things: large budget deficits—although much smaller as a percentage of GDP than we’re seeing now—and a huge disinflation, engineered by Paul Volcker. So we need to look at real, not nominal interest rates—and real rates were in fact very high by historical standards during the Reagan years. 10-year bond rates ranged between 8 and 9 percent in the later Reagan years, while inflation generally ran under 4 percent. And may I say, I thought that this was part of what every economist knows—the story of the tight-money loose-fiscal mix of the Reagan era is, literally, a textbook case that’s in just about every undergrad macro book.

Rarely, Krugman pushes further than exasperation: He seeks to evoke even a sense of anger, for example, at greedy people who have made life so much more difficult for the middle and lower socioeconomic classes. In this post, Krugman (2012) quotes from the original third verse of 19th-century poet Katharine Lee Bates’ song America the Beautiful:

America! America!

God shed His grace on thee

Till selfish gain no longer stain

The banner of the free!

Krugman will invoke fear in an attempt to force people to think through consequences of what he thinks would be a foolish action. For example, on Scotland’s vote for independence from the United Kingdom in 2014, Krugman (2014l) writes as follows:

I have a message for the Scots: Be afraid, be very afraid. The risks of going it alone are huge. You may think that Scotland can become another Canada, but it’s all too likely that it would end up becoming Spain without the sunshine.

Krugman is not all doom and gloom, however. He prominently and regularly trumpets economic and political achievements such as decreasing unemployment or increasing numbers of jobs, wage increases for lower and middle-class workers, and the success of Obamacare, especially in the face of incessant (and often unfounded) criticism from professional and political opponents (Krugman, 2016b). Furthermore, Krugman makes an occasional bid to evoke a sense of joy, or at least satisfaction, from his readers such as with his Christmas 2014 and Christmas 2015 posts in which he comments on positive developments such as the success of World Health Organization in ending the Ebola epidemic (Krugman, 2014w) and progress on renewable energy technology (Krugman, 2015jj), and it is clear from his Friday Night Music posts that Krugman has a passion for music that he is happy to share with readers in the hope that they will also take pleasure in it.

Following Cicero’s (1986) advice, Krugman brings a sense of humor (in addition to his occasional self-deprecating humor discussed earlier) to his blog and column writing, which is another example of how he uses pathos appeals effectively. To be sure, Krugman’s (2014i) humor often takes the form of biting satire, as this blog post on Obamacare demonstrates:

Is our conservatives learning? Are those who bought into the death spiral stories, who seized on every hint of bad news, asking themselves how they got it so wrong? Are they, maybe, considering the possibility that they’re listening to the wrong people…? Hahahaha.

Another rhetorical strategy that Krugman uses effectively is repetition. Krugman understands that the rhetorical battles he fights cannot be won overnight or even over the course of months or a few years. Krugman is in it for the long haul, and he hammers the same point again and again as necessary. For example, during an approximately 5-month period in 2014, Krugman pressed the economic and ethical advantages of investing in infrastructure during a period of low interest rates and relatively high unemployment at least five times:

Ideology and Investment, October 26 (blog, Krugman, 2014g)

Disinvestment Madness, October 8 (blog, Krugman, 2014d)

The Great Disinvestment, July 3 (blog, Krugman, 2014q)

Build We Won’t, July 3 (column, Krugman, 2014b)

The Folly of Prudence, April 29 (blog, Krugman, 2014p)

Krugman lets his readers know that he is consciously repeating arguments; in addition to mentioning and linking to past columns and blog posts, he clarifies this point by bringing up past academic work that he has done on the issue. In one blog post, Krugman (2014m) brought up an article he had published more than two decades previously—in 1992.

As with his longing for a more logos-friendly world, Krugman (2013e) laments the need for repetition:

And yet the people warning about inflation four years ago, and three years ago, and two years ago, are still at it, still making the same arguments. And they still have influence. I guess there’s nothing for it but to keep on pounding. But it’s discouraging.

Krugman’s tactics with repetition are the rhetorical equivalent of trench warfare, and they are an example of kairos. It is important to note that Krugman does not appear to ever repeat arguments verbatim; he frames the argument in a different way in recognition of the fact that a new argument may work on someone for whom the previous argument was ineffective.

