Talk About Damning With Faint Praise

As some of might know, professor Niall Ferguson wrote an article in the Financial Times where he said that, "President Barack Obama reminds me of Felix the Cat. One of the best-loved cartoon characters of the 1920s, Felix was not only black. He was also very, very lucky. And that pretty much sums up the 44th president of the US."

I saw it, I read it, and thought that it was sophomoric bullsh@$ of the sort you frequently see college students who want to play at radicalism, both left and right.

One of the people who called him out on this was Paul Krugman, who said that he could not, "fathom is how any editor could think this was a good thing to appear in the FT’s pages," and James Fallows, who suggested that would like to see him, "discussing this over a beer with his Harvard colleague Henry Louis Gates."

I did not blog about it, because I didn't have anything to add, but Niall Furguson decided not to let sleeping dogs lie, and he did discuss it with Dr. Gates.

So Krugman offers an apology of sorts:

What can I say? While the Ferguson line was deeply offensive — everyone I know asked, “Did he really write that? Did the FT actually publish it?” — it never occurred to me that it had anything to do with the question of whether Felix the Cat was supposed to be African-American. The mind reels.

For the record, I don’t think that Professor Ferguson is a racist.

I think he’s a poseur.

I’m told that some of his straight historical work is very good. When it comes to economics, however, he hasn’t bothered to understand the basics, relying on snide comments and surface cleverness to convey the impression of wisdom. It’s all style, no comprehension of substance.

And this time he ended up choking on his own snark.

(emphasis mine)

Remind me to never demand an apology of Nobel Prize winning economists.