Wednesday, May 7, 2014
Paul Krugman calls it the Trahison Des Nerds: Betrayal by Economists
Paul Krugman ,New York Times columnist and Princeton
economics professor, came up with an amusing description of economists who tell
the rich and powerful what they want to hear (NY Times 5/2/14). He thinks such people are engaged in the Trahison des nerds. Even though they
should know better, they write analyses that support the conservative fiction
that slashing government spending will help the economy grow by boosting fiscal
confidence. Trahison is the French word for betrayal or treachery. French philosopher Julien Benda may have used
the construction first when he titled his 1927 book, “La Trahison Des Clercs.” It
described how German and French intellectuals in the 19th and 20th
centuries became apologists for warmongering, nationalism and racism (http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/). Also in
1927 René Magritte
named one of his most famous paintings, “La Trahison des Images.” It shows what looks like a pipe, but a caption reads "Ceci n'est pas une pipe" (this is not a pipe). The point Magritte seems to be making is that images are constructs that betray our perceptions. The painting isn’t a pipe. It’s an image
painted on a flat surface with lines, arcs, and colors that the observer
chooses to imagine as a pipe. As semanticist Alfred Korzybski noted, the map is not the territory. Krugman’s choice of the word nerd to describe
the treacherous economists he has in mind isn’t very hard to understand. It’s the columnist having fun by choosing to infantilize
his wayward colleagues.
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