I confess that I find many of the mathematical exercises in economics to be wholly uninteresting and irrelevant and to that extent I enjoyed Krugman's article (here). But he really does have his head....
as John Cochrane points out, at great length. Here is the intro to Cochrane's piece.
Many friends and colleagues have asked me
what I think of Paul Krugman’s New York Times Magazine article, “How did
Economists get it so wrong?”
Most of all, it’s sad. Imagine this weren’t
economics for a moment. Imagine this were a respected scientist turned popular
writer, who says, most basically, that everything everyone has done in his
field since the mid 1960s is a complete waste of time. Everything that fills
its academic journals, is taught in its PhD programs, presented at its
conferences, summarized in its graduate textbooks, and rewarded with the
accolades a profession can bestow, including multiple Nobel prizes, is totally
wrong. Instead, he calls for a return to
the eternal verities of a rather convoluted book written in the 1930s, as
taught to our author in his undergraduate introductory courses. If a scientist, he might be a global-warming
skeptic, an AIDS-HIV disbeliever, a stalwart that maybe continents don’t move
after all, or that smoking isn’t that bad for you really.
It gets worse. Krugman hints at dark
conspiracies, claiming “dissenters are marginalized.” Most of the article is just
a calumnious personal attack on an ever-growing enemies list, which now
includes “new Keyenesians” such as Olivier Blanchard and Greg Mankiw. Rather than source professional writing, he
plays gotcha with out-of-context second-hand quotes from media interviews. He
makes stuff up, boldly putting words in people’s mouths that run contrary to
their written opinions. Even this isn’t
enough: he adds cartoons to try to make his “enemies” look silly, and puts them
in false and embarrassing situations. He
accuses us literally of adopting ideas for pay, selling out for “sabbaticals at
the Hoover institution” and fat “Wall street paychecks.” It sounds a bit
paranoid.
It’s annoying to the victims, but we’re big
boys and girls. It’s a disservice to New York Times readers. They depend on Krugman
to read real academic literature and digest it, and they get this schlock
instead. And it’s ineffective. Any astute reader knows that personal attacks
and innuendo mean the author has run out of ideas.
And that’s the biggest and saddest news of
this piece: Paul Krugman has no interesting ideas whatsoever about what caused
our current financial and economic problems, what policies might have prevented
it, or what might help us in the future, and he has no contact with people who
do. “Irrationality” and “spend like a drunken sailor” are pretty superficial
compared to all the fascinating things economists are writing about it these
days.
What do I think? How sad.
...
