Many friends and colleagues have asked me what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did Economists get it so wrong?”
Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s, as taught to our author in his undergraduate introductory courses. If a scientist, he might be an AIDS-HIV disbeliever, a creationist, a stalwart that maybe continents don’t move after all.
It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now includes “new Keynesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to their written opinions. Even this isn’t enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them in false and embarrassing situations. He accuses us of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit paranoid.
It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this attack instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.
That’s the biggest and saddest news of this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who do. “Irrationality” and advice to spend like a drunken sailor are pretty superficial compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these days.
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The jerks in Washington keep trying to put band aids on the economy, but do not correct the source of the problem! A trillion here, a trillion there, a trillion everywhere – bankrupting our country!
Since demographics is what drives the economy, I believe that biggest source of the economic problem is the abomination of law passed by bigoted, immoral, liberal supreme court justices called Row v. Wade. Since the passing of this law FROM THE BENCH, over 50 million little, defenseless babies had their heads crushed and their brains sucked out just because women could not keep their legs crossed, because some found that having a baby was inconvenient or because Planned Parenthood talked people into abortion in order to increase their profits. (They should NOT receive federal funds.)
Roe v. Wade was passed in January 1973, so those aborted would have been 0 to 39 years old. They would have required that schools were built, roads were updated, required a larger energy grid and that at least 20 million more homes/apartments were built. They would have gotten married, had children, raised families, bought a house or rented an apartment, bought clothes, bought food, bought refrigerators, computers, cell phones, books, washers, dryers, dish washers, furniture and many more products that would have caused more factories to be built to manufacture these products and more stores to sell them in.
Now, because of Roe v. Wade, we have had over three years of recession with no sign of an end. In fact, we are looking forward to ten to twenty years of more of the same.
To fix the problem, we need to reverse Roe v. Wade and it would help to instill better morals in all our citizens. GOD is punishing us through the use of simple economics. The application of Keynesian economics IS NOT the solution!