A charlatan? How so?

He has a Nobel prize for his work in economics. He has been a professor of economics at multiple prestigious universities. Surely that makes him qualified to opine on economic policy, even when it is a bit outside of his specialization.

Also, while he does share opinions about things outside of his area of expertise, I don't view him as claiming some unearned expertise in those areas.

Don’t let the Nobel prize fool you. Economics is not a science [1]

Why Economics Is Not Yet a Science [2]

But Economics Is Not an Experimental Science [3]

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/nobel-...

[2] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813154...

[3] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.59

"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."

If you follow other economists, you’ll find that their opinion on Paul Krugman is rather low. This is mostly due to his extremely partisan career as NYT opinion pundit. A typical sentiment you’ll hear is something along the lines “I respect Krugman for his work on trade back in the eighties, but ever since he became a political commentator, he stopped being an economist, and mostly says what his political tribe wants to hear”. Contrast this to, for example, Larry Summers, who, while sharing probably most of his political views with Krugman, is, unlike Krugman, widely respected, due to his well known and repeated commitment to truth and integrity above political expediency.

Krugman represents a failure mode typical to modern science. Science won its respect through its commitment to truth. This caused scientific credentials to be held in high esteem. Now, it is becoming more and more common for people with little personal integrity and commitment to truth to obtain these credentials and use them as a cudgel to push through some blatantly political and unscientific theories and views.

One example of this is very popular recently within American and European central banking community push to quantify and mitigate risk of climate change to the stability of financial system: as much as climate change is a planetary scale problem our species have never faced before, it is not in any significant way a risk to the stability of financial systems. Nevertheless, banking regulators are all about this non stop for past few years. This is because they want to do something about climate change (as most people should!), and they have power over very important part of the global economy, so they pretend, using all their scientific credentials, that climate change is a risk to financial systems, purely so that they can claim that fighting it is within their mandate. This might be good from the perspective of utilitarian morality, but the problem with being utilitarian is that people quickly learn to ignore voices coming out of your mouth, because you have proven yourself to be a person who will lie to them with zero qualms if this happens to be expedient in any given moment. Given this, there should be no surprise that trust in experts and in institutions in developed world is at all times low.

(As an additional example of how silly it is for central bankers and regulators to focus on “climate change risk to financial system”, note how they utterly and entirely missed other things that actually significantly impacted financial stability in real world: pandemic, war in Ukraine, or, for that matter, recent utterly predictable pension crisis in UK. If they failed to be prepared there, why would anyone believe that they can do a good job on the alleged climate change risk to financial stability? I certainly don’t, I only trust experts who have zero power to affect anything, and consequently zero incentive to push convienient falsehoods.)

Is there a Wikipedia List of Charlatan article? I would have zero idea about Paul Krugman. Though, it’s not like I’m going to research the author of every article. What I really need is a browser extension that will do a background search for the author of any article I open and throw up an alert if there are concerns. Hmmm, sounds like we need a charlatan API the extension can hit up.

You probably couldn't find much evidence re Krugman + Charlatan, because he's not. He's an accomplished economist who's influential and respected among the academic community. He's won two of the most prestigious awards in economics (Nobel + John Bates Clark). He's had some peculiar arguments in the past, which were dumb imo, but nothing "Charlatan"... Science is hard and economics is unique. Krugman is known for doing post-mortems and admitting when his ideas are off. I also think that being recognized by the academic community and his peer economists is a reasonable signal that he's not an idiot.

More recently he's been a bit more into hackish punditry and is prob. most famous among regular people for his somewhat abrasive nyt column. I think your idea about and API is not ideal. Is it enough to trust some randos on hacker news to identify Charlatans?

People hate Krugman mostly because he's the most widely read economist in the world. He's not 100% correct all the time but he's generally very sane and sober in his assessments and admits his mistakes. He is absolutely not a charlatan.

> He is a charlatan.

How can that be. nobel prize and all.

I'm not saying Krugman is a charlatan, but answering the question "how can a Nobel prize winner be a charlatan."

It's possible that someone wins a Nobel prize, and then maybe a decade or two later) turns into a charlatan. I think Linus Pauling could be an example: Two Nobel prizes, but later in life he was known for promoting crackpot theories about massive doses of Vitamin C being a miracle cure for cancer. Clinical studies failed to confirm this, and it is regarded as quackery.

One of the few things both sides can agree on.