KRUGMAN: "Our discourse being badly distorted by ideologues/wishful thinkers-boring-cruel romantics"

[kpete]

KRUGMAN: I know from technocrats; sometimes I even play one myself. And these people — the people who bullied Europe into adopting a common currency, the people who are bullying both Europe and the United States into austerity — aren’t technocrats. They are, instead, deeply impractical romantics.

They are, to be sure, a peculiarly boring breed of romantic, speaking in turgid prose rather than poetry. And the things they demand on behalf of their romantic visions are often cruel, involving huge sacrifices from ordinary workers and families. But the fact remains that those visions are driven by dreams about the way things should be rather than by a cool assessment of the way things really are...

Our discourse is being badly distorted by ideologues and wishful thinkers — boring, cruel romantics — pretending to be technocrats. And it’s time to puncture their pretensions.

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http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/21/opinion/boring-cruel-euro-romantics.html?_r=3&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss