In reading Paul Krugman’s 2007 book, The Conscience Of A Liberal, I wanted to be able to speak of his writing style, as much as of his opinions, politically and economically. This is because I simply get tired of books being criticized simply for their arguments and not how they are presented. In the last year or so, as example, I got two books that exemplified this approach.
The first was psychologist Steven Pinker’s The Stuff Of Thought. It’s a book suffused in science, but as I detailed in this review, it also showed off Pinker’s chops as a great prose stylist, regardless of what one thought of his theories. On the other hand, I also reviewed Michael Shermer’s The Mind Of The Market, a well written book (although Shermer is not the wordsmith Pinker is) but one’s whose Libertarian beliefs so clouded his judgment as to make the book almost laughable in its assertions.
As a side note, as fair as I was in detailing Shermer’s book’s writing strengths, my systematic debunking of his poorly thought out ideas caused Shermer to huffily renege on an agreement he had to be interviewed by me. Such are the woes of dealing with books that are written by non-experts, well outside their fields of expertise (Shermer is a debunker of things supernatural by trade, not an economist), and do not feature creative writings, but contest a battle of wills and ideas to maintain their bona fides as ‘good books.’
And, on a related minor note to the writing style in The Conscience Of A Liberal, while there is not much to discuss stylistically about the writing, there was some very poor editing. As example, there are some poorly punctuated sentences in the book, where clauses are not delineated by commas nor semi-colons to set off appositives, introductory elements, or even simple clarification. I lost count after a few dozen examples of this. However, the blame lies not with Krugman, but his editor. While this is not something unusual to today’s book publishing industry, it does highlight the serious decline in simply quality standards over the last few decades.
The Conscience Of A Liberal falls somewhere between Shermer’s and Pinker’s books. On the one hand, Krugman’s straightforward, non-flowery prose shows he’s no match for Pinker as a pure writer. That stated, he’s about on par with Shermer’s prose. On the field of ideas, Krugman does not display the brilliance of a Pinker- mainly because his book is soberingly middle of the road in its tack (yes, he’s a liberal, but William Jennings Bryan he’s not), but he’s light years ahead of Shermer as an economist and social critic.
His style is designed to appeal to a wide audience, and this likely accounts for the thankful absence of graphs and pie charts. The book has only a few of those attention killers. That stated, despite his background as an economist, Krugman (whose day job is as a columnist for The New York Times) spends very little ink on detailed economic theory. This, doubtlessly, is the columnist in him; for Krugman writes his book so the middlebrow reader can understand the basics of what his book is about.
Yet, although the book deals with the basics of economics in America over the last 120 years or more, Krugman takes such a large overview that instead of bogging down in niggling details, which too many books on assorted social theorizing- from economics to culturata- do, his large sweep invigorates a reader to see whole trends, not mere moments, as being important. Another positive in the book is that it sticks to the economic impact of assorted decisions, and does not stray too far afield into culture wars, even if it occasionally tackles subjects such as racism, and its role in the economics of the last few decades.
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