Paul Krugman Goes for a Knockout Against Scrappy Austerians

Re:Paul Krugman Goes for a Knockout Against Scrappy Austerians by comex on Wednesday June 24, 2015 @03:34PM (#9773942)

I read the article. It's interesting, as it does point out situations where Krugman seems to have been somewhat wrong in hindsight - which may be more discrediting than it otherwise would be, despite the difficulty of most predictions, when combined with his constant self-praise. That said, the evidence is fairly subjective: for example, even as someone unfamiliar with economics I can be pretty confident that Murphy is overstating his case when he lambastes Krugman for talking about the zero lower bound, when it turns out that interest rates can go slightly negative - it may be more than "nitpicking", as he says, but the zero lower bound turning out to be less than zero hardly vindicates the idea that the entire concept is a "mentality" Krugman is "locked into". Also, a prediction that 'X will push the economy in the wrong direction' is not directly contradicted by the economy going in the right direction in the presence of X; it's evidence against the relation, but not necessarily strong evidence in a complex system with many other factors - yet Murphy uses words like "revisionism" and "withering and irrefutable criticism".

Meanwhile, Wikipedia has links to articles where Murphy has made absolutely worded claims that have turned out to be completely wrong. That doesn't make Krugman right, but it's hard to take seriously anything about economics written by someone who said

"We can’t know the timing of the impending monetary catastrophe, but it is coming. Smart investors will minimize their dependence on the dollar before it crashes. At this late date, no one should trust the government and media “experts” who assure us that the worst is over." [1]

Maybe two excesses average out somewhere closer to the truth? But I'd like a more neutral source.

http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/killing-the-...

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Re:Paul Krugman Goes for a Knockout Against Scrappy Austerians by maxlybbert on Thursday June 25, 2015 @12:49AM (#9776019)

The argument isn't simply that Krugman is a human -- although that might be news to him -- but that, contrary to his claims, he hasn't been "right on everything" and has, in fact, been fundamentally wrong on the main thing he's been talking about for a decade.

> the zero lower bound turning out to be less than zero hardly vindicates the idea that the entire concept is a "mentality" Krugman is "locked into".

Krugman's been arguing that at the zero lower bound the regular laws of economics don't apply. That's not a caricature ("When depression economics prevails, the usual rules of economic policy no longer apply: virtue becomes vice, caution is risky and prudence is folly", http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/14/opinion/14krugman.html ). Krugman's tried to establish himself as somebody able to reason in this weird realm (although his recommendations always amount to "spend more and don't worry about the deficit"), so it seems important to know where the weird realm actually is. It's certainly true that the US didn't have any experience with the zero lower bound, but it's also true that there are a few other free market economies in the world that might have given a deep thinker something to work off of.

> Also, a prediction that 'X will push the economy in the wrong direction' is not directly contradicted by the economy going in the right direction in the presence of X; it's evidence against the relation, but not necessarily strong evidence in a complex system with many other factors

But Krugman didn't say that austerity would simply cause headwinds, or just push the economy in the wrong direction. According to the Bloomberg article, he said people advocating austerity enjoyed inflicting economic suffering, and he coined the words "austerian" and "sadomonetarist." He routinely said that austerity would cause a new recession before we recovered from the first. Not that it would be hard to overcome austerity, but that it would be impossible to. Then, when the predicted double dip never occurred, he declared victory and claimed he'd been right about everything.

The only substance I can see from the original Bloomberg article is that Krugman enjoys a scrappy technique when debating other economists. But his record doesn't really justify his statements that people only disagree with him because they are evil or insane.

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