Copy-pasting my comment from another sub-thread: As Joe Weisenthal (co-host of Odd Lots podcast) wrote last year, Krugman wasn't was wrong as most people seem

Copy-pasting my comment from another sub-thread: As Joe Weisenthal (co-host of Odd Lots podcast) wrote last year, Krugman wasn't was wrong as most people seem to think: > So the first part of Krugman’s prediction was obviously, completely, unequivocally wrong. It turns out that people have a lot to say to each other. More than we ever thought. A total zero on that one. Points to the dunkers. > The more interesting half of the quote though — and the one that the critics mostly remember — is the second part about the impact on the economy being no greater than the fax machine. This one is completely defensible. > As Skanda Amarnath, head of research at Employ America, wrote to me, what people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.” * https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krugman-got-something-very-right-about-the-internet-the-fax-machine-and-the-economy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug... * https://archive.ph/FD6GR https://archive.ph/FD6GR As Krugman himself stated in 2018: > I must have tossed it off quickly (at the time I was mainly focused on the Asian financial crisis!), then later conflated it in my memory with the NYT piece. Anyway, I was clearly trying to be provocative, and got it wrong, which happens to all of us sometimes. * https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-effect-economy/ https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff... It's been over twenty years since Krugman wrote that article: people need to get over it. It was a throw away article for a now-defunct B-list publication. People seem to like to dunk on Krugman for this 1998 pop-econ article, but don't bother looking at his academic work. For example this was also published in 1998: And here's something else that he published in 1998: > THE LIQUIDITY TRAP-that awkward condition in which monetary policy loses its grip because the nominal interest rate is essentially zero, in which the quantity of money becomes irrelevant because money and bonds are essentially perfect substitutes-played a central role in the early years of macroeconomics as a discipline. […] * https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-slump-and-the-return-of-the-liquidity-trap/ https://www.brookings.edu/bpea-articles/its-baaack-japans-sl... Which kind of has become important over the last few decades as Japan, and now many other countries (especially post-GFC), have to deal with luke warm growth: * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secular_stagnation * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liquidity_trap * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero_interest-rate_policy