Afternoon Must-Read: Paul Krugman Has Been on a Serious Roll All of This Just-Past Weekend!

Paul Krugman has been on a serious roll this weekend. All worth reading and pondering:

  • On Econoheroes http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/on-econoheroes: “Joe [Stiglitz] and I do tend to get quoted, invoked, etc. on a frequent basis in liberal media and by liberals in general, usually with (excessive) approbation…. [The] people playing a comparable role in right-wing discussion… tend not to be highly cited or even competent economists. So don’t tell me that Greg Mankiw or Robert Barro are famous economists and also conservative. Indeed they are. But are they omnipresent on the conservative scene?… ‘mankiw economy’… get[s]… 5200 hits… ‘stephen moore economy’… get[s] 65,700… ‘stiglitz economy’… get[s] 43,800…. This [is] a real asymmetry…. The right does not turn to these eminent conservative economists for guidance and support; it prefers the hacks.”
  • History and Policy Failure http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/history-and-policy-failur: “I’ve been having a hard time reading Barry Eichengreen’s Hall of Mirrors… a very good book…. But the recent history is painful, because I was watching in real time, warning desperately that what did happen, would happen…”
  • Deflation As Betrayal http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/deflation-as-betrayal: “southern Europe played by the rules [of the Euro], but in its time of need the rules [of the Euro] were changed, hugely to its disadvantage…”
  • Orthodoxy, Heterodoxy, and Ideology http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/orthodoxy-heterodoxy-and-ideology: “Not that there’s anything wrong with being heterodox… but a lot of what we’ve been seeing misidentifies the problem… gives aid and comfort to the wrong people…. Standard macroeconomics does NOT justify the attacks on fiscal stimulus and the embrace of austerity…austerians had to throw out the models and abandon statistical principles to justify their claims…”
  • Where Are The Friedmans Of Yesteryear? http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/where-are-the-friedmans-of-yesteryear: “Modern conservatism doesn’t have Friedman-like figures…. Who would be the conservative counterparts [to Stiglitz and me]? Who gets cited by, say, Republican governors seeking authority for their tax cuts, or published on a regular basis on conservative opinion pages? I’d say Stephen Moore and Arthur Laffer…. And it’s not as if Moore and Laffer are guys who may lack academic cred but have proved themselves as working analysts…”
  • Reaganomics Undefended http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/reaganomics-undefended: “this piece by Robert Samuelson, attacking me over my debunking of the Reagan legend, is really strange… Samuelson declares me ‘totally wrong,’ then seems to agree with me about the economics…”
  • Emerging Markets After The [Taper] Tantrum :
    “The [taper] tantrum has subsided, and US interest rates have retraced much of their rise. But EM currencies haven’t rebounded… One guess is that we’re seeing retroactive evidence that the EM thing was a bubble…”
  • [For the Love of Carbon http://www.nytimes.com/2015/01/12/opinion/paul-krugman-for-the-love-of-carbon.html: “Why is this environmentally troubling project an urgent priority in a time of plunging world oil prices? Well, the party line, from people like Mitch McConnell, the new Senate majority leader, is that it’s all about jobs…. [But] you can’t consistently claim that pipeline spending creates jobs while government spending doesn’t…. If Mr. McConnell and company really believe that we need more spending to create jobs, why not support a push to upgrade America’s crumbling infrastructure? So what should be done about Keystone XL? If you believe that it would be environmentally damaging… you should be against it, and you should ignore the claims about job creation. The numbers being thrown around are tiny…. The jobs argument for the pipeline is basically a sick joke coming from people who have done all they can to destroy American jobs…”

January 12, 2015

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