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| 5/24 |
| 2008/10/13-15 [Finance/Investment] UID:51495 Activity:nil 63%like:51494 |
10/13 Paul Krugman's Nobel Prize, you heard it here first:
*Boredcast Message from 'psb': Tue Oct 7 13:13:54 2008
|| i wonder if the nobel people will give PKRUGMAN the econ prize
|| as a way of sticking it to BUSHCO
|| well the econ nobel people
||
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008
Good informal commentary at:
http://tinyurl.com/3ewln8 [tyler cowan]
This is also an intereting essay for PK fans:
http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html
Given all the yammering from Ben Stein lately, it is time to
recycle this:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/a_missing_piece.html
\_ The already insane have gone insane:
http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/10/crooked-timber.html |
| 5/24 |
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| nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008 -> nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/ Prize in Economics Nobel Prize medal - registered trademark of the Nobel Foundation The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel 2008 "for his analysis of trade patterns and location of economic activity" Paul Krugman Copyright Princeton University Paul Krugman USA Princeton University Princeton, NJ, USA b 1953 Titles, data and places given above refer to the time of the award. |
| tinyurl.com/3ewln8 -> www.marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2008/10/paul-krugman-wi.html the most basic links on Paul, it is hard to know where to start. I have to say I did not expect him to win until Bush left office, as I thought the Swedes wanted the resulting discussion to focus on Paul's academic work rather than on issues of politics. Krugman on video, from just the other day, talking about the crisis and how bad it might get. Krugman, of course, also called the housing bubble in advance. Krugman is very well known for his work on strategic trade theory, as it is now called. Building on ideas from Dixit, Helpman, and others, he showed how increasing returns could imply a possible role for welfare-improving protectionism. Krugman, however, insisted that he did not in practice favor protectionism; it is difficult for policymakers to fine tune the relevant variables. If a government can subsidize the home firm to be a market leader, the subsidizing country can come out ahead through the mechanism of capturing the gains from increasing returns to scale. Krugman himself has admitted that parts of the theory may be less relevant for rich-poor countries trade (America and China) rather than rich-rich trade, such as America and Japan. I am most fond of Krugman's pieces on economic geography, in particular on cities and the economic rationales for clustering. He almost single-handedly resurrected the importance of "location theory," an all-important but previously neglected branch of economics. The latter started a trend of Krugman as a debunker of erroneous economic claims. The supply-siders and the low-level industrial policy advocates were early targets of his pen. Pop Internationalism is also the work of Krugman's most likely to be popular with market-oriented economists. Currencies and Crises is in my view his most underrated work; it provides a very readable introduction to some of his ideas on financial crises and it has a nice use of the concept of option value. Development, Geography, and Economic Theory is a very good and very readable introduction to his work on economic geography. That and the currency book are my two favorites by Krugman. Krugman has a widely used Principles text, co-authored with his wife Robin Wells. He also has a leading text in international economics co-authored with Maurice Obstfeld. His exposition of Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage is remarkably good and it is one of the best pieces of popular economics writing I know. Award analysis: This was definitely a "real world" pick and a nod in the direction of economists who are engaged in policy analysis and writing for the broader public. Krugman is a solo winner and solo winners are becoming increasingly rare. That is the real statement here, namely that Krugman deserves his own prize, all to himself. This could easily have been a joint prize, given to other trade figures as well, but in handing it out solo I believe the committee is a) stressing Krugman's work in economic geography, and b) stressing the importance of relevance for economics. Permalink Comments I must second Nassim Taleb in calling for the cancellation of the Nobel Prize in Economics. It is a dangerous platonification and legitimization of a heavily politicized field of inquiry. Krugman is a case in point, with his shrill left-wing columnry. Economists with Nobel Prizes are as dangerous as the banks and