tearing apart the RW arguments since his appearance on Morning Joe because he's being attacked. He has a really good series of posts.
Despicable Me
Funny: Angry Bear finds some of the usual suspects explaining How to Debate Paul Krugman, and the answer appears to be this: invent a straw man who bears no resemblance at all to the economist/columnist of the same name, and ridicule that imaginary person.
I have to say, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that I could play the role of History’s Greatest Monster to so many people. Thank you for the honor!
Aside from the silliness of the exercise, this little exchange is another illustration of a point I’ve noticed before: the way hard-right commentators assume that the other side must be their mirror image. They insist that no government intervention is ever justified; so liberals must support any and all government interventions. They want smaller government, as a principle; liberals must want bigger government, never mind what for. They believe that deficits and printing money are always evil; liberals must be for deficits and money-printing under all circumstances.
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/03/despicable-me/
Government Spending in the Crisis
Mostly a note to myself. Not long ago, the usual suspects were going on and on about how government spending had soared under Obama, pointing to spending as a share of GDP. Some of us tried to point out that this bump represented two temporary factors: 1. GDP was depressed thanks to the crisis, so the spending share was correspondingly elevated 2. Emergency aid programs, notably unemployment benefits, were up because of the crisis. The implication of this argument was that the government spending share would decline as the economy recovered.
Conservatives were, of course, having none of it — Obama was permanently enlarging the government to European size. So, how’s it going?
In the figure below the blue line shows government spending at all levels as a share of GDP; the red line shows the share of potential GDP — what we’d be producing at normal employment — as estimated by the Congressional Budget Office; it’s lower than the first line because the economy is still operating well below capacity.
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/02/government-spending-in-the-crisis/
Memo To Deficit Scolds: I Hear What You’re Saying
I just think it’s kinda dumb.
Neil Irwin has a very good piece on economists versus pundits on the deficit, which is however marred by a half-hearted attempt to squeeze the issue into a standard views-differ-on-shape-of-planet framework — neither side understands the other’s concerns, they’re talking past each other, etc..
Actually, I understand perfectly well where the deficit scolds are coming from; I just don’t think it makes any sense, for reasons I’ve explained at length, and which Irwin mostly lays out as well. (Missing from his analysis is the sheer difficulty of telling a story about how we get in trouble even if investors get worried about our debt).
There’s no comparable level of understanding on the other side; indeed, Joe Scarborough and, as far as I can tell, Bowles/Simpson/Peterson etc. are under the delusion that my views are way out of the economics mainstream, whereas the truth, as Irwin says, is that very similar if less colorfully expressed views are held by many and probably most economists in the business world, major policy institutions like the Fed and the IMF, and so on.
There isn’t any symmetry here; my side of the debate is actually paying attention both to the numbers and to the arguments of the other side, while the Very Serious People only listen to each other.
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/memo-to-deficit-scolds-i-hear-what-youre-saying/
Really informative:
Moveable Feast Macroeconomics
Ah, Paris in the 1920s. It was the era of Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, sovereign debt and stabilization. Wait, what?
OK, I’ve written before about the notion that France in the 20s offers the closest thing I can find in the historical record to a crisis of the kind the deficit scolds keep warning us about. We’re not at all like Greece; we have our own currency, and our debts are in that currency. So we can’t run out of cash, even if the bond vigilantes turn out to be real and lose faith in America. At worst, we’re something like France in the 1920s, with its floating exchange rate and large wartime debt — except that our debt isn’t nearly as bad as a share of GDP, and we don’t have the lingering gold standard mentality that prevailed across the Western world back then.
So, what actually happened to 1920s France?
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http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/01/moveable-feast-macroeconomics/
= new reply since forum marked as read
