Days of Reckonings: A smart man, a foolish column.

Paul Krugman is probably the smartest man ever to have a regular column on the op-ed page of the New York Times. A professor of economics who has taught at Yale, Stanford, MIT, and now Princeton, Krugman is widely expected to win a Nobel prize some day. It's a rational expectation: Though not yet 50, Krugman has made major, even revolutionary, contributions to international-trade theory and to economic geography. So why is his column so extraordinarily awful?

It isn't that he's a liberal. He is one, but that does not distinguish him at the Times, which employs no conservative columnist (William Safire, who imagines himself to be a libertarian, is too ideologically confused to count). Besides, Krugman has been tough on his fellow liberals in the past. Early in the Clinton administration, for example, he was a vocal critic of the then-fashionable notion that countries compete with one another the way companies do. His criticism helped to demolish the intellectual pretensions of advocates of protectionism and of federal aid for "cutting edge" industries, both of which were said to be necessary to improve American "competitiveness."

Krugman's role in that debate was especially laudable, for two reasons: first, because the protectionists had claimed to be inspired by some of Krugman's own work on trade; and second, because the controversy may well have cost him a job in the Clinton administration. In a 1995 essay, Krugman wrote, "I was more or less disgraced, and my public profile was and still is much lower than at its peak." But the episode also convinced him, as he explained in his book Pop Internationalism, that it was important to combat economic nonsense in the public press. For a while, he wrote regularly for Slate. His column at the Times, "Reckonings," started at the beginning of 2000.

He has continued to argue for free trade, and has won some enemies on that account. Ralph Nader wrote a characteristically humorless "parody" in which the Times sacked Krugman and his colleague Thomas Friedman and replaced them with low-wage Chinese columnists. In The American Prospect, a liberal magazine, Robert Kuttner wrote an attack on Krugman as "the conservative's ideal liberal." While sour, the essay scored some real points. Krugman had, for instance, assailed the "competitiveness" crowd for being "policy entrepreneurs"-popularizers rather than scholars-but never supplied a definition of the put-down that would not also cover his own op-eds.

Robert Kuttner also made a valid point in calling attention to the columnist's "smugness." To hear Paul Krugman tell it, people who disagree with him are "cranks" who have never read an economic textbook and can't do math. Of course, these characterizations are often true. But Krugman is disconcertingly prone to asserting-and merely asserting-which people "deserve to be taken seriously" and which don't. Or he will write that some line of argument "leads us into the whole question of whether . . . the [federal] budget is loaded with fat (it isn't)." Well, that settles that.

This fondness for the ipse dixit may be related to Krugman's grandiose view of his discipline. In the 1995 essay mentioned above, he wrote that as a boy he had been a fan of Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, which was based on the premise that a sufficiently sophisticated science-Asimov dubbed it "psychohistory"-could predict the course of empires half a millennium into the future. "Someday there will exist a unified social science of the kind that Asimov imagined," Krugman wrote, "but for the time being economics is as close to psychohistory as you can get."

This description-cum-aspiration is, as the liberal economist James K. Galbraith has observed, not so much scientific as scientistic. Rather than confront that critique, Krugman caricatures it. He pretends that anyone who disagrees with his epistemology wants economics to have "a literary core," without any graphs or equations. It would be more accurate to say that his critics recognize that the graphs and equations are themselves a specialized form of rhetoric and should be evaluated in that light.