6 ms·

Paul Krugman: How I work

135 points by gabrielroth 18y ago

robg 18y ago
All in all, though, I've been very lucky. A lot of that luck has to do with the accidents that led me to stumble onto an intellectual style that has served me extremely well.
deleted 18y ago
[deleted]
- jacobolus 18y ago
  Which? Conscience of a Liberal? I didn’t find it particularly insightful, but it was alright.
fallentimes 18y ago
I love reading stuff like this. I wish more super intelligent people did it.
carterschonwald 18y ago
I like the bit where he keeps on pointing out how essential the style of keeping the models simple and tractable was key to the vein of research. this is a style that not enough folks actually focus on explicitly, at least from my range of experience
- 13ren 18y ago
  It's difficult to create something simple. And then people say "but that's simple". :| High effort/low reward: not an attractive proposition. It doesn't attract many folks. You need a way to demonstrate that it wasn't obvious; and (I think) you need to be a for-the-love-of-it kind of a guy: the unreasonable man upon which all progress depends.
dhuck 18y ago
this is my favorite quote, from the "Be Silly" section: "If you want to publish a paper in economic theory, there is a safe approach: make a conceptually minor but mathematically difficult extension to some familiar model. Because the basic assumptions of the model are already familiar, people will not regard them as strange; because you have done something technically difficult, you will be respected for your demonstration of firepower. Unfortunately, you will not have added much to human knowledge." be silly. do something completely different. the normal ideas that techcrunch spits out day after day are played out, do something revolutionary.
mynameishere 18y ago
Still depressed that this statist shill, who can't go two sentences without contradicting human reason, won the "nobel" prize. For an example of a man who actually improved human welfare, see the first physics recipient, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Conrad_R%C3%B6ntgen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Conrad_R%C3%B6ntgen
- Prrometheus 18y ago
  He was awarded the prize for his academic work, not his shilling for the Democratic Party.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    It's a prize. A prize in the field of economics, which is hardly physics. Unless there is some empirical process for selection and award, it's just the result of a committee's opinions. If we can agree on that, certainly you can see that the door is open for the members of the committee to be swayed by lots of things, including his political work/views. To act otherwise is to try to turn respected scientists into some sort of mechanistic non-humans. People are influenced by all sorts of things, at the conscious and unconscious levels. I have no idea what part of my statement is controversial. Yet it seems to just drive some people nuts.
    - deleted 18y ago
      [deleted]
    - jcl 18y ago
      As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page, there is no difference in the selection processes for the physics and economics prizes... All prizes are just the result of a committee's (and nominators', and screeners') opinions. In this respect, they are all equally valid. For what it's worth, though, the committee members are selected by Norwegian/Swedish institutions, which are perhaps less likely to be swayed by political actions in the U.S.
- brent 18y ago
cousin_it 18y ago
Sadly, this didn't sound very intelligent to me. And I can't seem to understand what significant things he did.
- cousin_it 18y ago
  All right, I read up a bit. Downmodders, I fucking dare you, read this piece by Krugman http://www.slate.com/id/9593 http://www.slate.com/id/9593 and tell me again that he isn't a quack.
  - rms 18y ago
    http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/pundits-as-mole.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/pundits-as-mole.html
    - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      I read that link four times. Are you saying that Krugman was a spy who actually published and worked his way up the right side of the political spectrum in order to make a stand for his true left-leaning views? Or the other way around? I found the "Pundits as Moles" post murky. I'm not so sure it helps in overcoming bias as much as finding excuses for behavior we don't like. Pundits could be moles, they could just sway with the partisan wind. Or they could just be businesspeople looking at their daily ratings. A plug-and-play system for determining motivations is not something that will help you overcome bias.
      - rms 18y ago
        I wasn't saying that Krugman was a spy for one side left or right -- he worked his way up the academic spectrum of quantitative economics, in fact, all the way to the very top. Now he gets to write about politics and literary economics using the authority earned from his academic career. His current motivation is getting Barack Obama elected and generally advocating higher taxes and more government services. I'm not reading into that "Pundits as Moles" post overly much -- I just thought it funny that it seemed to apply to Paul Krugman.
amix 18y ago