Krugman’s success as a public intellectual in the sciences also stems from his conscious and careful use of language and his keen insight into the genre of a newspaper editorial column and the medium of blogging. The consideration of language is mostly a matter of word choice. For example, Krugman (2014t) uses the word “zombie” in a specific way: to refer to “a doctrine that should be dead by now, having been repeatedly refuted by evidence, but just keeps on shambling along,” as with the unhelpful obsession with paying off national debt. Krugman also invents or uses new terms to help bring a particular practice or phenomenon into focus. Examples include “derp,” which refers to the practice of “always saying the same thing, regardless of circumstances, and regardless of past errors,” as with incessantly predicting that Federal Reserve policy will cause inflation when it clearly hasn’t (Krugman, 2015n); “sadomonetarism,” which is the desire to raise interest rates even in a weak economy (Krugman, 2013n); and, relatedly, “permahawks,” who are “people … demanding, year after year, that the Fed [i.e., the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank] raise [interest] rates now now now” (Krugman, 2016e, repetition in original).

With respect to his rhetorical awareness of newspaper columns and blogging, Krugman (2015e) explains that he initially started blogging because he wanted a rhetorical space to provide the “backstory” for his The New York Times editorial columns. Interestingly, the backstory often comes before the column rather than after: Krugman uses blog posts as an initial exploration of an issue; in other words, the blog post is a first draft. Krugman then develops the arguments more fully and more formally for a later column on the same issue. Often, the column follows the blog post in just a matter of days. In addition, Krugman occasionally offers metacommentary on blogging and social media (Krugman, 2015k, 2016f), which, interestingly, has led him in 2016 and 2017 to become much more active on Twitter.

Even more broadly, Krugman occasionally discusses his views of the mainstream media of which he is now a part given his roles as columnist and blogger. For example, Krugman (2011e) is critical of what he calls the “cult of balance”: the tendency of some media outlets to treat all controversies as if the two (or more) sides were equal in numbers of adherents and in quality of arguments. Of course, this kind of symmetry is rare. Krugman (2011e) castigates the mainstream media, for example, for holding Republicans and Democrats equally at fault for the 2011 U.S. government debt ceiling crisis:

We have a crisis in which the right is making insane demands, while [President Obama] and Democrats in Congress are bending over backward to be accommodating—offering plans that are all spending cuts and no taxes, plans that are far to the right of public opinion. So what do most news reports say? They portray it as a situation in which both sides are equally partisan, equally intransigent—because news reports always do that. And we have influential pundits calling out for a new centrist party, a new centrist president, to get us away from the evils of partisanship….[W]hat would it take for these news organizations and pundits to actually break with the convention that both sides are equally at fault? This is the clearest, starkest situation one can imagine short of civil war.

Discussion and Recommendations

It is no accident that Krugman uses the nontraditional rhetorical strategies for public intellectuals that are presented in this article. Krugman (2015hh), who understands the importance of molding public sentiment as the epigraph by Lincoln observes, knows exactly what he is doing. His goal, as he puts it, is to

Point out the wrongness in ways designed to grab readers’ attention—with ridicule where appropriate, with snark, and with names attached. This will get read; it will get you some devoted followers, and a lot of bitter enemies. One thing it won’t do, however, is change any of those closed minds….[But it will] deter other parties from false equivalence. Inflation cultists can’t be moved; but reporters and editors who tend to put out views-differ-on-shape-of-planet stories because they think it’s safe can be, sometimes, deterred if you show that they are lending credence to charlatans. And this in turn can gradually move the terms of discussion…

Krugman’s use of nontraditional rhetorical techniques is at odds with the calmer, more courteous ethos of other well-known public intellectual scientists such as the late Stephen Jay Gould, the late Carl Sagan, E. O. Wilson, Sam Harris, Michio Kaku, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and Neil deGrasse Tyson. ⁴ In a sense, then, Krugman is more like 1960s scientist and environmental activist Rachel Carson, who urgently and unapologetically sounded the alarm about toxic insecticides and other chemicals in her bestseller Silent Spring. Much to the dismay of the insecticide and herbicide industry executives, Carson was enormously successful in shifting public opinion on the use of these toxic substances because of her willingness as a public intellectual to engage the general public (Walker & Walsh, 2012) in extrascientific ways. Krugman appears to be having a similar kind of effect.

