This Krugman post is too good to excerpt.
Never Learning Anything
by John Cole| 29 Comments
This post is in: Republican Stupidity, Bring on the Brawndo!, Our Failed Media Experiment, Teabagger Stupidity
Never Learning Anything
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Odie Hugh Manatee
Being wrong doesn’t matter as long as you are Right.
And not a Democrat.
Bruuuuce
The second comment on Krugman’s entry is pretty telling, too:
Now let me see if I can get my 37 cents into the S&P…
Dork
But isn’t Krugman fat?
p.a.
Marx (Karl, maybe Groucho too) paraphrase on the French aristocracy: they forget nothing, and yet they learn nothing.
maybe the motto for the current American right also?
schrodinger's cat
Economics is like religion, for the usual suspects he mentioned, facts don’t matter, their faith is unshakable.
ETA: By Economics I mean the Classical theory, free markets, invisible hand, no regulations, etc etc, you know the drill.
beltane
Humans, especially right-wing humans, are not so terribly different from dogs. I can say “outside?” to my dog twenty times in a row without letting her out and she would get excited every single time I said it. True believers in conservative economics are the same way. It doesn’t matter how many times they are financially ruined; they hear the command phrases they’ve been trained to recognize, like “tax cut”, “deregulation”, and “privatization” and their ears perk up without fail.
The Democrats should test their messages on chimpanzees, not adult humans, if they really want to get their point across. I am serious about this.
artem1s
@Bruuuuce:
you beat me to it! This is totally going to be my new signature on my email.
schrodinger's cat
The wingnuttia and their party is impervious to facts to science, these are many of the same people who advocate creationism and deny the reality of global warming/climate change. GOP more a cult than a political party.
azlib
Given the behavior of the markets, I suspect the clever rich or at least their investment advisors did not follow their ideology.
Xenos
@Dork:
No, but he is a bearded marxist. A follower of Kenyasian economic theory, too.
joe from Lowell
Krugman forgot one:
If you read National Review in 2001-2004, you’d believe that the country was facing an imminent deflationary spiral.
beltane
@schrodinger’s cat: Yep. The GOP is now a religious/racial movement, not a political party. Expecting the members of this cult to wake up and “vote their pocketbooks” is an exercise in futility. No one should forget that cult members are know to sacrifice their money and even the lives of themselves and their children on the altar of their delusions.
mai naem
The Todd Henderson dude who wasn’t really super rich has decided to stop blogging. Apparently he got emails that he felt threatened by. Also took down the posts and comments. What a WATB. This was followed by one of this co bloggers whining about how uncivil it was and the country was going to hell in a handbasket. Apparently none of uncivil tone of the bone in the nose African tribal pic of Obama or the Obama being a monkey bothered them. I wonder how Obama also being a law professor becoming president has affected Henderson’s psyche.
General Stuck
Every day, Mr Hyde picks your pocket Dr Jekyll, and tells you not to worry. Then on Sunday, Baby jeevus washes clean . Come Monday morning, they get up and do it all over again.
bemused
@mai naem:
They can dish the most incredible crap out but cannot take even the mildest criticism or factual rebuttal.
Wimps.
Alex S.
@Xenos:
Kenyasian economics….nice!
jwb
@Dork: No, he’s shrill. Al Gore is fat. Gotta keep those insults straight.
Fargus
@Bruuuuce:
I ran those numbers, and they’re correct. But they even understate the case. If you adjust for inflation, and start in 1960, then in 2009 dollars, that $10,000 was worth $59,016.13. In 2009, investing in the S&P during the years when Republicans were in office and 5% vehicles when the Democrats were in office, you wind up with $63,290.92 in 2009 dollars, which is an anemic 0.14% real rate of return over those 49 years. Basically, you do almost no better than if you invested in an index that grew precisely with inflation.
