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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 mak

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.

morphle 4y ago
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-prize-economics-not-science-hubris-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/nobel-... [2] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315495972-9/economics-yet-science-alfred-eichner https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813154... [3] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.59 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.59
xyzzyz 4y ago
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.)
scifibestfi 4y ago
"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."

morphle 4y ago

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-prize-economics-not-science-hubris-disaster https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/oct/11/nobel-... [2] https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781315495972-9/economics-yet-science-alfred-eichner https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/97813154... [3] https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.59 https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.24.2.59

xyzzyz 4y ago

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.)

scifibestfi 4y ago

"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."