corresponding printing presses they man. Posted by: time for classical liberal nobel prize winners to return their medal in protest at Oct 13, 2008 7:26:13 AM I was delighted to hear this. Paul, your economic journalism and popular texts (especially Peddling Prosperity) was a significant reason why I chose to undertake a degree in economic. Posted by: Andrew at Oct 13, 2008 7:26:21 AM Intriguing choice etc etc, but I'm most interested to hear about the food column, which I've looked up. Speaking as a brit, I'm not convinced by the "have" bad food premise. "had", perhaps (70s/80s in particular), but I think the standard of food for most (maybe this is my middle class perspective)is pretty good, and that my experiences of New York less than totally convincing... Anyway, as for the prize, it seems a nice time to emphasise/remind about trade rather than finance in international economics. Posted by: Andrew at Oct 13, 2008 7:37:06 AM Am a bit disappointed with this, but don't want to sound too unfair. I know Krugman has done good work on location theory, but now he seems to be pretty much just a political commentator. I think the prize going to Krugman sends out the wrong message about economics. Mind you, havign said that, who really cares about it outside of the profession anyway? It's about how demand has changed over time, and the Brits now demand better foood. Posted by: Nick at Oct 13, 2008 7:38:35 AM I'd like to know whether it is really politicised, because I don't know. One thinks that if it were politicised you wouldn't get the Mankiw's and Cohen's of this world saying that Krugman deserved the prize. In the economics blogosphere there's an awful lot of people who say "Krugman's a partisan hack in the NYT but an excellent economist". For what it's worth, I think there's an awful lot of people who would say Greg Mankiw is a partisan hack on his blog but an excellent economist. I would actually really like to know what economists think about this. Michael Greinecker at Oct 13, 2008 7:45:37 AM I just read Krugman's piece on Austrian "hangover" theory. I'd love to see an Austrian response, do you know of one? mike van winkle at Oct 13, 2008 7:46:51 AM I am myself a big fan of Krugman's, but I can't help wondering: given the situation in the world economy, the upcoming presidential election, Krugman's vocal endorsement of Obama and given the Swedes' intense preference for a president Obama, you do the math... I share these preferences, and I remember thinking last week: "wouldn't it be awesome if Krugman won, it could boost the Obama campaign even further." I have given it a skim, but I had got that impression - it was Tyler's use of "has" I was objecting to, given his food critic sideline. Posted by: Andrew at Oct 13, 2008 7:51:00 AM First, there are two Andrews, one (this one) is not an economist) and has no idea about who deserves a Nobel prize. Personally, I'd give it to a guy who predicted the mess we are in before it happened. However, I'm not sure why we'd listen to someone's opinion on a subject he considers: "a theory that I regard as being about as worthy of serious study as the phlogiston theory of fire." And says about it: "Here's the problem: As a matter of simple arithmetic, total spending in the economy is necessarily equal to total income (every sale is also a purchase, and vice versa). So if people decide to spend less on investment goods, doesn't that mean that they must be deciding to spend more on consumption goods--implying that an investment slump should always be accompanied by a corresponding consumption boom? Where he misses the whole point of the theory, that credit creation exactly decouples price from value. Posted by: Andrew at Oct 13, 2008 7:52:35 AM Krugman was on the shortlist well before Bush got elected. Michael Greinecker at Oct 13, 2008 7:53:08 AM Is the value of winning the Nobel Prize in Economics going up or down? There can be no question that, at the current moment, economics is lumped in with finance (especially international) and that is definitely giving it a bad name (at least among the masses). The Nobel Prize is the one academic prize that people know about. If the movies have Oscars, and TV has the Emmies, it's as if the academy has its Nobel Prizes. Therefore the heritage/legacy of the Nobel Prize is extremely valuable as (I hope I am using this right) a sort of mental Schelling Point around which (semi-)intelligent laymen can coordinate their knowledge of economics. But is the value of a Nobel Prize in Economics going up or down? I think that in the past, the Nobel in Economics might have been thought of a little bit more like the ones in Chemistry, Physics, or Medicine: Perhaps there's some politics there; Now I'm afraid it's more like a Nobel in Literature or Peace--I'm sorry to have to draw such a stark hard/soft ... |
