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We Should Reject The Attempt To Divert The National Conversation Away From Soaring Inequality Toward The Alleged Moral Failings Of Those Americans Being Left Behind. Traditional Values Aren't As Crucial As Social Conservatives Would Have You Believe And, In Any Case, The Social Changes Taking Place In America's Working Class Are Overwhelmingly The Consequence Of Sharply Rising Inequality, Not Its Cause.

-Paul Krugman

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We Should Reject The

Paul Krugman

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We Should Reject The Attempt To Divert The National Conversation Away From Soaring Inequality Toward The Alleged Moral Failings Of Those Americans Being Left Behind. Traditional Values Aren't As Crucial As Social Conservatives Would Have You Believe And, In Any Case, The Social Changes Taking Place In America's Working Class Are Overwhelmingly The Consequence Of Sharply Rising Inequality, Not Its Cause.

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The Habit Of Disguising Ideology As Expertise Has Created A Deficit Of Legitimacy.

It Should Be Possible To Emphasize To Students That The Level Of Employment Is A Macroeconomic Issue, Depending In The Short Run On Aggregate Demand And Depending In The Long Run On The Natural Rate Of Unemployment, With Microeconomic Policies Like Tariffs Having Little Net Effect. Trade Policy Should Be Debated In Terms Of Its Impact On Efficiency, Not In Terms Of Phoney Numbers About Jobs Created Or Lost.

Whenever You See Some Business Person Quoted Complaining About How He Or She Can't Find Workers With The Necessary Skills, Ask What Wage They're Offering. Almost Always It Turns Out What Said Business Person Really Wants Is Highly (and Expensively) Educated Workers At A Manual-labor Wage. No Wonder They Come Up Short.

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In Short, It's A Great Economy If You're A High-level Corporate Executive Or Someone Who Owns A Lot Of Stock. For Most Other Americans, Economic Growth Is A Spectator Sport.

You Know That Republicans Will Yell About The Evils Of Partisanship Whenever Anyone Tries To Make A Connection Between The Rhetoric Of Beck, Limbaugh, Etc. And The Violence I Fear We’re Going To See In The Months And Years Ahead. But Violent Acts Are What Happen When You Create A Climate Of Hate. And It’s Long Past Time For The Gop’s Leaders To Take A Stand Against The Hate-mongers.

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The Key Reason Executives Are Paid So Much Now Is That They Appoint The Members Of The Corporate Board That Determines Their Compensation And Control Many Of The Perks That Board Members Count On. So It's Not The Invisible Hand Of The Market That Leads To Those Monumental Executive Incomes; It's The Invisible Handshake In The Boardroom.

What Our Economy Needs Is Direct Job Creation By The Government And Mortgage-debt Relief For Stressed Consumers. What It Very Much Does Not Need Is A Transfer Of Billions Of Dollars To Corporations That Have No Intention Of Hiring Anyone Except More Lobbyists.

Most People, I Suspect, Still Have In Their Minds An Image Of America As The Great Land Of College Education, Unique In The Extent To Which Higher Learning Is Offered To The Population At Large. That Image Used To Correspond To Reality. But These Days Young Americans Are Considerably Less Likely Than Young People In Many Other Countries To Graduate From College. In Fact, We Have A College Graduation Rate That's Slightly Below The Average Across All Advanced Economies.

The Planet Will Continue To Cook.

If You Are A Good Economist, A Virtuous Economist, You Are Reborn As A Physicist. But If You Are An Evil, Wicked Economist, You Are Reborn As A Sociologist.

I Predict That In The Years Ahead Enron, Not Sept. 11, Will Come To Be Seen As The Greater Turning Point In U.s. Society.

The Great Thing About Fiscal Policy Is That It Has A Direct Impact And Doesn't Require You To Bind The Hands Of Future Policymakers.

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If You're Doing Your Job Right, Some Substantial Group Of People [is] Going To Be Mad At You.

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[t]he Next Time You Hear Serious-sounding People Explaining The Need For Fiscal Austerity, Try To Parse Their Argument. Almost Surely, You'll Discover That What Sounds Like Hardheaded Realism Actually Rests On A Foundation Of Fantasy, On The Belief That Invisible Vigilantes Will Punish Us If We're Bad And The Confidence Fairy Will Reward Us If We're Good. And Real-world Policy - Policy That Will Blight The Lives Of Millions Of Working Families - Is Being Built On That Foundation.