I think his way of doing research is the way computer scientists do research. I.e. instead of taking a very complex programming model (like Java's or Haskell's), most CS researchers invent their own mini languages (that in a lot of cases are simple extensions of lambda calculus or turning machines), these mini languages makes it much easier to reason about specific things. An example: Java's generics were first presented in a paper that added them to a mini-language that only mimicked some properties of Java. That said, his way of working also seems to be very "hackerish", i.e. instead of using "the normal ways", he hacks a model together that show some properties that the conventional and more complex models have a hard time showing. This is basically also how great hackers work, e.g. Paul Graham's Arc (it's very unconventional and simplified - but great at showing the essence of the hacker's ideas). Anyway, great link!
sdurkin 18y ago
Oh, I love Prof. Krugman. Saw him at his press conference yesterday, and hoping to congratulate him today.
andreyf 18y ago
What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world. I don't get it - how helpful are "metaphors for things we think happen in the real world" if they aren't based in reality? Is that not like saying "let x be an odd number divisible by 2 [...] hence, taxes should go up!". Or am I misunderstanding the relationship between "proof" and "modeling". Here's how it looks to me: economists believed that people are utility optimizers, and form a lot of conclusions based on the idea. When it is found untrue, economists modify what their theory is explaining (they say it's explaining "market psychology" or some nonsense) so that their conclusions still hold. It's not so obvious when the complicated workings of academics and their institutions behave this day, but if a single individual ever behaved like this, it would just seem stubborn.
- mechanical_fish 18y ago
  how helpful are "metaphors for things we think happen in the real world" if they aren't based in reality? Metaphors -- in this context I'd call them "rules of thumb" -- are computable by humans in real time. Reality generally isn't. Technically, things don't fall down. When I hold a brick above your head and then let go, you shouldn't just assume that you have to dodge. You should take note of all the massive objects in the vicinity and do a calculation using the law of gravitation. You might also do some energetic calculations to make sure that the brick won't just bounce harmlessly off of your head, or come to rest on it like a falling feather. Or, you know, you can avoid thinking at all and just allow the circuits in your brain and spinal cord to get you out of the way fast so that you can live to argue another day. Those circuits embody a relatively crude theory of physics, and their design process didn't make use of a theory of physics at all, but they work to keep you alive. What Krugman is saying is that, while economists would love to develop the economic equivalent of the law of gravitation (and some are even foolish enough to believe that they have) their first priority is to develop some rules of thumb that can tell us when to dodge, when to stand still, and when to wear a hard hat. And that can be used to explain, in simple terms, where the bump on our head came from. ("You stood under a metaphorical brick and failed to dodge in the Keynesian manner.")
andreyf 18y ago
The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. This seems like a big statement. What is the point of models, if they aren't true? Metaphor is important in political rhetoric, but not necessarily in science...
- DLWormwood 18y ago
  > What is the point of models, if they aren't true? Because they can make testable predictions or approximations for the truth. This is not unique to Economics, even the "hard" sciences have to deal with this problem. Before relativity was conceptualized, Newton's models for gravity and inertia were considered "good enough" even though they were observed to break down at the cosmic observational level. Even today, many measurements have to account for uncertainty in unit size (even at the macro scale!) and have to be accounted for when crunching numbers in serial calculations. (Wikipedia's got several acceptable pages on several types of uncertainty, especially measurement uncertainty.)
vtnext 18y ago
Krugman is obviously smart, as well as arrogant and a liberal shill. But that's not the problem. The issue is that he, and the economics establishment led by Helicopter Ben, never met a rate cut they did not like. Cheap money and credit are the fix for every problem. Today many recognize Greenspan held rates too low for too long. At the time, Krugman opposed rate increases from those low levels. He and his ilk fail to see any connection between destructive booms and the cheap credit they promote.
- startingup 18y ago
  vtnext, in all the excitement of his Nobel, his actual economic views (as opposed to his politics, which I completely don't care about one way or another) about events in the real world have been forgotten. In fall of 2004, as Greenspan started raising interest rates in baby steps (very belatedly - housing was already bubbling up), Krugman was very opposed to those rate hikes. His analogy for the tech-telecom bust was with the post-bubble doldrums in Japan - and it was no time to be risking a slide back by rising rates. In the event, directly as a result of that easy credit policy, we got the mother of all bubbles in housing, which has almost taken the entire financial system down with it. Krugman did not anticipate the bigger bubble that was brewing even as he was advocating continuing 1% interest rates (well below the rate of inflation even then!). Economists like Nouriel Roubini, Steven Roach (then Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley), eminent people like Paul Volcker (Fed Chairman between 79-87), investors like Warren Buffet & Marc Faber all warned about the 2004-7 bubble in housing several times, for many years. Krugman had a very public voice during that entire time, but saw no problems with the Greenspan/Bernanke Fed. It is worth remembering this real world record, as the world fetes his Nobel prize.
