Friday, February 1, 2013

Paul Krugman is a goddamn national treasure

For the longer version, go to Angry Bear.

I had some of these very same thoughts reading Bob Wenzel dismiss Krugman as a "geographer" that has nothing useful to say about economics.

7 comments:

  1. I actually used to like Wenzel for a while, until I figured out that he's a complete asshole who has nothing to contribute but attacks and smears. I don't mind a few snipes here and there, but every freaking time? It gets old quick. I've yet to have seen him post anything positive or strictly idea-based.

    Don't tell anybody, but back when I was in high school I actually liked Krugman's work on trade. Granted, that was a while ago, and I certainly don't like his current stuff. Something definitely changed between then and now, and I don't think that it was just me.

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    1. I don't think anything's changed about you or him. I think since different issues have come up since the 1990s people have realized they agreed with some of Krugman's views and not with others. He was writing about expectations and liquidity traps in the 90s too. He was just writing about Asia, so he wasn't writing about it in popular American publications.

      I didn't know Krugman in high school, but in college his "geography" stuff - as Wenzel put it - is what got me really interested in economics.

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    2. I couldn't tell you precisely what got me interested in economics, I tend to read books from a variety of disciplines, economics is just one (and not my strongest one, either). However, if I were to try to narrow it down with a guess, it would probably be Krugman's earlier works, or an array of Milton Friedman's stuff, that ultimately got me interested. I know that I was never really a Keynesian, but I was certainly a neo-classical for a while. Probably until about 2007 or thereabouts. Obviously, you know which way I went after that.

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    3. I've yet to have seen him post anything positive or strictly idea-based.

      Well, he did suggest the Obama was a Manchurian candidate planted by the CIA. That was pretty creative.

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    4. *that Obama...
      Grrr. Predictive text and grammar Nazi tendencies.

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  2. Wenzel dismissing Krugman as a geographer is pretty funny. If Krugman is only qualified to talk about trade, then Wenzel certainly isn't qualified to talk about any part of economics.

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  3. That Hoppe video is so profoundly stupid I hardly know where to start. Instead of "little pieces of paper", why doesn't he just say "shiny pieces of metal dug out of the ground" and see if he can start answering his own question?

    But it is the sheer strawmanning in those links that rankles most. Alongside that Boettke "DNA" quote you posted the other day, it's no wonder these people are being relegated to the fringes. They have the most warped sense of their opponents and, indeed, conventional economics.

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