| web.mit.edu/krugman/www/howiwork.html HOW I WORK My formal charge in this essay is to talk about my "life philosophy". Let me make it clear at the outset that I have no intention of following instructions, since I don't know anything special about life in general. I believe it was Schumpeter who claimed to be not only the best economist, but also the best horseman and the best lover in his native Austria. I don't ride horses, and have few illusions on other scores. What I want to talk about in this essay is something more restricted: some thoughts about thinking, and particularly how to go about doing interesting economics. I think that among economists of my generation I can claim to have a fairly distinctive intellectual style -- not necessarily a better style than my colleagues, for there are many ways to be a good economist, but one that has served me well. The essence of that style is a general research strategy that can be summarized in a few rules; I also view my more policy-oriented writing and speaking as ultimately grounded in the same principles. I think I can best introduce those rules, however, by describing how (it seems to me) I stumbled into the way I work. ORIGINS Most young economists today enter the field from the technical end. Originally intending a career in hard science or engineering, they slip down the scale into the most rigorous of the social sciences. The advantages of entering economics from that direction are obvious: one arrives already well trained in mathematics, one finds the concept of formal modeling natural. I studied little math, picking up what I needed as I went along. Nonetheless, I got deeply involved in economics early, working as a research assistant (on world energy markets) to William Nordhaus while still only a junior at Yale. Graduate school followed naturally, and I wrote my first really successful paper -- a theoretical analysis of balance of payments crises -- while still at MIT I discovered that I was facile with small mathematical models, with a knack for finding simplifying assumptions that made them tractable. Still, when I left graduate school I was, in my own mind at least, somewhat directionless. I found my intellectual feet quite suddenly, in January 1978. Feeling somewhat lost, I paid a visit to my old advisor Rudi Dornbusch. I described several ideas to him, including a vague notion that the monopolistic competition models I had studied in a short course offered by Bob Solow -- especially the lovely little model of Dixit and Stiglitz -- might have something to do with international trade. Rudi flagged that idea as potentially very interesting indeed; and within a few days I realized that I had hold of something that would form the core of my professional life. The point of my trade models was not particularly startling once one thought about it: economies of scale could be an independent cause of international trade, even in the absence of comparative advantage. This was a new insight to me, but had (as I soon discovered) been pointed out many times before by critics of conventional trade theory. Even so, to make the models tractable I had to make obviously unrealistic assumptions. And once I had made those assumptions, the models were trivially simple; writing them up left me no opportunity to display any high-powered technique. So one might have concluded that I was doing nothing very interesting (and that was what some of my colleagues were to tell me over the next few years). Yet what I saw -- and for some reason saw almost immediately -- was that all of these features were virtues, not vices, that they added up to a program that could lead to years of productive research. I was, of course, only saying something that critics of conventional theory had been saying for decades. Yet my point was not part of the mainstream of international economics. The new monopolistic competition models gave me a tool to open cleanly what had previously been regarded as a can of worms. More important, however, I suddenly realized the remarkable extent to which the methodology of economics creates blind spots. And the biggest blind spot of all has involved increasing returns. So there, right at hand, was my mission: to look at things from a slightly different angle, and in so doing to reveal the obvious, things that had been right under our noses all the time. The models I wrote down that winter and spring were incomplete, if one demanded of them that they specify exactly who produced what. It took me a long time to express clearly what I was doing, but eventually I realized that one way to deal with a difficult problem is to change the question -- in particular by shifting levels. A detailed analysis may be extremely nasty, yet an aggregative or systemic description that is far easier may tell you all you need to know. To get this system or aggregate level description required, of course, accepting the basically silly assumptions of symmetry that underlay the Dixit-Stiglitz