Saturday, March 14, 2009

Krugman Mankiw Bet

This is how much of a genius I am. I said this BEFORE MANY TIMES. 2006.

Now Mankiw is getting it.

Come on KRUGMAN, you pathetic excuse for an economist. TAKE THE BET!!!!!

His Nobel Prize would be worthless if he doesn't.

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

PK won't take the bet - because he knows he'll lose.

I don't care if he's a Nobel winner. The Nobel used to actually mean something in the days before the selection committees became dominated by leftist agenda-driven idiotarians. PK's, Al Gore's and Yassir Arafat's selection says far more about the Nobel committee than it does about PK.

PK may be a good economist, but his economics are so horribly tainted with his partisanship that he is useless.

Anonymous said...

I think it's funny how Krugman has (in the 9/14/03 edition of the NYT) attributed the end of the early 80s recession to Keynesian style fiscal and monetary stimulus, when unemployment rates were at 10.2% and the government deficit was never more than 6% of GDP.

Now unemployment is 8.1%, and Krugman doesn't think that a government deficit equal to 12% of GDP, or $1.75 trillion, is going to be enough stimulus to get us out of it.

Paul Krugman isn't being consistent with his own theories. If a government deficit less than 6% got us out of the early 80s recession which had over 10% unemployment, why isn't 12% enough to get us out of a recession that's only caused 8% unemployment so far?

Sure, unemployment is going to go over 8%, but it'll need to go a hell of a lot higher than 8%, or even 10%, if double the amount that worked last time (so he claims) still isn't enough. Seriously, if one were to assume a constant amount of unemployment that can be deficit-stimulated away, then the US would need to pass 20% unemployment for the current stimulus package to not be big enough. So, why is such an obvious inconsistency in Krugman's thinking eluding his attention?

Here's why: in his position as a columnist for the New York Times, Krugman is a hack. As an international trade theorist he's not so bad. He even makes the case that trade raises the standard of living for both parties, which is pretty much universally accepted among economists although you'll never see him mention something like that in his NYT column. See, when he's writing for the New York Times he knows what his audience wants to hear and he tells it to them whether it's good economics or not, and the readers of the New York Times do *not* want to hear good economics very often. Explaining the basics of Ricardian comparative advantage to the garden-variety protectionist is like brandishing a cross at a vampire.

Hot Sam said...

Krugman is a pompous, ignorant moron. He's so enamored by his own ability to formulate mathematically tractable models and take derivatives that he has completely forgotten what life in the real world is all about.

He repeatedly claims to fully understand such things but he is so far removed from it, he hasn't got a clue. He's what I call DK Squared: He doesn't know that he doesn't know.

He's just like Brad DeLong, the leftist Econo-blogger who always and everywhere touts diversity, but chooses to live in a town that is 0.5 percent black and teaches at a university with only 3 percent of black students.

I caught Krugman once trying to criticize the inability of the Army to properly equip troops in Iraq. I explained to him that producing half a million sets of high quality body armor and shipping them halfway around the world can't be done overnight, easily, or cheaply - something a real economist should understand quite well.

Last year, he criticized the McCain and Clinton proposals for a gas tax holiday. Since gasoline supply would be perfectly inelastic, he assumed, all of the benefits would go to producers. I asked him why he thought gas supply would be fixed and presented data from the EIA showing they were already ramping up supply for the summer. He didn't publish the comment nor did he ever respond.

Then he tried to ease fears of "nationalization" by saying we have already done that with Indy Mac and other banks. I carefully explained to him the difference between receivership, conservatorship, and nationalization. Again, he didn't publish the comment nor did he respond to it.

On his blog, he almost never publishes comments which criticize or question him. Krugman is an idiot, a ninny, an elitist, and a coward.

He was a teenager in the 60's - that explains it all.

Anonymous said...

Hey Cap,

Was Krugman's Nobel legit, did he deserve it?