Friday, September 23, 2011

Everybody with a beard looks alike

Paul Krugman is somewhat baffled by the above photo, which is of George Clooney's CIA agent character in the 2005 movie Syriana, except with a caption (of course!).

Still, I wonder sometimes how Krugman doesn't snap. Sometimes on those talking gasbag shows when someone says something completely stupid and nonsensical, Krugman's looking at them like, "you got to be kidding", he's got that expression on his face. Then there's all the folks who put words into Krugman's mouth, who state nonsense like:

  1. "Krugman encouraged the housing bubble" (he didn't -- he said that if Greenspan kept dropping interest rates and pushing people to buy homes, Greenspan was going to create a housing bubble, but for some reason a prediction becomes "Krugman wanted it"?)
  2. "Krugman always says printing money is the best thing to do." (Err, no -- Krugman points out both in his research and in his editorials that when you hit the interest rate zero boundary, fiscal policy -- i.e., actually putting government to work as consumer of last resort -- is the best thing to do, printing money would be incidental to that and unnecessary at present due to ultra-low interest rates).
  3. "Krugman is the cause of the common cold." Uhm, okay, so I made that one up, but it makes just as much sense :).
So anyhow: let us simply be glad that someone with the intelligence of Paul Krugman has somehow managed to hold it together, because he's smart enough that if he flips, there's some folks whose cars are not only going to be burning, but they're going to be in it, 'cause Krugman don't play :).

-- Badtux the Appreciative Penguin

Posted by BadTux at 9/23/2011 09:58:00 PM
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4 comments:

  1. Bukko Boomeranger24/9/11 4:29 AM

    Krugman is regarded as the absolute devil on several econoblog sites I like, such as Zerohedge and Max Keiser (an outraged and outrageous financial commentator, kinda like Donald Duck doing Howard Beale). I still like the sites because they're ahead of the mainstream news curve and skeptical of TPTB, but their attitude is one of all spleen and no solutions. To them, especially their Glibbo/Reichy commenters, Krugman's a simplistic, "print money as the solution to everything" caricature. They jeer his Nobel Prize as much as they do Preznit Hopey's. I'm not in total agreement with the Prof, especially his persistent faith in Pretendisent Sellout, but at least Krugman has a heart. His critics, they've got lizard hearts that pump bile instead of blood.

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  2. BadTux24/9/11 9:19 AM

    The "print money" strawman is the most ridiculous. Keynesian economics only says to print money when you're not already at the 0% interest boundary. But we're already there. Past that point, Keynesian economics says fiscal policy -- turning the government into consumer of last resort to mobilize slack resources in the economy -- is the solution. Crap, Krugman even has published *academic papers* showing that printing money at the zero bounds doesn't do anything except make mattresses plump. This caricature shows an ignorance of Krugman's very own research!

    As for Krugman's faith in Hopey Changey, I think it's more despair. Despair because if Hopey Changey really is the conservative sellout that he appears to be, then there's no hope at all, we're all fucked. So he prefers to believe that Hopey Changey is something other than what he is, because the alternative is to go behind his townhouse and shoot himself in the head.

    - Badtux the Economics Penguin

    ReplyDelete
  3. BBC24/9/11 9:25 AM

    I don't watch any of that crap.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Jazzbumpa24/9/11 10:54 AM

    I've done a little Krugman derangement debunking on my blog. In my experience Krugman haters are always wrong, and always easy to refute because they are either stupid, or simply ignore the facts. My favorite adventure in this arena was blowing up Scott Sumner who is NOT stupid.

    But Bukko, if you think PK has persistent faith in Pretendisent Sellout, you haven't been reading PK.

    Cheers!
    JzB

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