and related models. Yet these silly assumptions seemed to let me tell stories that were persuasive, and that could not be told using the hallowed assumptions of the standard competitive model. What I began to realize was that in economics we are always making silly assumptions; it's just that some of them have been made so often that they come to seem natural. And so one should not reject a model as silly until one sees where its assumptions lead. Finally, the simplicity of the models may have frustrated my lingering urge to show off the technical skills I had so laboriously acquired in graduate school, but was, I soon realized, central to the enterprise. Trade theorists had failed to address the role of increasing returns, not out of empirical conviction, but because they thought it was too hard to model. How much more effective, then, to show that it could be almost childishly simple? And so, before my 25th birthday, I basically knew what I was going to do with my professional life. I don't know what would have happened if my grand project had met with rejection from other economists -- perhaps I would have turned cranky, perhaps I would have lost faith and abandoned the effort. In my own mind, the curve of my core research since that January of 1978 has followed a remarkably consistent path. Within a few months, I had written up a basic monopolistic competition trade model -- as it turned out, simultaneously and independently with similar models by Avinash Dixit and Victor Norman, on one side, and Kelvin Lancaster, on the other. I had some trouble getting that paper published -- receiving the dismissive rejection by a flagship journal (the QJE) that seems to be the fate of every innovation in economics -- but pressed on. From 1978 to roughly the end of 1984 I focussed virtually all my research energies on the role of increasing returns and imperfect competition in international trade. What had been a personal quest turned into a movement, as others followed the same path. Above all, Elhanan Helpman -- a deep thinker whose integrity and self-discipline were useful counterparts to my own flakiness and disorganization -- first made crucial contibutions himself, then talked me into collaborative work. Our magnum opus, Market Structure and Foreign Trade, served the purpose of making our ideas not only respectable but almost standard: iconoclasm to orthodoxy in seven years. For whatever reason, I allowed my grand project on increasing returns to lie fallow for a few years in the 1980s, and turned my attention to international finance. My work in this area consisted primarily of small models inspired by current policy issues; although these models lacked the integrating theme of my trade models, I think that my finance work is to some extent unified by its intellectual style, which is very similar to that of my work on trade. In 1990 I returned to the economics of increasing returns from a new direction. I suddenly realized that the techniques that had allowed us to legitimize the role of increasing returns in trade could also be used to reclaim a whole outcast field: that of economic geography, the location of activity in space. Here, perhaps even more than ... |
| delong.typepad.com/sdj/2005/06/a_missing_piece.html Krugman's allegations": To: Mr Paul Krugman Op-Ed Page The New York Times From: Ben Stein Los Angeles, California. Dear Professor Krugman, In all of my life, I have never seen a more confused column than the one that appeared on March 12, 2002 on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times about the death of the esteemed economist, policy expert, teacher, and public servant, James Tobin, on the sad occasion of Professor Tobin's death. I was honored to be a student and lifelong admirer of Dr. Tobin, and you do him and many others wrong, and display frightening misunderstanding of the field. Just to start, you say the great depression was "widely blamed" on laissez faire policies. It has been blamed on many things, but no serious scholar has blamed it on free market economics. In fact, just the opposite--many blame it on price fixing and restraint of trade encouraged by the New Deal. Your idea that there is or ever was any intellectual rigor in blaming the great depression on the free market is simply a non-starter, period. Second, your calling a true scholar and genius like Friedman "naive" is simply astonishing especially in context. He had great respect for monetarism, for its central text, The Monetary History of the United States by Friedman and Anna Jacobson Schwartz, and would have been scandalized by someone at your level daring to call Milton Friedman or his ideas and thorough research naive. For you to further assert that Friedman's monetarism has not stood the test of time is almost unbelievable. What theory do you think governs current Fed policy if not monetarism? Do you really think that even Tobin believed