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Adverse Effects

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Monetary Policy

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Politics Determines Who Has The Power, Not Who Has The Truth.

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This Is A Serious Analysis Of A Ridiculous Subject, Which Is Of Course The Opposite Of What Is Usual In Economics.

By Rescuing The Financial System Without Reforming It, Washington Has Done Nothing To Protect Us From A New Crisis, And, In Fact, Has Made Another Crisis More Likely.

If The Price Of Everything Is Going Down, That's Going To Include Wages As Well. People Will Have An Incentive To Sit On Their Cash And Not Spend It.

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In Our Country, Learned Ignorance Is On The Rise.

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The Economics Profession Went Astray Because Economists, As A Group, Mistook Beauty, Clad In Impressive-looking Mathematics, For Truth.

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Sometimes Economists In Official Positions Give Bad Advice; Sometimes They Give Very, Very Bad Advice; And Sometimes They Work At The Oecd.

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The Obama Campaign Seems Dangerously Close To Becoming A Cult Of Personality.

Cult Of Personality

And When The Chickens That Didn't Hatch Come Home To Roost, We Will Rue The Day When, Misled By Sloppy Accounting And Rosy Scenarios, We Gave Away The National Nest Egg.

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When Depression Economics Prevails, The Usual Rules Of Economic Policy No Longer Apply: Virtue Becomes Vice, Caution Is Risky And Prudence Is Folly.

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Friedrich Hayek Is Not An Important Figure In The History Of Macroeconomics.

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You Really Have To Go Searching Desperately To Find Any Contemporary Examples Of Good, Old-fashioned Runaway Inflation.

I Think Stockman Is An Interesting Sort Of Amalgam.

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The French, Unfortunately, Actually Believe What They Say, And That Has Been Very Destructive.

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People Who Are Complaining About The Fed Are People Who've Been Predicting Runaway Inflation For Five And Six Years, And It Hasn't Happened.

People Respond To Incentives. If Unemployment Becomes More Attractive Because Of The Unemployment Benefit, Some Unemployed Workers May No Longer Try To Find A Job Or May Not Try To Find One As Quickly As They Would Without The Benefit.

One Way In Which Americans Have Always Been Exceptional Has Been In Our Support For Education. First We Took The Lead In Universal Primary Education; Then The “high School Movement” Made Us The First Nation To Embrace Widespread Secondary Education.

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Some Years Down The Pike, We're Going To Get The Real Solution, Which Is Going To Be A Combination Of Death Panels And Sales Taxes. It's Going To Be That We're Actually Going To Take Medicare Under Control, And We're Going To Have To Get Some Additional Revenue, Probably From A Vat. But It's Not Going To Happen Now.

[i]f One Asks What Substantive Contributions [f. A. Hayek] Made To Our Understanding Of How The World Works, One Is Left At Something Of A Loss. Were It Not For His Politics, He Would Be Virtually Forgotten.

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Approval Rating

As An Economics Professor I Am By Nature Inclined To The View That The Truth Isn't Out There, It's In Here - That Usually You Learn A Lot More By Thinking Really Hard About The Data Than You Do By Sniffing Around For Supposedly Inside Information.

Debt Is One Person's Liability, But Another Person's Asset.

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I Don't Think I've Had Any Great Success In Predicting Politics Or Social Change, Nor Have I Really Tried.

For Most Americans, Economic Growth Is A Spectator Sport.

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Bad Ideas Flourish Because They Are In The Interest Of Powerful Groups.

Social Security Is A Social Insurance Program - It Is Not Designed To Be The Same Thing As A 401(k).

Unsustainable Situations Usually Go On Longer Than Most Economists Think Possible. But They Always End, And When They Do, It's Often Painful.

I'm Not Sure That The Current Value Of The Nasdaq Is Justified, But I'm Not Sure That It Isn't.

Every Once In A While I Feel Despair Over The Fate Of The Planet. If You’ve Been Following Climate Science, You Know What I Mean: The Sense That We’re Hurtling Toward Catastrophe But Nobody Wants To Hear About It Or Do Anything To Avert It.

There Are No Atheists In Foxholes And There Are No Libertarians In Financial Crises.

It Has Been Obvious All Along, To Anyone Paying Attention, That The Politicians Shouting Loudest About Deficits Are Actually Using Deficit Hysteria As A Cover Story For Their Real Agenda, Which Is Top-down Class Warfare. To Put It In Romneyesque Terms, It's All About Finding An Excuse To Slash Programs That Help People Who Like To Watch Nascar Events, Even While Lavishing Tax Cuts On People Who Like To Own Nascar Teams.