  - gahahaha 18y ago
    Krugman in this op-ed from 2004 doesn't seem to be advocating lower interest rates, but simply stating that they are probably coming, and that many people are badly prepared for them. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E6DD1E3BF933A15757C0A9629C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E6DD1E3BF... "A number of analysts have accused Mr. Greenspan of fostering a debt bubble in recent years, just as they accuse him of feeding the stock bubble during the 1990's. Just two months ago, Mr. Greenspan went out of his way to emphasize the financial benefits of adjustable-rate, as opposed to fixed-rate, mortgages. Let's hope that not too many families regarded that as useful advice." One reason why he might have argued for lower interest rates, is that the employment growth during the "Bush Boom" was so dismal compared to earlier expansionary periods. (See: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/about-that-bush-boom/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/about-that-bush-...)
pragmatic 18y ago
R.I.P. Paul Krugman http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmZmMzlmZjU4NDVlMmFlZWRlZDM4YjZiYmRmYjc4NDQ= http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmZmMzlmZjU4NDVlMmFlZWR...
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  Seems like you're posting an informed and reasonable argument from a political site. This argument has a contrary opinion to those expressed in this thread. Burn the witch! I wonder if I could make money selling pre-lit virtual torches for the angry mob that is about to descend upon you? Seriously -- I'd like to see this discussed in a separate article. Very interesting stuff.
  - robg 18y ago
    That's not just any "political site". It's far right, especially now. Shoot, Buckley's son just resigned his column there because he had the audacity to support Obama. What would they have done to the father since, as a reasonable conservative, I can't see him endorsing Palin? The case against Krugman from those niches of the far right is almost entirely political. That link is a good example of the genre. This is better and back when NR had something worthwhile to say: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmQ4MzY0NGVjODdmZmY2ZGQzMDAwZThmNTYyYzYxYjQ= http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmQ4MzY0NGVjODdmZmY2ZGQ...
    - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      E-gad, it's the "let's be perfectly clear" meme. Wonder where you got that one? I don't mind you characterization of the site as far right wing. I'd simply look at the facts, source if doubtful, and continue the discussion from there. Same as if it were far left wing.
DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Krugman, and the Politicization of the Prize (Editorial) http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/10/krugman_and_the_politicization.html http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/10/krugman_and...
- olefoo 18y ago
  Give it up dude, nobody cares that you disagree with his politics. He would not have been awarded the prize if his work wasn't important regardless of his politics.
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    It's not that nobody cares, it's that people are actively pissed off that I questioned the selection. Sorry, I'm not giving up being able to make a simple observation the group may disagree with. I'm sick of the herd mentality, and you guys can vote me into the gutter and it's not going to stop me. I could care less about Krugman.
    - davidw 18y ago
      Another thing for you to keep in mind: the same group handed out prizes at some point to Hayek and Friedman.
      - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
        I've been reading around some. As I was the first to admit, I am ignorant. FWIW, glowing reviews are running about 70-30 with critical reviews of their award. There's a nice glowing review over at Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/13/krugman-economics-nobel-oped-cx_as_1013subramanian.html http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/13/krugman-economics-...) Even then, the author ends with: "But these days, even while disavowing overtly protectionist positions, Krugman's columns do sometimes have a protectionist tenor. Not only purists, but developing country policymakers, worry that Krugman is part of the shifting intellectual climate in the United States that has become ambivalent about keeping markets for goods and services open. Now that he also has the imprimatur of the Nobel Committee, Paul Krugman has a special responsibility to retain his cosmopolitan and internationalist credentials. At this time of financial crisis, Krugman should be reminding us that shutting down markets for trade helped transform the depression of the 1930s into the Great Depression." I'm open to discourse, just not impressed with the downmodding as a result of going against the herd over here. I've found economics a subject of some interest, but even with as much math as it takes, my _opinion_ is that it is far from a hard science like physics. So pointing out that politics and people's biases are involved shouldn't be such a freaking big deal, in my opinion. And that goes with Hayek, Friedman, and Krugman. My comment holds for all of them. That's the weird part about it.

