22 Days in Paul Krugman's Masterclass (Day 19) (A Vicious Attack on Larry Kudlow)

Paul Krugman, viciously attacks Larry Kudlow

Lesson 19 in Paul Krugman's Masterclass is 12 minutes and 58 seconds long.

Krugman starts off this lecture by telling us what he reads every morning:

The New York Times
The Washington Post
Bloomberg
Vox
Twitter (He adds that he never reads responses to his own tweets)

He says he spends from 45 minutes to an hour with the above each day.

He then adds that with opinion pieces one should consider arguments over assertions.

Then out of left field, he makes two assertions about certain policy positions without any argument.

He says those who argue for the gold standard and for tax cuts are making arguments that are "too simple."

Then Krugman goes into a vicious attack against President Trump's economic adviser Larry Kudlow.

This is noteworthy because to date Krugman has scarcely mentioned anyone by name other than David Ricardo, who has been dead for 195 years. In Lesson 15,  Krugman takes a minor swipe at Ricardo's selective model building.

But his attack on Kudlow is a full out assault.

He finds quotes of bad forecasts by Kudlow and reads them aloud. Though I hasten to add none of them come close to Krugman's great embarrassing forecast. He said in 1998:

The growth of the Internet will slow drastically...By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.

Of Kudlow, Krugman says, "he has a long track record of bad predictions," and that "he is not honest and doesn't learn."

This is so out of the blue that you have to wonder if there is history between these two.

-RW 

Links to discussions of all Krugman's Masterclass lessons are here.