What’s Left of the Left: Krugman's Lonely Crusade
There was a time, not really that long ago, when I respected Paul Krugman as much as I did any economic thinker. I suggest the following profile, from New York Magazine . What’s Left of the Left: Paul Krugman's Lonely Crusade Economics is closer to psychology or sociology than a "hard science." Six economists can study the same moment and history and develop at least seven plausible explanations for economic events. Mathematical models have proved themselves wrong more than once. The 2008 Federal Reserve unemployment predictions are merely one example: way, way off the mark. Krugman's fatal flaw, one empirical economists of all persuasions repeat, is having too much confidence is how he reads the data -- while being too dismissive of how other people read the same numbers. It's a cockiness that screams, "I am smarter than everyone else, and I know it." As Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes: I brought up the work of the legal scholar Cass Sunstein, n...