Although this article is largely an exercise in panegyric rhetoric in the sense that it lauds Krugman’s effectiveness as a public intellectual in the sciences, I would be remiss if I did not suggest a few ways in which Krugman—and any prospective public intellectual who wishes to adopt some or all of his rhetorical strategies—may enjoy even more success. First, even though he appreciates the power of The New York Times as an authoritative media institution and the influence of blogging as a genre, Krugman does not appear to be convinced of the rhetorical nature of all language. In the following comment from a column critical of personality analysis of politicians, Krugman (2015p) distinguishes two kinds of language, saying “there will, however, be an asymmetry in the way this supposed gap between rhetoric and real views is presented.” The “real views” that Krugman mentions reflect truthful language, while his use of “rhetoric” reflects the common misconception of language without substance or perhaps even truth. Rhetoricians, of course, contend that all language use has elements of purpose and argument and that, as a human practice, a language that is somehow completely devoid of a writer or speaker’s personal context is not possible. Relatedly, language has epistemic potential: It does not simply transmit a preexisting reality; it contributes to the creation of that reality. Krugman’s use of the words “derp,” “sadomonetarism,” and “permahawk,” for example, changes the nature of the reality of which his readers are aware. Krugman may wish to consider the actual, material power that his use of language wields.

Second, although Krugman appreciates the importance of pathos appeals, he still underestimates their strength. For example, Krugman was critical of Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Democratic primary presidential campaign for its alleged lack of specifics concerning revenue sources for many of the policy positions that Sanders advocates—“fairy dust,” says Krugman scornfully (Krugman, 2016g), warning that Democrats should not follow Republicans into fiscal fantasy land. The Sanders campaign and its supporters disputed these criticisms, but even more importantly, the rhetorical lesson to be learned here is that many people are persuaded much more readily by big ideas and dreams rather than by what they might view as less significant details and data. Krugman may find this situation frustrating, but one could make the case that Republicans have scored impressive political victories for decades without worrying too much about details and that it might be time for Democrats to take a page from this playbook. Krugman and other public intellectuals in the sciences may wish to consider the use of pathos appeals more strategically as a way to win rhetorical victories and save the finer logos points for later.

Third, Krugman may want to try to resolve what appears to be a tension about the place of morality in economics. Krugman regularly declares that “economics is not a morality play” (2010, 2014c); yet, he just as frequently calls out and condemns unethical conduct of other economists and finance types. In a blog post entitled “The Immorality of the Interest Rate Hawks,” for example, Krugman (2013m) denounces hedge fund manager Stanley Druckenmiller’s argument to raise interest rates in an effort to prevent economic bubbles even during periods of low inflation and high unemployment, calling this position “appalling.” A second example is from a blog post entitled “Culture of Fraud,” in which Krugman (2012) takes a group economists that were working for the Romney presidential campaign to task for “undeniable professional malpractice” when they “cite the work of other economists, claiming that it supports [their] position, when it does no such thing.” When Krugman (2010) separates economics and ethics, he is making the point that economics, as he says, “is a system for organizing activity—a pretty good system most of the time, though not always—with no special moral significance.” Nonetheless, this “system” is made up of people and their actions, and those whom Krugman criticizes are clearly guilty, in his view, of acting unethically. The actions (or inactions, such as an unwillingness to read, to admit mistakes, and to take responsibility for past statements, all of which Krugman writes about regularly) of economists and the field of economics cannot be divorced so easily. A system such as economics is, in the end, the sum of its very human, very moral parts. ⁵

The three previously mentioned recommendations take nothing away from the rhetorical phenomenon and exemplar public intellectual that Krugman has become. With his blend of traditional public intellectualism and take-no-prisoners attack, Krugman has developed a unique and influential voice that has pushed conversations about economics (and other matters) in new directions. Krugman’s record of success is sorely needed in other scientific disciplines as well, most urgently in climate science and medicine, the latter because of the persistent rumors that vaccines are unsafe. In today’s polarized political climate, we need rhetorical street fighters like Krugman who are willing to name and shame.