that changes in asset prices (related to his fascinating doctrine of "Tobin's Q", which you totally ignore) caused business cycles, or were more important than fluctuations in money supply in determining levels of economic activity? I can well recall Tobin in class at Yale in the late sixties heaping praise on Friedman's explanations of the causes of business cycles. Finally, for you to assert, on zero evidence, that Tobin's time as a member of the Council of Economic Advisers was unique and that since the early sixties, all other Council members have had to hew to a political line and sacrifice honesty and objectivity is insanely insulting to all other members of the Council and their staffs. The history of honesty and objectivity of members of both parties is unquestioned (except maybe by you, again, on a hunch, without any data at all). However, they all loved their jobs and knew who their bosses were. The idea that the Kennedy team of economists alone was above politics and holy men of scholarship is comical. I strongly urge you to read "Presidential Economics" by my father, Herbert Stein, a member and then Chair of the Council of Economic advisors, under Nixon and Ford, and whom you smear along with all of the others similarly sited except Dr. This little bit of reading by you might save you from such naive assumptions in the future, as well as from smears of the innocent. and to heap scorn on one of the great minds of all time in economics, Milton Friedman. In short, your piece is a dismaying morass of confusion, insult, and disinformation. You know you're really getting under peoples' skin when they go ballistic over perfectly nice, genteel columns. I was somewhat surprised, while on vacation, to receive hostile, irrational email attacking my valedictory for James Tobin - the least biting column I've written for ages. Not until I got back and read a short squib in the New Republic did I realize where that came from - a bizarre screed by Ben Stein. For what it's worth: I can be accused of a lot of things, but a "limited background in economics" isn't one of them. Mr Stein's father was a fine economist, a member of a rapidly vanishing species - moderate Republicans. Vague memories of what he heard in his undergraduate class in the 1960s don't cut it. I'm tempted to assign Mr Stein some readings, starting with Tobin's Essays in Economics: Volume 1, Macroeconomics. It gives you a pretty good picture of what he did, of his debate with Friedman (the volume includes Tobin's critical review of Friedman and Schwartz, which Mr Stein clearly has not read) and much more. I think I understand Tobin's contribution as well as anyone - and no serious economist has quarreled with my depiction of his work. the current fashion in economic policy is "inflation targeting", while the current fashion in academic research is to suppress any explicit discussion of the money supply, and use other indicators of monetary policy. Friedman's claim to greatness rests not on monetarism, which is now seen as a somewhat embarrassing - and, yes, "naive" - episode in his intellectual evolution, but on two lasting contributions: the permanent-income theory of consumption, and the natural-rate hypothesis. If I had to psychoanalyze Mr Stein, I'd say that the idea that I am a serious academic economist deeply disturbs him. After all, if I know what I'm talking about in eulogizing James Tobin, the other things I've been saying in my column might be true, and the politicians Mr Stein supports might be as dishonest as I claim. Anyway, I knew Jim Tobin - whom I talked with at length just a few days before his death - a lot better than Mr Stein. And here is Krugman on Tobin, from the March 12, 2002 New York Times: Missing James Tobin SYNOPSIS: The passing of James Tobin marks the passing of a good man and the end of an era of honesty James Tobin -- Yale professor, Nobel laureate and adviser to John F Kennedy -- died yesterday. his passing seems to me to symbolize the passing of an era, one in which economic debate was both nicer and a lot more honest than it is today. Mr Tobin was one of those economic theorists whose influence reaches so far that many people who have never heard of him are nonetheless his disciples. He was also, however, a public figure, for a time the most prominent advocate of an ideology we might call free-market Keynesianism -- a belief that markets are fine things, but that they work best if the government stands ready to limit their excesses. it's ironic that some of his essentially moderate ideas have lately been hijacked by extremists right and left. Mr Tobin was one of the economists who brought the Keynesian revolution to America. Before that revolution, there seemed to be no middle ground in economics between laissez-faire fatalism and heavy-handed government intervention -- and with laissez-faire policies widely blamed for the Great Depression, it