A somewhat long, but interesting look into the transformation of Paul Krugman. Like I've said before, he and I disagree on almost every policy prescription imaginable, but he is a first class intellect whose theories and insights are mind-blowing. However, his wife is the academic equivalent of Yoko Ono. http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/03/01/100301fa_fact_macfarquhar?currentPage=all
Great read, thanks. If you were to recommend someone to provide a counterpoint to Krugman - someone with whom you generally agree rather than disagree, someone with economic cred but who writes for the unwashed masses, who would that be? barfo
Good question. There's no one on my side (I would be defined in that article as a "freshwater" economist) who does the same thing Krugman does. He's one of the finest Keynesian minds there is, yet he's pitched his academic career aside and waded into the dirty waters of partisanship. Remember, he doesn't talk about economics as much as he talks about politics. He uses economics to butress his political opinion. There are plenty of second-rate economists doing the same thing (Thomas Sowell, Walter Williams, etc.), but no one of Krugman's stature. Milton Friedman used to do it, Gary Becker writes an occasional column, but no one regularly.
Krugman's published today one of his finest, most pointed pieces in my memory: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/22/opinion/22krugman.html?ref=opinion
Krugman takes us for fools. http://www.cbpp.org/cms/index.cfm?fa=view&id=1258 Social Security spending for FY 2009 was $617B Medicare, Medicaid, and CHIP spending for FY 2009 was $599B Looks like about $1.2T - $1.4T out of a budget of $3.6T to me.
First and foremost, you'd want to be a regular reader of Tyler Cowen. He's the main blogger at Marginal Revolution, and often writes Sunday Pieces for the NY Times. Megan McArdle is the business editor of the Atlantic and maintains an excellent blog from which she's pretty handily dissected most of the arguments for health care. They're both moderately libertarian in their outlook and probably most obviously run counter to Krugman in that they're both scrupulously nice to their ideological opponents. They're also both first rate thinkers. I could see Cowen winning a Nobel at some point, although his interests tend to lie in areas that don't traditionally get recognized. The guys at EconLog are topical and interesting, and generally a little more firebrand in their individualist, libertarian brand of economics. Caplan is actually not argumentative at all, but he rarely engages on very "political" issues. Kling used to work in the mortgage business and is a heck of a teacher. I think he's generally right on his big picture "recalculation" story of the current recession and its causes, but he sometimes seems a little myopic on it for my taste. Finally, there's Russ Roberts, who does podcasts, gives talks on NPR, and writes at Cafe Hayek. He is the brains behind the recent viral video hit featuring Keynes and Hayek [video=youtube;d0nERTFo-Sk]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk"]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0nERTFo-Sk[/video] I guess for the sake of full disclosure, whatever that means in this context, I worked as a research assistant for Russ, took several classes with Bryan Caplan, and routinely got good advice from Tyler Cowen while I was in grad school at GMU. Beyond those guys, Harvard professor Greg Mankiw writes a very accessible econ blog with a more mainstream conservative take. If you ever become a little bit more washed than the masses, you might find Scott Sumner or Jim Hamilton worth a read. They're very interesting but generally understate the important stuff they have to say by couching it in more technical terms.
I'm a bit perplexed by this. I agree that Krugman has a first class intellect, but I've always come away from lots of what he writes as a tremendous misapplication of that intellect. In, I guess, the sense that you could call the smartest of Cardinals back in the 14th century mind-blowing for coming up with the most sophisticated argument of how many angels can fit on the head of a pin (which mostly seems what being an intellectual boils down to these days). I mean, I'm not just saying you and I would disagree with his policy prescriptions. I think if you were to take his fundamental contributions to economic science, I think most mainstream economists would say they're interesting but probably misleading as far as implementing any practical policy. New trade theory essentially leaves most casual folks coming away thinking "protectionism", and economists of pretty much every stripe are for free trade. Likewise, I think his stuff on liquidity traps and international finance is interesting, but I think even quite a bit more liberal folks than me think the prescriptions he's put forth (e.g. trade war with China, triple the stimulus) are wildly impractical and solutions in the same sense that sawing off your leg is a solution to a stubbed toe.
