Paul Krugman

Politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth.

Paul Krugman (born 28 February 1953) is a Nobel Prize winning, New Keynesian economist.

Quotes

There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
Do some homework to find out what these people really want. I’m not talking about deeply hidden motives; usually the true goal is in the public domain.
  • If you want a simple model for predicting the unemployment rate in the United States over the next few years, here it is: It will be what Greenspan wants it to be, plus or minus a random error reflecting the fact that he is not quite God.
    • Slate, 6 February 1997; as cited by Orrin Judd at brothersjuddblog, 14 August 2004
  • To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble. Judging by Mr. Greenspan's remarkably cheerful recent testimony, he still thinks he can pull that off. But the Fed chairman's crystal ball has been cloudy lately; remember how he urged Congress to cut taxes to head off the risk of excessive budget surpluses? And a sober look at recent data is not encouraging.
  • There is no economic policy. That's really important to say. The general modus operandi of the Bushies is that they don't make policies to deal with problems. They use problems to justify things they wanted to do anyway. So there is no policy to deal with the lack of jobs. There really isn't even a policy to deal with terrorism. It's all about how can we spin what's happening out there to do what we want to do.
    • When asked to define the economic policy of the Bush administration in a BuzzFlash interview, 11 September 2003
  • The raw fact is that every successful example of economic development this past century – every case of a poor nation that worked its way up to a more or less decent, or at least dramatically better, standard of living – has taken place via globalization, that is, by producing for the world market rather than trying for self-sufficiency.
    • The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, ISBN 0393058506, pp. 368–9; as cited by Edward Fullbrook at logosjournal, Logos 4.1, winter 2005
  • What saved the economy, and the New Deal was the enormous public-works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy's needs.
    • Op-ed, "Franklin Delano Obama," New York Times, November 10, 2008 [1]
  • We’re living in a Dark Age of macroeconomics. Remember, what defined the Dark Ages wasn’t the fact that they were primitive — the Bronze Age was primitive, too. What made the Dark Ages dark was the fact that so much knowledge had been lost, that so much known to the Greeks and Romans had been forgotten by the barbarian kingdoms that followed.
  • ... politics determine who has the power, not who has the truth.
    • The Australian Financial Review, 6 September 2010, p.15, "Time for Obama to abandon caution". Also seen in the Sacramento Bee [2]
  • The appeal to the intellectually insecure is also more important than it might seem. Because economics touches so much of life, everyone wants to have an opinion. Yet the kind of economics covered in the textbooks is a technical subject that many people find hard to follow. How reassuring, then, to be told that it is all irrelevant -- that all you really need to know are a few simple ideas! Quite a few supply-siders have created for themselves a wonderful alternative intellectual history in which John Maynard Keynes was a fraud, Paul Samuelson and even Milton Friedman are fools, and the true line of deep economic thought runs from Adam Smith through obscure turn-of-the-century Austrians straight to them.
  • If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. … There was a Twilight Zone episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
    • on CNN's "Fareed Zakaria GPS", August 21, 2011. [3]
  • ...and Newt [Gingrich] — although somebody said "he’s a stupid man’s idea of what a smart person sounds like," but he is more plausible than the other guys that they’ve been pushing up.
  • Sometimes economists in official positions give bad advice; sometimes they give very, very bad advice; and sometimes they work at the OECD.

Rules of reporting (2003)

The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century, 2003, Rules of reporting pp. 13-19
  • Do some homework to find out what these people really want. I’m not talking about deeply hidden motives; usually the true goal is in the public domain. You just have to look at what the people said before they were trying to sell it to the broad public.
  • When you are dealing with the revolutionary power, it’s important to realize that it will make whatever argument advances that goal. So, there should be no presumption that the claims makes any sense in their own terms.
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Quotes about Krugman

  • Krugman [...] was not cheerfully advocating a housing bubble, but instead he was glumly saying that the only way he could see to get out of the recession would be for such a bubble to occur.
  • Until the emergence of Democrat leader John Kerry, Paul Krugman had virtually become the leader of the opposition in America, an unusual position for an academic economist.
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Last modified on 11 May 2013, at 16:38