It is the new economic geography, stupid. Or not?

Looks like Paul Krugman has started throwing punches in every street battle.  Krugman is now doing an Obama of trying to be everywhere.  Chill it, Prof!

First it was his rather shrill attack on Paul Ryan, by using metaphors to describe the person.  Whatever happened to the academic in Krugman to focus on the arguments and not on the person?   Maybe Krugman has been listening too much to the master manipulator of metaphors whose office is just down the hall from his? :)  Megan McArdle has articulated well what I have in mind:

there are legitimate concerns about whether the roadmap would actually reduce the deficit.  Of course there are legitimate concerns; I share them.  (For that matter, I have legitimate concerns about pretty much every policy proposal ever invented.)  But I am not the person who titled his column "The Flim-Flam Man" and turned the raising of legitimate concerns into the side-show of an all-out attack on Paul Ryan's credibility and ethics, while treating an estimate from the Tax Policy Center as a fact rather than one possible model. 

If you think that this is all rather beside the point, then bring it up with Krugman, who not only did multiple follow-up posts on Ryan's alleged dishonest campaign to prevent his tax program from getting scored, but also seems to have been so tickled by his column title that he threw in a bonus Diana Krall video**.

Nor, in my experience, do such attacks help get one's legitimate concerns addressed.  Rather the opposite, in fact; they tend to entrench the opposition, who for some reason often fear that they will not get a fair hearing.

And now, Krugman is ticked off at a FT opinion piece that opens with a direct hit at Krugman:

China’s exchange rate continues to be blamed for global economic imbalances, with the economist Paul Krugman one of Beijing’s staunchest critics. Even after China announced a change in its currency policy in June, Mr Krugman argued that it did not “address the real issue, which is that China has been promoting its exports at the rest of the world’s expense”. Yet, arguably, it is the Nobel Prize-winning ideas that Mr Krugman developed three decades ago, not currency manipulation, that have led to China’s unparalleled growth.

At least this time Krugman is not resorting to name calling--no "flimflam man" :) and points out that:

surpluses, and the currency manipulation, are neither intimately related to Chinese growth nor necessary for that growth to continue.