Although he is not an economist like Krugman, David Brooks is also a first-rate smartie. When I want to understand the Republican POV, he makes the most sense.
I don't know, but I specifically remember him forecasting the bursting of the housing bubble in 2007 or so and thinking "What does he know, my home value will go up forever." Ha!
He said, "But there has always been a political problem with this agenda. Voters may say that they oppose big government, but the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security — are very popular. So how can the public be persuaded to accept large spending cuts?" Maybe military spending and interest on the debt are equally dominant? (They are). And there's still another 1/3 of the budget that can be tackled.
Math not very accurate. Here's a graph from the link you provided. So, which parts of that do you feel are not very popular and voters would be happy to cut? Or is your complaint just that Krugman gave an incomplete list of popular programs? barfo
Seems to me people are getting caught up too much about how much of the current deficit was caused by stimulus spending vs entitlements. The key point he is making is that for 30 years the Republican plan was to "starve the beast" by cutting taxes and running up a ridiculous national debt, so eventually we'd have no choice but to cut spending or raise taxes. Americans would naturally be averse to taxes, so we'd be forced to cut spending. The beast would starve. Well, the time to starve it has come. We finally got to the point where they wanted us all along. Where's the leadership of the Republican party on cutting government programs? I just don't see it. And that's the real problem with the "starve the beast" election strategy. It's great to run on when you aren't actually starving it.
It was Krugman who stated that "the programs that actually dominate federal spending — Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security," which simply isn't true. My math is quite fine. Those figures are from FY 2008 when the budget was $2.5T. Give them a nice 10% yearly growth due to inflation and population aging and those things Krugman talks about are $1.6T out of a $3.6T budget THIS YEAR. You could easily make the point that Defense, Safety Net Programs, and Interest on the Debt dominate federal spending (and none are entitlements). How about we just go back and spend the $2.5T like in 2008, just 2 years ago (with 2 wars ongoing, at that). Or a 10% hike at $2.75T. That would be something like a healthy 5% year over year increase since Clinton's last budget. Or is it in your interest somehow to see the 8% that is interest on the debt turn into the biggest of any one item in that chart? It's going to be there before Obama's term is over.
Ok, you could make that point. Where would it get you? Krugman's point is that people don't actually want to cut government spending. You are arguing that he named the wrong programs. Who cares? Show me some programs that people want cut. If you can't do that, he's not wrong. I think mook was right. You want to make this all about the stimulus. That wasn't the subject of the article. The stimulus is temporary. The question of starving the beast goes back many years, and will still be an issue after the recession is over. barfo
lol. And that was what, 25 years ago? (I'm not familiar with the quote. Just guessing.) Both guys have been dead for more than a decade. Any day now, though, Republicans are going to start axing all those horrible government programs Americans hate. Note: I'm not saying Democrats haven't had their own share in this mess that is our national finances. But at least they never pretended that some day a magic diet was going to come to make all the spending stop. They wanted their binge, but they also wanted to pay for it. Republicans have been like binge eaters who also figured they'd save money by cutting their gym membership. After all, if they just kept eating eventually there wouldn't be any food left and we'd have to starve.
People DO want to cut government spending. I just proposed a $900B cut. People hate the bank bailouts ($400B/year over 2 years) and the so-called stimulus bill (also $400B/year over 2 years). Even if those were one-time spending things, the budget wouldn't be negative $trillion+ per year if there wasn't some massive increase in spending. Then there's about 30% of the population who make up the tea party movement that your kind misunderestimates. They're all about fiscal responsibility.
Reagan was president at the time, O'Neil speaker of the house. I'd say democrats have historically been tax and spend, while republicans have been borrow and spend. Right now though, democrats are borrow and spend at a level never seen before, and they still haven't met a tax hike they didn't like. I saw some economist write that once the Bush tax cuts expire and new taxes are enacted, we'll be the 4th highest taxed people in the world, behind Camaroon, Denmark, and the Netherlands. And people think the country is headed in the wrong direction now, just wait.
