Nocera and the Skeptics

By Ankush

Joe Nocera's weekly, reported columns for the Times Business section are usually quite good.  But every once in while, things go weirdly awry, and the normally sensible Nocera reveals an odd penchant for contrarianism. 

A few months ago, it was his column on Jeffrey Sachs, whose impressive efforts to eradicate malaria and reduce global poverty Nocera referred to as "laudable" but unable to achieve their goals "in any serious way." To demonstrate this, he quoted and channeled Tyler Cowen at great length, without offering Sachs or one of his supporters any space to respond to Cowen's specific criticisms, which mainly boiled down to claims about the difficulties Sachs would have scaling up his small and successful projects to a grander scale. Nocera concluded by noting that Sachs was engaged in "a worthy effort but probably not as profoundly transformative as he likes to portray it."  The reader could have been forgiven for wondering why Nocera blew prime real estate and his own time in order to mildly deflate efforts he seemed to actually find worthwhile.

Nocera's column this week is of a similar variety. Regardless of one's views on whether it's a good idea to require companies to disclose the risk global warming poses to their businesses, I think it's safe to say that Gregg Easterbrook -- who only recently acknowledged the widespread view in the scientific community that warming is, you know, happening -- is not someone you should be relying upon particularly heavily.  And yet, there Easterbook is, peddling his new, more-reasonable-sounding-but-still-minority view that global warming may not actually be so bad after all!

Nocera was on sturdier ground with the Sachs column, since there is a fairly serious debate within economics about the effectiveness of foreign aid, but in both columns, skeptics on high-profile issues were given far more favorable treatment than their opponents, who, in turn, weren't offered an opportunity to respond directly to the claims of their detractors.  It's a fairly transparent way for Nocera to emerge as a cool-headed realist among crazed, unthinking partisans.

The method is embarrassing and silly, and while it's unfortunately quite common in journalism, I have higher expectations for someone with Nocera's talent.