have some other beef besides the issue at hand to complain about. Cranks are people who are cut off from their academic colleagues, who neither argue before scientific conferences nor write for peer-reviewed journals. Instead, they speak before groups they themselves organize, and write for publications they themselves edit. Their insular and constrictive way of thinking prevents them from seeing what the fallacies of supply side are. Krugman states that an unusually high percentage of supply-siders were not economists at all, but journalists with no formal training. Robert Bartley, who has run the editorial pages of The Wall Street Journal for nearly 25 years, was perhaps the movement's greatest spokesman. Other journalists included Jude Wanniski and Irving Kristol. Crusading in their national publications, they were able to reach a much wider and more popular audience than most economists could. Of course, journalists are normally reporters of stories, not creators of theories. Krugman is very critical of their approach to news reporting. He thinks that one would expect them to report the latest cure for cancer but not claim that they had discovered such a cure themselves. This is common sense in most fields like biology and physics.The movement did have a few intellectuals, but even here, its professors were far from the mainstream. Arthur Laffer has a Ph.D. in economics, but according to Krugman he has contributed little to scientific conferences or peer-reviewed journals, instead playing to crowds on the lecture circuit and writing for popular publications. He is famous for the Laffer Curve (see Figure 1), which purports to show that productivity declines as taxation increases. Most economists agree that the general principle behind the Laffer Curve is correct, but widely disagree on how much taxation is necessary before productivity starts declining. Laffer believed that the effects of taxation were so heavy that cutting t...