The need for this kind of public intellectual in the natural and physical sciences grows increasingly obvious and imperative by the day. The consequences of a lack of science literacy in a significant portion of the population bode ill for society as evidence by the pernicious persistence of science-related conspiracy theories (Harambam & Aupers, 2015), occult practices (Doering-Manteuffel, 2011), and the equating of science and astrology (Allum, 2011). With respect to climate change, other nonacademic attempts to increase the level of science literacy have not met with significant success, at least so far. For example, Conway and Oreskes created a buzz in 2014 when they published The Collapse of Western Civilization, an example of an emerging genre of literature called climate fiction. This book attempts to capture the public’s imagination about climate change in the same way that, for example, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin influenced the slavery debate in the 1850s, Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations revealed the stark reality of poverty in Victorian Britain, and Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle exposed the horrors of the meatpacking industry in the early 1900s. However, despite the attention that The Collapse of Western Civilization received on its publication, it does not seem as yet to have gained the same kind of notoriety that these other works of fiction did. Similarly, in the United States, famous television satirists such as Stephen Colbert have not been able to persuade many science skeptics of the reality of climate change. A public intellectual who is willing to go toe to toe with pundits and policy makers who distort the reality of climate change would likely have more effect than science literacy because, though we may not like to admit it, many people respond best (and perhaps even only) to drama that they can watch on a screen or read in short bursts (i.e., blogging). To be sure, Krugman himself has addressed climate change many times in his work (e.g., Krugman, 2015aa), but a public intellectual from the climate sciences who adopts the Krugman’s effective rhetorical strategies may have more success than Krugman on this issue given that he is an economist. The same holds true for issues in the other natural and physical sciences such as vaccinations, genetically modified foods, and evolution.

Many scientists likely consider the nontraditional rhetorical strategies used by Krugman as undignified, and this point is certainly worth discussing. But we live at a time in the natural and physical sciences when we may have to sacrifice some dignity to advance important—and it would not be an exaggeration to say life-and-death—arguments. For example, climate change denial is fast becoming the rhetorical and moral equivalent of Holocaust denial and must be characterized accordingly. In the social sciences, Krugman appreciates the dilemma between winning the rhetorical struggle and dignity, even if he doesn’t like it much. Although Krugman’s tactics may seem aggressive, they champion science. In a study of what he sees as undue lay public influence on science, Dirodié (2005) argues that science must stand firm against those who are not willing to be open-minded and see where the evidence leads, and Krugman resolutely pursues this goal. In this sense, Krugman’s brand of public intellectualism reflects the kind of “meaningful action” of public intellectuals discussed by Small (2002, p. 7). The natural and physical sciences need public intellectuals like the decidedly successful Krugman who are willing and able to engage in rhetorical strife, even if it seems somewhat disreputable. And they likely have people who can do it, if they are willing and able. One potential spokesperson in climate science is Michael Mann, who has engendered a degree of public sympathy after the former Attorney General for Virginia, Ken Cuccinelli, attempted in 2010 to discredit Mann by subpoenaing all of Mann’s emails while he was a faculty member at the University of Virginia. Now at Penn State, Mann has gained some experience as a public intellectual: Taking advantage of social media, he has established Twitter and Facebook accounts targeted at nonscientists, has answered questions in a Reddit forum, and has published an op-ed in The New York Times (Mann, 2014). Mann asserts that, although he is “an accidental and reluctant public figure,” “it is no longer acceptable for scientists to remain on the sidelines” (Orso, 2014). At least some scientists who become public intellectuals, perhaps partnering with an interested rhetorician, must adopt Krugman’s confrontational tactics, appeals to emotion, sense of humor (including self-deprecation), common-ground-building cultural references, repetition strategies, and rhetorical and institutional awareness shown in this article to win the fight against science skepticism.