135 points by gabrielroth 18y ago

robg 18y ago

All in all, though, I've been very lucky. A lot of that luck has to do with the accidents that led me to stumble onto an intellectual style that has served me extremely well.

deleted 18y ago

[deleted]

jacobolus 18y ago
Which? Conscience of a Liberal? I didn’t find it particularly insightful, but it was alright.

fallentimes 18y ago

I love reading stuff like this. I wish more super intelligent people did it.

carterschonwald 18y ago

I like the bit where he keeps on pointing out how essential the style of keeping the models simple and tractable was key to the vein of research. this is a style that not enough folks actually focus on explicitly, at least from my range of experience

13ren 18y ago
It's difficult to create something simple. And then people say "but that's simple". :| High effort/low reward: not an attractive proposition. It doesn't attract many folks. You need a way to demonstrate that it wasn't obvious; and (I think) you need to be a for-the-love-of-it kind of a guy: the unreasonable man upon which all progress depends.

dhuck 18y ago

this is my favorite quote, from the "Be Silly" section: "If you want to publish a paper in economic theory, there is a safe approach: make a conceptually minor but mathematically difficult extension to some familiar model. Because the basic assumptions of the model are already familiar, people will not regard them as strange; because you have done something technically difficult, you will be respected for your demonstration of firepower. Unfortunately, you will not have added much to human knowledge." be silly. do something completely different. the normal ideas that techcrunch spits out day after day are played out, do something revolutionary.

mynameishere 18y ago

Still depressed that this statist shill, who can't go two sentences without contradicting human reason, won the "nobel" prize. For an example of a man who actually improved human welfare, see the first physics recipient, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Conrad_R%C3%B6ntgen http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wilhelm_Conrad_R%C3%B6ntgen

Prrometheus 18y ago
He was awarded the prize for his academic work, not his shilling for the Democratic Party.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  It's a prize. A prize in the field of economics, which is hardly physics. Unless there is some empirical process for selection and award, it's just the result of a committee's opinions. If we can agree on that, certainly you can see that the door is open for the members of the committee to be swayed by lots of things, including his political work/views. To act otherwise is to try to turn respected scientists into some sort of mechanistic non-humans. People are influenced by all sorts of things, at the conscious and unconscious levels. I have no idea what part of my statement is controversial. Yet it seems to just drive some people nuts.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - jcl 18y ago
    As far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page, there is no difference in the selection processes for the physics and economics prizes... All prizes are just the result of a committee's (and nominators', and screeners') opinions. In this respect, they are all equally valid. For what it's worth, though, the committee members are selected by Norwegian/Swedish institutions, which are perhaps less likely to be swayed by political actions in the U.S.
brent 18y ago

cousin_it 18y ago

Sadly, this didn't sound very intelligent to me. And I can't seem to understand what significant things he did.

cousin_it 18y ago
All right, I read up a bit. Downmodders, I fucking dare you, read this piece by Krugman http://www.slate.com/id/9593 http://www.slate.com/id/9593 and tell me again that he isn't a quack.
- rms 18y ago
  http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/pundits-as-mole.html http://www.overcomingbias.com/2008/09/pundits-as-mole.html
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    I read that link four times. Are you saying that Krugman was a spy who actually published and worked his way up the right side of the political spectrum in order to make a stand for his true left-leaning views? Or the other way around? I found the "Pundits as Moles" post murky. I'm not so sure it helps in overcoming bias as much as finding excuses for behavior we don't like. Pundits could be moles, they could just sway with the partisan wind. Or they could just be businesspeople looking at their daily ratings. A plug-and-play system for determining motivations is not something that will help you overcome bias.
    - rms 18y ago
      I wasn't saying that Krugman was a spy for one side left or right -- he worked his way up the academic spectrum of quantitative economics, in fact, all the way to the very top. Now he gets to write about politics and literary economics using the authority earned from his academic career. His current motivation is getting Barack Obama elected and generally advocating higher taxes and more government services. I'm not reading into that "Pundits as Moles" post overly much -- I just thought it funny that it seemed to apply to Paul Krugman.

amix 18y ago

I think his way of doing research is the way computer scientists do research. I.e. instead of taking a very complex programming model (like Java's or Haskell's), most CS researchers invent their own mini languages (that in a lot of cases are simple extensions of lambda calculus or turning machines), these mini languages makes it much easier to reason about specific things. An example: Java's generics were first presented in a paper that added them to a mini-language that only mimicked some properties of Java. That said, his way of working also seems to be very "hackerish", i.e. instead of using "the normal ways", he hacks a model together that show some properties that the conventional and more complex models have a hard time showing. This is basically also how great hackers work, e.g. Paul Graham's Arc (it's very unconventional and simplified - but great at showing the essence of the hacker's ideas). Anyway, great link!

