Hey, forget the space aliens! We now have a new economic stimulus package: the earthquake!
Actually, no. It was too small, just like the "stimulus," darn it! Paul Krugman has given us the Ultimate Broken Window Fallacy post on Google about yesterday's earthquake (which I admit we did NOT feel here in Riga):
"People on Twitter might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage."Now, if we only could get the space aliens to induce and earthquake, we all could get rich!!
28 comments:
A very minor correction: Krugman's actual post was on Google+. He's referring to the many Tweets that made jokes at his expense, like this one.
I must admit that after I saw that post from Reason, my first thought was "Dr. Anderson could have a field day with this."
My take on Krugman's comment.
Change made. I can't believe the guy is serious...but he is.
Wait a second... Recently Obama said that the earthquake and tsunami in Japan were bad things, they disrupted supply chains and stalled the recovery... But Krugman says that a nasty earthquake is good for economy...
What's the conclusion here? Overseas disasters bad, local disasters good for America?
These Keynesians make my head spin!
"People on Google might be joking, but in all seriousness, we would see a bigger boost in spending and hence economic growth if the earthquake had done more damage."
And there you have the rotten core of Keynesianism. Destruction of wealth creates a vacuum of wealth and therefore "spending" drives economic growth, no matter if physical wealth is destroyed, no matter if capital is consumed, no matter if people die.
Bill, you changed the wrong word. The Reason quote from Krugman was correct; he said, "People on twitter might be joking..." But in your summary, you should be saying that Krugman said this on Google+, not on twitter.
As has been mentioned before, the beliefs of Krugman and associates can be easily taken to their logical conclusion. If we wish to stimulate the economy, why not just have an Air Force bomber fly over a major city and drop a small nuke? No, wait... if the city were D.C., then that might actually make sense and do us all some good! Ok, how about this? We create a government program to borrow a bunch of money and then to build a brand new city out in the desert somewhere. Then we bomb that! Or, even better, we just build the city broken in the first place. We stack bricks and broken concrete in roughly build sized piles of rubble, and that way, we don't even have to pay the cost of the bomber flying over.
Yeah, that's the ticket! The more I think about this, the more sense it makes...
What scares the hell out of me is that this man still finds employment over at the New York Times.
What scares the hell out of me is that this man still finds employment over at the New York Times.
Considering how wealthy he's become spouting this nonsense, it does make some sense that he spouts it.
What scares me is that there are people like our precious Keynesian Kommenters who believe it.
Changes made. Krugman now claims it was a forgery. Space aliens must have done it.
"What scares me is that there are people like our precious Keynesian Kommenters who believe it."
reminds me a lot of Limbaugh's "Ditto-Heads"
Paul Krugman is the Deepak Chopra of economics.
"reminds me a lot of Limbaugh's "Ditto-Heads""
Trying to figure out the relevance of this comment.
Paul Krugman does not have a Google+ account
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/24/identity-theft/
You guys are dishonest to the core, and prove his point for him. When you can't beat him with facts, you just make things up.
"What scares me is that there are people like our precious Keynesian Kommenters who believe it."
What scares me is that Keynesian economics is working as intended and its defenders don't even see that.
@ Jason Calley. There's always Detroit, or the rest of the rust belt, i.e., Cleveland, Buffalo, Rochester, etc.
@Anon 10:55
"You guys are dishonest to the core, and prove his point for him."
Except Prof Anderson blogged this post at 2AM and Krugman didn't publish his Identity Theft article until 9:24 AM.
Prof Anderson updated this post to reflect what Krugman states AND posted a comment stating he had done so at 10:03 AM, not even 45 minutes later.
When are you going to update here and apologize, especially since you made your post over 50 minutes after Prof. Anderson made his correction?
I think the real meaning of this forgery is that there is nothing in it that contradicts what Krugman has said repeatedly.
The forgery is believable specifically because it is in line with his stated opinions.
"Never let a crisis go to waste"
LOL:
"Most of you probably know by now that the alleged Krugman reaction to the earthquake on Google + was a fake."
http://factsandotherstubbornthings.blogspot.com/2011/08/fake-krugman-on-keynesian-economics.html
Meanwhile Anderson is so pathetic that he just reports that Krugman "claims" it was a forgery.
I believe space aliens abducted Krugman and hypnotized him to create this G+ account, all for plausible deniability purposes. This way, his goals of stimulating the economy from their proposed alien invasion will be thwarted as he will lose credibility.
Either that or Bush's fault.
:-)
William Anderson. You missed the point - impersonating a person is dishonest and dangerous.
You are gloating, but what if someone impersonates you, saying something that is consistent with your beliefs, but, to repeat, is not you in the first place, you are a blogger, don't tell me that you find that acceptable.
if you find that acceptable, then your website attacking krugman has reached the point of gloating, not serious criticism, as what serious economists do when they referee or discuss other economists' works.
OK, folks. Here is the thing that I think the detractors have forgotten: this statement hardly was out of line with what Krugman has been saying.
That's right, anyone who claims that if we decided to gear up to fight a war with space aliens that never make it to earth, then such actions will pull us out of the depression is going to be seen as being capable of making the forged statement.
I never said that forgeries were acceptable; my point is that what was said is believable, given what Krugman has said in the past. Day after day, Krugman gives us one rendition of the Broken Window Fallacy after another.
It did not occur to people that this statement was a forgery because, face it, it really fell into line with other things Krugman says regularly.
As for being vulnerable to forgeries and the like, Krugman has chosen to be outspoken, and this stuff, like it or not, comes with the territory. Look at the hostile commentators on this page; I have had ideas attributed to me that I don't believe, but my point is that if I am going to have a blog like this, I have to accept that not everyone is going to like what I say. So what?
@LK
"Meanwhile Anderson is so pathetic that he just reports that Krugman "claims" it was a forgery."
And he updated the blog post right after he realized that it was not really Krugman.
Why don't you mention that?
Poe's Law.
Apart from the aliens, he also said this in 2001:
"Ghastly as it may seem to say this, the terror attack -- like the original day of infamy, which brought an end to the Great Depression -- could even do some economic good" - Krugman, 14th September 2001
Well, as you know, there were lots of broken windows in the World Trade Tower collapses, and the more windows that are broken, the more prosperity is created!
@ Mike Cheel... from Anonymous' comment, is it very hard to figure out the timeline of events on their end?
1) Anon somehow learns that Krugman is being excoriated (again) by Bill Anderson.
2) Anon, being too lazy to read/research on his/her own, follows the link that's been provided
3) Before reading anything on the linked page, Anon posts his retort in defense of PK.
We have evidence of #3, he posted AFTER the correction had been made, which supports my hypothesis in #2.
Of course, our 'real' sin, in the eyes of these folks, is that we didn't wait for the 'experts' to confirm anything, but thought and acted on our own. Such independent thinking does not fit into the Keynesian models, and must therefore be eradicated. Then we must pretend that such thinking doesn't even exist, and has never existed, and that even the experts rely on consensus for their decision-making, rendering individual thought without value to collective society.
So... Krugman and the Keynesians DON'T think a more destructive earthquake would have stimulated our economy?
I see lots of ppl denying PK's authorship of the post, but none of them are denouncing the argument it made.
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