Krugman Reads His Hate Mail

He writes:

I’ve been getting a lot of mail from Germany lately, in a break from (or actually an addition to) my usual deluge of right-wing hate mail. I’m well aware that this is a highly distorted sample, since I’m only hearing from those angry enough and irrational enough — seriously, what do the writers expect to accomplish? — to send such things. Still, the content of the correspondence is striking.

Basically, the incoming missives take two forms:

1. Obscenities, in both English and German

2. Bitter accusations of persecution, along the lines of “As a Jew you should know the dangers of demonizing a people.” Because criticizing a nation’s economic ideology is just like declaring its people subhuman.

Actually, as an economist, he should understand that much of what he writes contradicts basic economic principles., e.g., he tends to favor the minimum wage, but in his textbook he makes clear that the minimum wages creates unemployment, In  Microeconomics (Third edition p.137), written by Krugman with his wife Robin, they write:

A price on the floor of labor [is] called a minimum wage...[P]rice floors are intended to help some but generate predictable and undesirable side effects...Left to itself, the market would move to equilibrium....price floors lead to a persistent surplus

In the case of a minimum wage a "persistent surplus" is, of course, persistent unemployment.


-RW