SYNOPSIS: Krugman points out a sloppy mistake by Mickey Kaus in an attack against Krugman regarding this webpost by Dan Drezner

Alas, a friend alerted me to Mickey Kaus's latest snidery. For what it's worth, it contains a basic error: saying that I advised Daniel Drezner's dissertation. If Kaus had bothered to read what Drezner actually wrote, he would have seen that I was "outside chair"; that means that I didn't advise, I just talked to the actual advisers - I think only once, though to be honest I barely remember that committee - to be sure that everything was on the up and up.The outside chair normally doesn't even come from the same department - Drezner's degree was in political science, not economics.

This could be sloppiness. More likely, Kaus likes the idea of saying "See, even Krugman's old students are attacking him." No doubt sometime, somewhere, a bona fide old student will say something negative - I've been teaching for 25 years, so there's a large pool of candidates. But this wasn't the occasion.

Memo to Mr. Drezner: if you want to accuse me of being shrill, a link to Andrew Sullivan, of all people, doesn't exactly make the case.

Originally published on the Official Paul Krugman Site, 12.9.02