sdurkin 18y ago

Oh, I love Prof. Krugman. Saw him at his press conference yesterday, and hoping to congratulate him today.

andreyf 18y ago

What seems terribly hard for many economists to accept is that all our models involve silly assumptions. Given what we know about cognitive psychology, utility maximization is a ludicrous concept; equilibrium pretty foolish outside of financial markets; perfect competition a howler for most industries. The reason for making these assumptions is not that they are reasonable but that they seem to help us produce models that are helpful metaphors for things that we think happen in the real world. I don't get it - how helpful are "metaphors for things we think happen in the real world" if they aren't based in reality? Is that not like saying "let x be an odd number divisible by 2 [...] hence, taxes should go up!". Or am I misunderstanding the relationship between "proof" and "modeling". Here's how it looks to me: economists believed that people are utility optimizers, and form a lot of conclusions based on the idea. When it is found untrue, economists modify what their theory is explaining (they say it's explaining "market psychology" or some nonsense) so that their conclusions still hold. It's not so obvious when the complicated workings of academics and their institutions behave this day, but if a single individual ever behaved like this, it would just seem stubborn.

mechanical_fish 18y ago
how helpful are "metaphors for things we think happen in the real world" if they aren't based in reality? Metaphors -- in this context I'd call them "rules of thumb" -- are computable by humans in real time. Reality generally isn't. Technically, things don't fall down. When I hold a brick above your head and then let go, you shouldn't just assume that you have to dodge. You should take note of all the massive objects in the vicinity and do a calculation using the law of gravitation. You might also do some energetic calculations to make sure that the brick won't just bounce harmlessly off of your head, or come to rest on it like a falling feather. Or, you know, you can avoid thinking at all and just allow the circuits in your brain and spinal cord to get you out of the way fast so that you can live to argue another day. Those circuits embody a relatively crude theory of physics, and their design process didn't make use of a theory of physics at all, but they work to keep you alive. What Krugman is saying is that, while economists would love to develop the economic equivalent of the law of gravitation (and some are even foolish enough to believe that they have) their first priority is to develop some rules of thumb that can tell us when to dodge, when to stand still, and when to wear a hard hat. And that can be used to explain, in simple terms, where the bump on our head came from. ("You stood under a metaphorical brick and failed to dodge in the Keynesian manner.")

andreyf 18y ago

The point is to realize that economic models are metaphors, not truth. This seems like a big statement. What is the point of models, if they aren't true? Metaphor is important in political rhetoric, but not necessarily in science...

DLWormwood 18y ago
> What is the point of models, if they aren't true? Because they can make testable predictions or approximations for the truth. This is not unique to Economics, even the "hard" sciences have to deal with this problem. Before relativity was conceptualized, Newton's models for gravity and inertia were considered "good enough" even though they were observed to break down at the cosmic observational level. Even today, many measurements have to account for uncertainty in unit size (even at the macro scale!) and have to be accounted for when crunching numbers in serial calculations. (Wikipedia's got several acceptable pages on several types of uncertainty, especially measurement uncertainty.)

vtnext 18y ago

Krugman is obviously smart, as well as arrogant and a liberal shill. But that's not the problem. The issue is that he, and the economics establishment led by Helicopter Ben, never met a rate cut they did not like. Cheap money and credit are the fix for every problem. Today many recognize Greenspan held rates too low for too long. At the time, Krugman opposed rate increases from those low levels. He and his ilk fail to see any connection between destructive booms and the cheap credit they promote.