SteveinSC
On Joe “Scarface” Scarborough’s morining wankfest, Joe, “My intern Dead?, No!” said that the repukes strayed from good conservative principles and embraced Keynesian economics. That is what led to the disaster that the GOP refuses to acknowledge. Well, thank god I am not an economist, but as I understood it, Keynesian economics means a certain amount of deficit spending helps to expand the money supply/economy, too much and you have Chile. Bush and company didn’t embrace Keynesian methods, they spent like drunken sailors, cut taxes on the rich, outsourced jobs , spent trickle-down money on the wars/Mil-Industrial complex, liquidated the regulators, and fueled it with artificially low interest rates, financed by the outsource beneficary, China.
How could that not cause a financial catastrophe?
TooManyJens
As that graph we saw last week about how well the different income quintiles do under Democrats vs. Republicans illustrated, it’s not about the absolute return. The richest still do better under Democrats than they do under Republicans. But the rest of us start catching up to them a tiny bit when Democrats are in charge, and that’s what they can’t abide. We need to be kept in our place.
That comment about the bridge and the sparrow is so true, and so sad.
schrodinger's cat
@SteveinSC: According to Keynes, aggregate demand is responsible for what happens in the labor market. Deficit spending by the government is just one of the many solutions he suggested to increase the aggregate demand.
EconWatcher
In fairness, Krugman got some things very wrong, too, and hasn’t been so great about owning up to it. He was arguing that monetary policy was not overly expansionary during the build up of the housing bubble, and now still downplays the significance of loose monetary policy in creating the crisis. That doesn’t seem like a terribly reasonable position.
I like 70% of what he does, and I think he’s a useful citizen. But some people (including Krugman himself) overstate his prescience.
EconWatcher
Raghuram Rajan was prescient about the crisis, and this account of his battles with Krugman gives you a little different picture of Krugman. Again, Krugman does a lot of great things–not denying that. But self-justification does occasionally lead him to some unreasonable positions.
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/brian.barry/igm/reviewingkrugman.pdf
Glen Tomkins
You need to add another tag to this one
This item should be tagged, “our Bourbon rulers”. As the Encyclopedia Britannica explains (http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/75704/Bourbon):
“history of postwar South (in United States: The era of conservative domination, 1877–90)
…regimes in the Southern states began to fall as early as 1870; by 1877 they had all collapsed. For the next 13 years the South was under the leadership of white Democrats whom their critics called Bourbons because, like the French royal family, they supposedly had learned nothing and forgotten nothing from the revolution they had experienced.”
liberal
@EconWatcher:
Strictly on the numbers alone, it’s impossible that loose monetary policy was responsible for the bulk of the bubble. It’s easy enough to crank some numbers through a mortgage spreadsheet to see why.
OTOH it’s certainly possible to argue for subtle nonlinear effects, like cheap money “igniting” the bubble, etc. But not directly.
mclaren
Unfortunately psychology experiments prove that when confronted with contradictory evidence, people tend to ignore it — or, in many cases, their original incorrect opinions actually get stronger.
Yeah well you can prove anything with science, Ben Goldarce, The Guardian, 3 July 2010.
schrodinger's cat
@EconWatcher: Krugman has been more correct than anyone in the national media about the state of the economy. So I give whatever he says a lot of credence. As far RRR is concerned he is a neoclassical economist with their magical fairy dust assumptions about free markets and no regulations, read his papers on banking failures to see what I mean.
gex
@EconWatcher: I don’t recall Krugman or anyone else claim he was without error. It also gets pretty tedious to have to say “well of course Krugman has made mistakes too, but…” Apparently that is required.
Frankly, I think letting the big 5 exceed regulatory debt to asset ratio was the problem. 30-1. I don’t think anything different at the Fed would have helped when they got to play with someone else’s money.
ETA: removed some unnecessarily inflammatory statements. Trying to be a better net citizen.
EconWatcher
schrodinger’s cat:
Rajan’s position is that the deep techtonic force that was the most important cause of the financial collapse was rising economic inequality. I think this is spot on. And it doesn’t quite fit the Chicago School mold, does it? It’s an almost Marxian conception.
gex:
I think there’s a certain amount of Krugman worship on this blog. That’s why I brought it up.