Hiss. Hiss, I say.

Brad DeLong is pissed off:

Daniel Drezner screams and leaps, fangs bared, for Paul Krugman’s jugular. However, he trips over a tree root and falls off a cliff…. Misrepresent somebody [Krugman] as saying something they did not say. Attack them for it. And then accuse them of “distortions.” Way to go, Dan: you’re now at the loony hack level. You ought to at least try to be better than that.

What could prompt Brad to say this? It all starts with this post I wrote last week while subbing at the Daily Dish. The relevant portion:

CORRECTING KRUGMAN: In his Tuesday column, Paul Krugman made the following aside:

[H]ow weak is the labor market? The measured unemployment rate of 5.9 percent isn’t that high by historical standards, but there’s something funny about that number. An unusually large number of people have given up looking for work, so they are no longer counted as unemployed, and many of those who say they have jobs seem to be only marginally employed. Such measures as the length of time it takes laid-off workers to get new jobs continue to indicate the worst job market in 20 years. (emphasis added)

Krugman’s assertion here is that the number of discouraged workers (“those who have given up looking for work”) plus the number of part-time workers who wish they were full-time (“only marginally employed”) are unusually high by historical standards.

I then linked to Don Luskin and Bureau of Labor Statistics data suggesting that the numbers of discouraged workers and those who work part-time for economic reasons are not unusually high. Brad’s beef is with my operationalization of what Krugman said:

There are, of course, two big problems with Drezner’s “argument.” When Krugman writes “an unusually large number of people have given up looking for work” he is tracking the flow of people who used to be employed into out-of-the-labor force status, and is referring to a much larger category of people who have dropped out of the labor force over the past three years than just the Bureau of Labor Statistics’s “Discouraged Workers” category. When Krugman writes “many of those who say they have jobs seem to be only marginally employed” he is referring to a large group that has nothing at all to do with those who are working part-time for economic reasons. He is referring to those who tell the BLS household survey interviewers that they are working but for whom there is no corresponding employer telling the BLS payroll survey that they have somebody working for them Does Krugman say that those who have “given up looking for work” are in the BLS “discouraged worker” category? No. Does Krugman say the words “discouraged workers” at all? No. Does Krugman say that those “marginally attached” are in the BLS “part-time for economic reasons” category? No. Does Krugman say the words “part-time for economic reasons” at all? No. It is true that anybody who has been watching the labor market over the past three years–and seen the remarkably large fall in employment coupled with the remarkably small rise in the unemployment rate–will know that what Paul Krugman wrote was completely correct: this recession looks small as measured by the rise in unemployment, but it looks large as measured by the fall in employment as a share of the population or the duration of unemployment. Anybody who has been watching will know that Daniel Drezner’s fangs-bared attack is fake and loony.

Brad then presents data showing that by his operationalization of Krugman’s words, the employment situation looks recession-like. How to respond? One way is to point out that Brad doesn’t directly address the point of the post — that Krugman’s claim that this job market is unusually bad is an exaggeration. Brad’s data suggests that the percentage of people not working has dropped by a fair amount since 2000 — but it’s still higher than Bush I recession levels, and way higher than Reagan recession levels. Part of this may be due to greater female participation in the work force — and part of it may be due to the economy being in better shape than it was in 1990 or 1984. Similarly, the discrepancy between the household survey and the payroll survey — which Brad displays in this post — is still less now than it was in 1990. As to what explains fluctuations in this number, even DeLong confesses puzzlement. My primary concern in the Krugman post was the word “unusual” and “the worst job market in 20 years.” I wasn’t saying that the employment situation was rosy — merely that it was not as bad as Krugman asserted. The measures I used confirmed this. Another response is to use DeLong’s logic right back at him. Does Krugman say that those who have “given up looking for work” are “people who have dropped out of the labor force over the past three years”? No. Does Krugman say the words “over the past three years” at all? No. Does Krugman say that those “marginally attached” are in the category of “those who tell the BLS household survey interviewers that they are working but for whom there is no corresponding employer telling the BLS payroll survey that they have somebody working for them”? No. Does Krugman say the words “payroll survey” at all? No. So which operationalization is correct? This depends on whether you’re talking about Krugman’s intent versus what Krugman has written on the page. If you go by intent, it’s far more likely that DeLong knows what Krugman meant than myself. DeLong has a Ph.D. in economics — I possess a measly M.A. DeLong is pretty tight with Krugman — I’m not. Maybe they had an exchage where Krugman said, “Yes Brad, when I say ‘marginally attached,’ I’m talking about those who tell the BLS household survey interviewers that they are working but for whom there is no corresponding employer telling the BLS payroll survey that they have somebody working for them.” However, I couldn’t read Krugman’s mind when I wrote what I wrote. All I could do was read what he wrote. This is a danger with popular writing on economics — plain language can be interpreted in a number of different ways. I think the operationalizations I used are valid and straightforward — but Brad’s are certainly plausible. So are Arnold Kling‘s, for that matter. A final point about Brad’s language — the “screams and leaps, fangs bared” deal. This implies that I engaged in massive rhetorical overkill in my post on Krugman. In the original post, there were no exclamation points. No ALL CAPITAL LETTER statements. No adjectives to describe Krugman. I didn’t impugn his motives. Unlike Luskin, I didn’t say Krugman lied — I said I thought he was wrong, without ascribing intent. When Brad e-mailed me to say that there was another way to interpret Krugman’s paragraph, I linked to his points (as soon as Blogger would permit) in an update to the original post (by the way, the term “quasi-response” was not meant to say that Brad’s posts were weak, but rather that he never linked to my original post, so it wasn’t a direct response. In retrospect, “indirect” might have been the better word choice). If this is what Brad means by “screams and leaps, fangs bared,” he’s way more thin-skinned than I had previously thought. UPDATE: DeLong responds, as does Mark Kleiman. Both Kleiman (directly) and DeLong (sarcastically) say my rhetoric was inflammatory. As Kleiman puts it:

The point that Drezner misses is that he (more politely than Luskin) accused Krugman of either incompetence or dishonesty in a matter within Krugman’s professional competence. “Krugman is either wrong or has a different definition of ‘unusual’ than the rest of the English-speaking world. Distortions such as this ...” Not only are such charges unlikely to be correct, they are, if believed, extraordinarily damaging. That’s two good reasons for making them only hesitantly and retracting them quickly when they turn out to have been incorrect.

You know what, I’ll meet them halfway — instead of “distortion,” which does hint at intent, perhaps I should have used “error.”