was hard to see how free-market economics could survive. John Maynard Keynes changed all that: with judicious use of monetary and fiscal policy, he suggested, a free-market system could avoid future depressions. Basically, he took the crude, mechanistic Keynesianism prevalent in the 1940's and transformed it into a far more sophisticated doctrine, one that focused on the tradeoffs investors make as they balance risk, return and liquidity. In the 1960's Mr Tobin's sophisticated Keynesianism made him the best-known intellectual opponent of Milton Friedman, then the advocate of a rival (and rather naive) doctrine known as monetarism. For what it's worth, Mr Friedman's insistence that changes in the money supply explain all of the economy's ups and downs has not stood the test of time; Mr Tobin's focus on asset prices as the driving force behind economic fluctuations has never looked better. First, Mr Tobin was the intellectual force behind the Kennedy tax cut, which started the boom of the 1960's. The irony is that nowadays that tax cut is usually praised by hard-line conservatives, who regard such cuts as an elixir for whatever ails you. In fact I was on a panel with him just last week, where he argued strongly that the current situation called for more domestic spending, not more tax cuts. Second, back in 1972 Mr Tobin proposed that governments levy a small tax on foreign exchange transactions, as a way to discourage destabilizing speculation. He thought of this tax as a way to help promote free trade, by assuring countries that they could open their markets without exposing themselves to di... |
| delong.typepad.com/sdj/2008/10/crooked-timber.html The Name of This Band is Exploding Heads: As Kieran notes in comments below, the comments thread to Tyler Cowen's (perfectly reasonable) Krugman post is pretty hilarious. But given Krugman's place of pride in the wingnut demonology, I'm sure that this is only a mere scraping of what's out there on the Internets today. It furthermore occurs to me that someone (ie Me) should do a comments thread to collate and conserve the very bestest blogposts and comments on the Vast Nobel Prize Conspiracy. Kathy G Here are my first nine: 1 Powerline: Special John Hinderaker 8 August 2005: It must be depressing to be Paul Krugman. No matter how well the economy performs, Krugman's bitter vendetta against the Bush administration requires him to hunt for the black lining in a sky full of silvery clouds. With the economy now booming, what can Krugman possibly have to complain about? In today's column, titled That Hissing Sound, Krugman says there is a housing bubble, and it's about to burst.... There are, of course, obvious differences between houses and stocks. Most people own only one house at a time, and transaction costs make it impractical to buy and sell houses the way you buy and sell stocks. Krugman thinks the fact that James Glassman doesn't buy the bubble theory is evidence in its favor, but if you read Glassman's article on the subject, you'll see that he actually makes some of the same points that Krugman does. But he argues, persuasively in my view, that there is little reason to fear a catastrophic collapse in home prices. Krugman will have to come up with something much better, I think, to cause many others to share his pessimism. I am sure many of you have watched him on cable networks. He speaks like a mouse and his beady eyes have a strange stare. He looks like if someone droped a glass he would scream. Friedman may also win a real Nobel prize in the future in Mathematics - something that Krugman is lacking sorely in his 1911 model T 10 pager with static labor, demand and other - almost impossible to forecast in the real world -variables. So some great minds such as John Maynard Keynes and Fischer Black never received the prize in Economics. With today's award to Paul Krugman, the Nobel as gone to an economist who died a decade ago. The person alive to receive the award is merely a public intellectual, a person operating in the same domain as Oprah Winfrey. And even as a public intellectual, the prize is inappropriate, because never before has a scientist operating in the capacity of a public intellectual so abused and debased the science he purports to represent. Krugman's New York Times column drawing on economics is the equivalent of 2006's Nobelists in Physics, astromers Mather and Smoot, doing a column on astrology--and then, in that column, telling lies about astronomy. The only question now is whether Krugman will pay taxes on the prize at the low rates enabled by the Bush tax cuts he has done so much to discredit, or if he will volunteer to pay taxes at higher rates he considers more fair. He totally omits all these major issues where the economics conclusion goes against the feel-good Democratic Party ethos, which I think he's really tended to pander to especially since writing for The New