Sunday, December 2, 2012

Even Keynesians View Krugman as Deceiving

In a recent post, Scott Sumner takes apart Paul Krugman, from what  I would view as a Keynesian perspective.

This is not an Austrian School war, but it does demonstrate how contradictory, deceiving  and misleading are some of the things Krugman writes, even when viewed from by a Keynesian.

Here is Sumner with a sharp stab:
Don’t you love the way  [Krugman] juxtaposes; “This isn’t hard folks”  ”it’s just Macro 101″  ”stupid people”  ”don’t want to understand”  ”hard time grasping this basic concept.”  Let’s translate this bit of Krugmanese as follows: 
“I want to signal to my sophisticated readers that anyone who believes monetary stimulus can restore full employment at the zero bound is stupid, but I also want to be able to deny that I made that charge.  So I inject the term ‘stupid’, next to all sorts of other comments that imply I think they are stupid.  I’ll say my opponents are not stupid people, even as I imply they are.”

The full takedown by Sumner is here. 


3 comments:

  1. I read the first paragraph and that was enough. Sumner doesn't know what "juxtapose" means. Why should I read anything else he writes? FYI, he also told me once that he applied for a job to work at the Federal Reserve. He and Krugman are both a few bricks short of a full load and can have each other. Juxtapose means to put two things close to each other in order to highlight or compare the differences between them. What was he contrasting in his list? Idiot.

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  2. I'm increasingly of the opinion that not everything attributed to Herr Krugman is actually written by him.

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  3. Krugman is not only a political terrorist, it is an elistist brat.
    That statist ape really just claims to own everyone and their earnings...I wish it would make that claim to my face.

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