However, The Fact That An Economist Offers A Theoretical Analysis Does Not And Should Not Automatically Command Respect. What Is Needed Is Some Assurance That The Analysis Is Actually Relevant.

Where's That Toxic Rhetoric Coming From? Let's Not Make A False Pretense Of Balance: It's Coming, Overwhelmingly, From The Right. It's Hard To Imagine A Democratic Member Of Congress Urging Constituents To Be "armed And Dangerous" Without Being Ostracized; But Representative Michele Bachmann, Who Did Just That, Is A Rising Star In The G.o.p.

The Public Has No Idea That The Deficit Has Been Falling Like A Stone.

A Snarky But Accurate Description Of Monetary Policy Over The Past Five Years Is That The Federal Reserve Successfully Replaced The Technology Bubble With A Housing Bubble

A Message To Progressives: By All Means, Hang Senator Joe Lieberman In Effigy.

...academic Credentials Are Neither A Necessary Nor A Sufficient Condition For Having Your Ideas Taken Seriously. If A Famous Professor Repeatedly Says Stupid Things, Then Tries To Claim He Never Said Them, There's No Rule Against Calling Him A Mendacious Idiot - And No Special Qualifications Required To Make That Pronouncement Other Than Doing Your Own Homework.conversely, If Someone Without Formal Credentials Consistently Makes Trenchant, Insightful Observations, He Or She Has Earned The Right To Be Taken Seriously, Regardless Of Background.

...instead It Seems That Business - Like Weight Loss - Is A Subject Wherein Hope And Fear Inspire Limitless Gullibility.

Yes, Over The Centuries Economic Progress Has Reduced Some Gross Disparities - Modern Americans Are Relatively Unlikely To Simply Starve To Death (though It Can Happen), So In That Sense The Gap Between Rich And Poor Has Narrowed. But The Question Isn't Whether Society Is, In Some Sense, More Equal Than It Was In 1900. It's Whether It Is Radically More Unequal Than It Was In 1970. And Of Course It Is.

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The Problem With Digital Books Is That You Can Always Find What You Are Looking For But You Need To Go To A Bookstore To Find What You Weren't Looking For.

As I've Often Said, You Can Shop Online And Find Whatever You're Looking For, But Bookstores Are Where You Find What You Weren't Looking For.

Outrageous Fiscal Mendacity Is Neither Historically Normal Nor Bipartisan. It’s A Modern Republican Thing.

I Know That When I Look At Today’s Mexicans And Central Americans, They Seem To Me Fundamentally The Same As My Grandparents Seeking A Better Life In America. On The Other Side, However, Open Immigration Can’t Coexist With A Strong Social Safety Net; If You’re Going To Assure Health Care And A Decent Income To Everyone, You Can’t Make That Offer Global. So Democrats Have Mixed Feelings About Immigration; In Fact, It’s An Agonizing Issue.

Surely I'm Not The Only Person To Ask The Obvious Question: How Different, Really, Is Mr. Madoff's Tale From The Story Of The Investment Industry As A Whole?

The Party Of Ideas Has Become The Party Of Beavis And Butthead.

The Raw Fact Is That Every Successful Example Of Economic Development This Past Century ... Has Taken Place Via Globalization.

We Should Reject The Attempt To Divert The National Conversation Away From Soaring Inequality Toward The Alleged Moral Failings Of Those Americans Being Left Behind. Traditional Values Aren't As Crucial As Social Conservatives Would Have You Believe And, In Any Case, The Social Changes Taking Place In America's Working Class Are Overwhelmingly The Consequence Of Sharply Rising Inequality, Not Its Cause.

Democracy Or Breakdown In Syria Would Change The Whole Middle East Overnight.

For Decades The G.o.p. Has Won Elections By Appealing To Social And Racial Divisions, Only To Turn After Each Victory To Deregulation And Tax Cuts For The Wealthy A Process That Reached Its Epitome When George W. Bush Won Re-election By Posing As America's Defender Against Gay Married Terrorists, Then Announced That He Had A Mandate To Privatize Social Security.

Rising Inequality Isn’t About Who Has The Knowledge; It’s About Who Has The Power.

But Wall Street People Are In Fact Very Smart; They're Funny, They're Not Company Men Who Work Their Way Up The Chain.

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