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Are you calling Scott Sumner a random partisan hack?
I'd hadn't heard of him before today but the top result for the name "Scott Sumner" in my search bar was "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Critic of Donald Trump".
If his opposition to Trump and Tarrifs is notable enough to show up in his academic profile and Wikipedia I think its safe to say that he is not an unbiased observer.
He has strong opinions about Trump. That doesn't make him partisan or a hack. He's also not a random person but one of the most famous economics bloggers.
As i said, i hadn't heard of him before yesterday, but based on the first page of search results he's notable as much for his politics as for his work in economics. And as @Dean says, being popular doesn't mean he is not "a hack".
Now if his description had been "Economist at the University of Chicago and Vocal Libertarian" or "Vocal Socialist" I might not have come away with the impression that the article was written with the sole intent of trashing Trump and his supporters, but it didn't and I did.
I didn't say he wasn't a hack because he's popular. I said him not liking Trump doesn't make him a hack.
You admittedly knew nothing about but called him a hack. If you want to know if he's a hack, you need to become familiar with him. You're currently in no place to be making the judgment, which shouldn't be based on your impression from a two second Google search.
He's not even an economist at the University of Chicago.
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That makes him a statistically uncommon person. Statistically uncommon people come up in random person pulls all the time.
It certainly isn't a counter-argument to him being a partisan hack. Being a hack would go a long way to explaining why a notoriously dry, convoluted, and highly technical subject matter is keeping enough non-expert attention to justify a claim of fame. Another famed economist and partisan hack was Paul Krugman from the NYT. Krugman wasn't the NYT's go-to economist because of his economic insight and objectivity- he was the go-to economist because he would reliably tell the readers why [current democrat thing] was good and smart and why [current republican thing] was dumb and evil.
Krugman was certainly an uncommon partisan hack, but he was indeed both a partisan and a through that partisanship a hack. What separates Scott Sumner in nature, if not scale of popularity?
You're obviously not familiar with Scott Sumner. He criticizes both sides. He plainly isn't partisan.
His being famous for writing about economics doesn't need explanation just because you find the subject boring. Many people don't find it boring.
Did I misremember him being anti-populist?
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It's been a loooong time since I followed him, but I don't think he's as bad as Krugman (who is?). As far as I remember he's a pro-establishment libertarian-lite, who will occasionally side with either party, so strictly speaking not "partisan" (though deranged on the issue of populism).
Given how populism has been handled in western media over the last decade, I would absolutely consider that a partisan flag, even if it's a partisanship that's willing to shoot members of a broader policy coalition. Establishment partisans are still partisans.
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