York Times. com/rogerkimball/2008/10/13/what-a-way-to- celebrate-columbus-day-or-stockholm-takes-leave-of-its-senses/: But today we have yet another illustration of Marx's revision of Hegel's version of the progress of history: things happen as it were twice: first as tragedy (Arafat) then as farce-witness this year's Nobel Laureate for economics: Paul Krugman. Yes, that Paul Krugman, laughing stock (well, one of them) of The New York Times's editorial: the anti-capitalist, anti-American town crier whose hysterical maunderings about the economy and American society were embarrassing before they went entirely off the reservation and became merely part of the ambient left-wing static emanating from The New York Times. He is a hard-left activist whose only claim on our attention is as a bellwether of a certain species of anti-American demagoguery. That is not-not by a long shot-enough to make me wish for an Obama presidency, but it would be a pleasing consolation prize. UPDATE: It occurs to me on reflection that it would have been much more appropriate had the Nobel Prize Committee, since they were determined to honor a fantasist like Krugman, awarded him the Nobel Prize for Literature. I mean, he work is not more unreadable than many recent Nobel Laureates in literature, and it is just as untruthful. An American hating Soros toady endorsed by The Communist Party USA wins the Nobel Prize. It's almost as if the committee has a political agenda... He routinely fudges facts and, when called on it, refuses to admit error. He never presents both sides of an argument dispassionately and then uses reason and observed experience to discern the truth. He consistently demonizes anyone who doesn't agree with him. His shrill, hysterical voice trivializes honest differences and invites counter-attack rather than reasoned rebuttal. Plus he's not even well-informed on many issues that fall outside his academic specializations. I know the Nobel committee doesn't judge entirely on the basis of someone's career, but Krugman's Nobel should make them rethink this. He continues to use his NYTimes column in a way that diminishes the intellectual standards of his field. This does significant, long-run harm to what the Nobel Committee calls "Economic Sciences," perhaps entirely offsetting the value of Krugman's academic contributions. I want it to be something really special--totally unhinged. com/id/2061092/ The one thing that makes me have reservations about Obama is that Sullivan has such a crush on him, and has been so disastrously wrong a judge of character and policy in the past. October 13, 2008 at 05:04 PM I just don't get these comments - in what universe is Paul Krugman, mild-mannered Princeton Economics professor, a member of the Ultra-HARD Left? October 13, 2008 at 05:05 PM Klein's piece has a period feel -- for some people it might have had some plausibility or persuasiveness ten years ago, or even three months ago, but not now. He and a high proportion of the other demented Krugman critics seem to want people to accept Krugman's Democratic partisanship as sufficient proof that his popular writing is no good. They're comparing Krugman unfavorably to the mythical above-the-battle neutral-scientist model, but unfortunately they themselves are so rabidly partisan that you worry that they're going to bite themselves in their rage. Mankiw doesn't come off well at all when he links Klein. Mankiw may or may not be not be a typical economist, but I plan to keep saying that he is. October 13, 2008 at 05:07 PM Many of the Krugman critics, often economists, say something like "I wish he's just write about what he knows about, economics, and not about areas where he's not expert". They actually seem to believe that newspaper columnists normally are expert about the things they write about. Not only are newspaper columnists seldom experts about anything they write about, given the generalist nature of their job, it's utterly unreasonable to hope for them to be. I've frequent heard that criticism of Krugman right here at DeLong's, btw, from fanatical technocrats who don't even agree with Krugman's politics, but just are incapable of conceiving of democratic political discourse. Krugman's Wiki page has been the site of editing wars, with Luskinites and Obama partisans ganging up on Krugman. October 13, 2008 at 05:28 PM Luskin really IS the stupidest man alive. Someone needs to tell him that awards such as the Nobel are not taxable income under the IRC. October 13, 2008 at 05:30 PM Wow, number 3 has a special level of idiocy to it, inventing Nobel prizes that don't exist. Sadly the most common story about why there's no Nobel prize in math is almost certainly apocryphal. id=5589 For the ages: Topic: Memos Sent to Romenesko Date/Time: 9/5/2003 1:06:35 PM Title: Slate publisher's memo re losing staff to NYT Posted By: Jim Romenesko TO: Brad Smith Sr. Vice President, Micro... |