Krugman Distorts About "Openly Sexist" Editorial

Since Ben Bernanke will step down as Fed chairman, there is a discussion about who will replace him. The choice has unofficially been narrowed down to Janet Yellen and Lawrence Summers. I don't really care which one of them it will be, since from what I can tell they have more or less the same views on monetary policy.

However, because Yellen is a woman and Summers is a man, and because this is 2013, a year when feminist identity politics permeate the media and the liberal punditry in America (and many other Western countries) , the issue has switched to how Yellen has supposedly already become a victim from sexist bigotry.

Paul Krugman's latest column is a good example of this as he claims that the conservative publication The New York Sun's editorial "The Female Dollar" is "openly sexist". It is true that the title of the editorial is intentionally provocative to attract more readers, a goal that clearly has been succesful.

But if you actually read the leader, you can see that it nowhere says that Yellen is inappropriate as Fed chairman because she is a woman. What it does say is that there is no sign that Yellen would be an improvement over Bernanke and that it is ridiculous to make the choice an issue of gender. Far from advocating that the choice of chairman should be based on whether the choice is a man or woman, which is what Krugman wants us to believe, it is actually criticizing the use of gender as a criteria. Is Paul Krugman lying deliberately or has he just been sloppy and only read the title? I'll let you be the judge of that, but there can be no doubt that he is totally wrong.