Paul Krugman 
Thu Feb 04, 2010 at 07:12:52 AM EST
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( - promoted by Jack's Smirking Revenge)
From Paul Krugman's blog...
Health care reform -- which is crucial for millions of Americans -- hangs in the balance. Progressives are desperately in need of leadership; more specifically, House Democrats need to be told to pass the Senate bill, which isn't what they wanted but is vastly better than nothing. And what we get from the great progressive hope, the man who was offering hope and change, is this:
"I would advise that we try to move quickly to coalesce around those elements of the package that people agree on. We know that we need insurance reform, that the health insurance companies are taking advantage of people. We know that we have to have some form of cost containment because if we don't, then our budgets are going to blow up and we know that small businesses are going to need help so that they can provide health insurance to their families. Those are the core, some of the core elements of, to this bill. Now I think there's some things in there that people don't like and legitimately don't like."
In short, "Run away, run away"!
And more from Krugman...
Obama Liquidates Himself
A spending freeze? That's the brilliant response of the Obama team to their first serious political setback?
It's appalling on every level.
It's bad economics, depressing demand when the economy is still suffering from mass unemployment.
It's bad long-run fiscal policy, shifting attention away from the essential need to reform health care and focusing on small change instead.
And it's a betrayal of everything Obama's supporters thought they were working for. Just like that, Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view -- and more specifically, he has embraced the policy ideas of the man he defeated in 2008. A correspondent writes, "I feel like an idiot for supporting this guy."
"Obama has embraced and validated the Republican world-view."
And that's the whole story of Obama's miserable Presidency.
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Wed Sep 09, 2009 at 15:16:41 PM EDT
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Paul Krugman has been thinking deep meta-thoughts about deep meta-theories, and his foundational analysis of evolutionary biology has been chronicled on a New York Times blog devoted to similar issues.
Krugman celebrates the factuality of biological research, and encourages old-media economists to gather much, much more data from the internet, where graduate students in economics can "download securities prices from Bloomberg and see how blue skies and rain affect the behavior of financial markets." The blog's curator indulges Krugman's fantasy in a made-to-order universe where we can "brutally confront theory with data."
Obviously both of those hyper-intelligent individuals could avoid this sort of "abuse of language" at the price of tedious qualifications which would quickly overburden their readership and leave them talking into a vacuum, and nobody wants that, but nevertheless it may not be entirely out of place to wonder exactly how tedious those qualifications would have to be.
Unfortunately for all of us, the qualifications are endless, and we will never ever "see" a connection between cause and effect, neither on the Bloomberg ticker or even in a physics lab, where visual and conceptual "metaphors" are respectably anchored in standard procedures, but inevitably dissolve into the fog of quantum mechanics before anybody "sees" anything.
So what?
Everybody already knows that data only really "confront" the bleary eyes of weary lab assistants, and what's the harm in a little convenient shorthand for what everybody already knows? Without it no finite person could ever enunciate any kind of theory, economic or physical.
The harm is payrolls shrinking by hundreds of thousands of jobs month after month, and almost every relevant article in the New York Times winding up with a professor of economics somewhere "seeing" light at the end of the tunnel. Happy days are (almost) here again!
Meanwhile simple alternatives to watching this mess get worse, like hiring the unemployed for massive public-works projects which our disintegrating infrastructure absolutely requires anyway, get lost in a fog of Keynesian stimuli or Chicago laissez-aller, and outright destitution is now confronting millions of Americans more brutally than mere data will ever confront anything.
Obama's stimulus was a bastardization of Keynesian deficit spending and Friedman-esque tax cuts, a grab-bag of almost all contemporary economic theories, and only the eyes of faith can "see" much in the way of results, but the same $700 billion package could have employed 6,000,000 people at $3000 per month tax-free for about 40 months, with no theoretical framework whatsoever except giving jobs to the jobless, and if our moribund economy still didn't have a pulse after 40 months, at least tax-payers would have had some brand new bridges and thousands of windmills to show for their money, and 6,000,000 people would have also earned a living for what promises to be three lean, mean years.
But instead we got theories, and "abuse of language."
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Thu Jul 16, 2009 at 11:12:24 AM EDT
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An avalanche-fence in the French Alps
It's bad enough to be jobless for a few weeks; it's much worse being unemployed for months or years. Yet that's exactly what will happen to millions of Americans if the average forecast is right - which means that many of the unemployed will lose their savings, their homes and more. To head off this outcome - and remember, this isn't what economic Cassandras are saying; it's the forecasting consensus - we'd need to get another round of fiscal stimulus under way very soon. But neither Congress nor, alas, the Obama administration is showing any inclination to act.
Not much about macro-economics is obvious, and even mathematical economists who subscribe to exactly the same sub-division of economic ideology can radically disagree about factors as fundamental as the fiscal multiplier.
Likewise even the definitions of terms like "unemployment" are so complicated and indefinitely qualified that even the most official of all official measures of unemployment by the Bureau of Labor Statistics is immediately fractured into six "alternative measures of labor underutilization," and there wouldn't be much hope for the average person to understand anything about the statistical measures of unemployment if all those different indicators weren't moving in exactly the same direction.
Zoom!
One of many unpleasant aspects of depression and recession economics is what you might call a snowball effect, and as more and more people lose jobs, the salesmen who formerly sold them boats goes under, and then the worker who built the boats, and so on.
Prescriptions for dealing with similar phenomena have been incorporated into the folk-wisdom of all times and places, in the form of nostrums like "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure" and "a stitch in time saves nine," but American political economics possesses a peculiar un-wisdom of its own, and although one or two "stitches in time" could have prevented the whole mess ten years ago when Brooksley Born was ringing alarms all over Washington, and Larry Summers was making sure nobody listened, now the same little snowball which Ms. Born detected in its very beginnings has doubled its snow-mass again and again and again and turned into a regular avalanche.
But not every avalanche is a roaring monster consuming skiers and chalets and tiny Swiss villages on its way to the bottom of the mountain, because mountainsides all over the world are terraced with avalanche-fences to stop little avalanches before they grow, and almost every avalanche-fence in the world is located somewhere between the top of a slope and the middle, because by the time an avalanche gets anywhere near the bottom of a mountain, you need something more like the Great Wall of China than any kind of fence to stop it.
This is a picturesque translation of the arguments Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz and Dean Baker and many other honest economists made for applying a realistic stimulus to the American economy before our current recession/depression developed too much momentum, but instead we got a feeble and slow-motion stimulus full of tax-cuts, like a rickety fence that wouldn't even stop a rabbit, much less an avalanche, and the American economy is still bleeding ten or fifteen or twenty thousand jobs every day.
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Mon May 25, 2009 at 19:43:34 PM EDT
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In my ongoing effort to postpone housecleaning activities and property maintenance, I wandered over to Calitics and, thanks to dday, discovered that even Paul Krugman has concluded California is a banana republic:
Who would have thought that America's largest state, a state whose economy is larger than that of all but a few nations, could so easily become a banana republic?
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