Wednesday, June 22, 2011

Krugman Explains His Qualifications in Macroeconomics and Economic History

In a speech delivered at the Cambridge conference commemorating the 75th anniversary of the publication of The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money, Paul Krugman told the assembled:
It’s a great honour to be asked to give this talk, especially because I’m arguably not qualified to do so. I am, after all, not a Keynes scholar, nor any kind of serious intellectual historian. Nor have I spent most of my career doing macroeconomics.
Via Nick Badalamenti who adds:
Personally, if any speaker started off on any topic with the first sentence and I was an "expert" in the field he was invited to speak about I'd immediately get up and find something more productive to do with my time. But then again I own a business and probably don't understand the life of economic academics so well...maybe this is S.O.P.

3 comments:

  1. I think anyone with a basic understanding of economics that's ever read Krugman knows full well he hasn't done economics, micro- or macro-, for quite some time.

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  2. Krugman is a political blogger, that is all that he is these days. And, I really must say, his face shot really makes me want to punch him. I'll be honest, I am not a violent person, in fact I border upon pacifism. I think that it has more to do with Krugman himself, rather than his actual photograph, but that face shot is quite disturbing.

    I don't know if it is the smoothing of the facial features, or the sharpening of the contrast, but I think that Murphy could take him in the ring; even if Murphy is a corpulent Irish beast.

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  3. Pity you didn't read past the first couple of sentences of his speech.

    So much for the democratisation of information.

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