startingup 18y ago
vtnext, in all the excitement of his Nobel, his actual economic views (as opposed to his politics, which I completely don't care about one way or another) about events in the real world have been forgotten. In fall of 2004, as Greenspan started raising interest rates in baby steps (very belatedly - housing was already bubbling up), Krugman was very opposed to those rate hikes. His analogy for the tech-telecom bust was with the post-bubble doldrums in Japan - and it was no time to be risking a slide back by rising rates. In the event, directly as a result of that easy credit policy, we got the mother of all bubbles in housing, which has almost taken the entire financial system down with it. Krugman did not anticipate the bigger bubble that was brewing even as he was advocating continuing 1% interest rates (well below the rate of inflation even then!). Economists like Nouriel Roubini, Steven Roach (then Chief Economist at Morgan Stanley), eminent people like Paul Volcker (Fed Chairman between 79-87), investors like Warren Buffet & Marc Faber all warned about the 2004-7 bubble in housing several times, for many years. Krugman had a very public voice during that entire time, but saw no problems with the Greenspan/Bernanke Fed. It is worth remembering this real world record, as the world fetes his Nobel prize.
- gahahaha 18y ago
  Krugman in this op-ed from 2004 doesn't seem to be advocating lower interest rates, but simply stating that they are probably coming, and that many people are badly prepared for them. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E6DD1E3BF933A15757C0A9629C8B63 http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F05E6DD1E3BF... "A number of analysts have accused Mr. Greenspan of fostering a debt bubble in recent years, just as they accuse him of feeding the stock bubble during the 1990's. Just two months ago, Mr. Greenspan went out of his way to emphasize the financial benefits of adjustable-rate, as opposed to fixed-rate, mortgages. Let's hope that not too many families regarded that as useful advice." One reason why he might have argued for lower interest rates, is that the employment growth during the "Bush Boom" was so dismal compared to earlier expansionary periods. (See: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/about-that-bush-boom/ http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/08/26/about-that-bush-...)

pragmatic 18y ago

R.I.P. Paul Krugman http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmZmMzlmZjU4NDVlMmFlZWRlZDM4YjZiYmRmYjc4NDQ= http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmZmMzlmZjU4NDVlMmFlZWR...

DanielBMarkham 18y ago
Seems like you're posting an informed and reasonable argument from a political site. This argument has a contrary opinion to those expressed in this thread. Burn the witch! I wonder if I could make money selling pre-lit virtual torches for the angry mob that is about to descend upon you? Seriously -- I'd like to see this discussed in a separate article. Very interesting stuff.
- robg 18y ago
  That's not just any "political site". It's far right, especially now. Shoot, Buckley's son just resigned his column there because he had the audacity to support Obama. What would they have done to the father since, as a reasonable conservative, I can't see him endorsing Palin? The case against Krugman from those niches of the far right is almost entirely political. That link is a good example of the genre. This is better and back when NR had something worthwhile to say: http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmQ4MzY0NGVjODdmZmY2ZGQzMDAwZThmNTYyYzYxYjQ= http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NmQ4MzY0NGVjODdmZmY2ZGQ...
  - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
    E-gad, it's the "let's be perfectly clear" meme. Wonder where you got that one? I don't mind you characterization of the site as far right wing. I'd simply look at the facts, source if doubtful, and continue the discussion from there. Same as if it were far left wing.

DanielBMarkham 18y ago

Krugman, and the Politicization of the Prize (Editorial) http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/10/krugman_and_the_politicization.html http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2008/10/krugman_and...

olefoo 18y ago
Give it up dude, nobody cares that you disagree with his politics. He would not have been awarded the prize if his work wasn't important regardless of his politics.
- DanielBMarkham 18y ago
  It's not that nobody cares, it's that people are actively pissed off that I questioned the selection. Sorry, I'm not giving up being able to make a simple observation the group may disagree with. I'm sick of the herd mentality, and you guys can vote me into the gutter and it's not going to stop me. I could care less about Krugman.
  - davidw 18y ago
    Another thing for you to keep in mind: the same group handed out prizes at some point to Hayek and Friedman.
    - DanielBMarkham 18y ago
      I've been reading around some. As I was the first to admit, I am ignorant. FWIW, glowing reviews are running about 70-30 with critical reviews of their award. There's a nice glowing review over at Forbes (http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/13/krugman-economics-nobel-oped-cx_as_1013subramanian.html http://www.forbes.com/opinions/2008/10/13/krugman-economics-...) Even then, the author ends with: "But these days, even while disavowing overtly protectionist positions, Krugman's columns do sometimes have a protectionist tenor. Not only purists, but developing country policymakers, worry that Krugman is part of the shifting intellectual climate in the United States that has become ambivalent about keeping markets for goods and services open. Now that he also has the imprimatur of the Nobel Committee, Paul Krugman has a special responsibility to retain his cosmopolitan and internationalist credentials. At this time of financial crisis, Krugman should be reminding us that shutting down markets for trade helped transform the depression of the 1930s into the Great Depression." I'm open to discourse, just not impressed with the downmodding as a result of going against the herd over here. I've found economics a subject of some interest, but even with as much math as it takes, my _opinion_ is that it is far from a hard science like physics. So pointing out that politics and people's biases are involved shouldn't be such a freaking big deal, in my opinion. And that goes with Hayek, Friedman, and Krugman. My comment holds for all of them. That's the weird part about it.