31–40 of 54 posts
It's quite unfortunate that the man chooses to intentionally disregard all he learned and espoused while attending such a massively well-respected institution.
That makes me laugh. I wouldn't measure economic success over a period of 7 years. Yes, the economic policies seemed to have brought the US economy out of its slump. However, let's see how we do over the next 7 years.
The danger of "printing money" is not so much the printing, it's the pulling back once the economy recovers. Since the Fed will get a ton of crap for moving too fast and slowing down the recovery, it tends to err on the side of moving too slow.
The problem with that is a rapid increase in inflation, followed by a spike in interest rates.
Any idea what might happen to housing prices when interest rates jump from 4% to 10% (historically they floated around 6%)? Every increase in interest rates reduces the buying power of those looking for homes.
And what happens if they move way too late? Rampant inflation and an erosion of savings.
We're still not anywhere close to being out of the woods yet.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We really need a way to simulate how the economy will react under certain policies. The current model is based on one hypothesis about how the economy works, when such policies may have been only tested once or twice before, AND when the test conditions were different in a lot of ways. Because of the complex nature of economic systems, prediction is extremely difficult. We have yet to see if the monetary policies bei…
I don't see any fundamental difference between what your call simulation and what economists call models. The only difference is that your believe in the possibility of models so accurate that one could easily verify that they give correct predictions, as opposed to existing models which are subject to continual debate. The reason it is so hard to stimulate the economy is that it represents the sum total of a large p…
I don't think we have anything satisfyingly like the latter for economics, but to claim that there is no fundamental difference is just inaccurate.
It's hard to take anything Krugman writes seriously. All his writing is so intertwined with his politics It's impossible to sort the factually sound parts from the rest and he has a track record of saying some truly wrong things with great conviction.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The economic slowdown could last 5-10 years and cost trillions of dollars (June 2009): http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8081813.stm Semi-prediction of a housing bubble (August 2002): http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip... Inflation and interest rates will remain low in in spite of stimulus and QE (many times). A diagnosis of potential problems with the euro, many of which have come to pass…
A better question would be, "what predictions did Krugman make which disagreed with non-Keynesians that turned out right (or wrong)?" Various ideological enemies of Krugman made these same predictions. All you are really saying is that Krugman, along with everyone else, gets the easy ones right.
You're actually aware of a non-Keynesian who predicted this?
> Semi-prediction of a housing bubble (August 2002)
> The economic slowdown could last 5-10 years and cost trillions of dollars (June 2009)
And your claim is that these were easy predictions that everyone got right? I can accept that they were easy predictions...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not evident by the article, but his blog [0], in which this article appears, is titled "The Conscience of a Liberal." Make of that what you will. [0] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
He painted Milton Friedman as a radical in the top post's article ("radical free-market ideology", "Chicago School", "Milton Friedman's 'win'"). The idea that free-market proponents in the 70s and 80s were "radical" is at best a lie, and at worst revisionist history.
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2007/feb/15/who-was...
The Krugman haters should find some nice balance in the above essay after Friedman's death where Krugman praises Friedman's economic chops but laments his looser standards when he gets too political.
By predicting the phenomenon of stagflation in advance, Friedman and Phelps achieved one of the great triumphs of postwar economics. This triumph, more than anything else, confirmed Milton Friedman’s status as a great economist’s economist, whatever one may think of his other roles.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's not evident by the article, but his blog [0], in which this article appears, is titled "The Conscience of a Liberal." Make of that what you will. [0] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
He painted Milton Friedman as a radical in the top post's article ("radical free-market ideology", "Chicago School", "Milton Friedman's 'win'"). The idea that free-market proponents in the 70s and 80s were "radical" is at best a lie, and at worst revisionist history.
It's certainly not a strong enough statement to be a lie.
Does anyone here take Krugman seriously?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you think are his political views, and how do they influence his economic writing?
It's not evident by the article, but his blog [0], in which this article appears, is titled "The Conscience of a Liberal." Make of that what you will. [0] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
A better question would be, "what predictions did Krugman make which disagreed with non-Keynesians that turned out right (or wrong)?" Various ideological enemies of Krugman made these same predictions. All you are really saying is that Krugman, along with everyone else, gets the easy ones right.
> Inflation and interest rates will remain low in in spite of stimulus and QE (many times). You're actually aware of a non-Keynesian who predicted this? > Semi-prediction of a housing bubble (August 2002) > The economic slowdown could last 5-10 years and cost trillions of dollars (June 2009) And your claim is that these were easy predictions that everyone got right? I can accept that they were easy predictions...
Another great Scott Sumner prediction: fiscal austerity hurts if you lack an independent central bank, but not if you don't (directly contradicting new style Keynesians, e.g. Krugman). The results: http://www.themoneyillusion.com/?p=29692
Various ideological enemies of Krugman predicted the housing bubble, and far more clearly than Krugman; Ron Paul, for example, argued against the creation of a housing bubble in 2001. It's hardly clear to me that Krugman even predicted it. From your article: "To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback...Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." The wording is ambiguous, but to me it sounds less like a prediction and more like advocacy.
A few years back I was a solid structuralist, but the monetarists have a really good track record of disagreeing with other people and coming out right.