Tuesday, July 16, 2013

What To Do If You See Paul Krugman Walking Down the Street

I kind of like this. Krugman reports:
 Once I was walking down the street near Capitol Hill and a man in a suit yelled at me, “Read Henry Hazlitt and learn some economics!” 
But then Krugman writes:
 Well, Hazlitt has been wrong about everything for more than 80 years[...]
Uh, Hazlitt has been dead for 20 years. And before that he wrote one of the most important economic texts ever written, The Failure of the New Economics, a page by page refutation of The General Theory by John Maynard Keynes.

Hazlitt also wrote the still best selling Economics in One Lesson, in which he gives a correct exposition of the Broken Window Fallacy, something Krugman, post-Nobel Prize, still doesn't seem to understand.

So no wonder Krugman thinks Hazlitt is wrong, Hazlitt gets correct everything Krugman gets wrong, from Keynesian economics to the Broken Window Fallacy.

As a counter, LOL, to Hazlitt, Krugman trots out Irving Fisher. The economic genius Fisher managed to lose all his money in the stock market crash of 1929. Just 12 days before the crash, Fisher had made the astoundingly incorrect statement:
Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau. I do not feel there will be soon if ever a 50 or 60 point break from present levels, such as (bears) have predicted. I expect to see the stock market a good deal higher within a few months.
Gary North has labeled Fisher correctly as "The Most Influential Economic Crank in American History"

So if you see Krugman walking down the street, set him straight and shout out, "Fisher has been wrong about economics for 100 years and Hazlitt destroyed Keynes!"

2 comments:

  1. Robert, don't be lazy. Type it out. It's the Swedish Central Bank Nobel Memorial Prize in the Economic Sciences.

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  2. "If you see me walkin' down the street
    And I start to cry each time we meet
    Walk on by, walk on by
    Make believe that you don't see the tears
    Just let me grieve in private 'cause each time I see you
    I break down and cry, I cry, walk on by" - Burt Bacharach and Hal David

    (Think the boy's said it as well as can be said...)


    ReplyDelete