Wednesday, November 21, 2012

Paul Krugman — C Is For Class Warfare


Oh my. Krugman trashes CNBC, praises Joe Weisenthal (who understands monetary economics).

The New York Times — The Conscience of a LIberal
C Is For Class Warfare
Paul Krugman | Professor of Economics, Princeton University

8 comments:

paul meli said...

I dumped Krugman a while back over the Steve Keen kerfluffel...he played the "authority" card. He's winning me back.

If you closed your eyes you would think he is becoming an MMT proponent.

Tom Hickey said...

If you closed your eyes you would think he is becoming an MMT proponent.

Praising Joe Weisenthal is getting pretty close.

But he still clings tenaciously to ISLM and loanable funds. That will be the test.

Anonymous said...

Ditto what Tom said.

And he can't be reading Carney who is close as well at CNBC

Tom Hickey said...

And he can't be reading Carney who is close as well at CNBC

Right.

Jose Guilherme said...

If he went over to the MMT side he would likely suffer, lose his NYT pulpit, see his influence vanish.

So he clings officially to the mainstream IS/LM model - which btw says much the same thinks MMT does in situations of recession - and adds ad hoc plug-ins as needed to help his analysis take into account the importance of being monetarily sovereign, keeping flexible exchange rates, etc.

He's a sharp observer of the dynamics of power and probably has political ambitions (Treasury? Fed?) so don't count on him ever admitting that the PK school and particularly MMT had the better, more general model of the economy all along the way.

paul meli said...

Jose, You make a good point.

Tom, I wonder if he truly believes in IS/LM? We may never know for sure.

If he promotes policy choices that are consistent with MMT then I suppose we shouldn't complain too much. He is somewhat of a rock star of economics. I was offended by his dismissal of Steve Keen though.

Critical Tinkerer said...

WHat Jose says
To add, i believe that he is ready to swicth the side to MMT as soon as he sees the aproaching critical mass of knowlede and contribute to the get it over the line.
I am regurarly sending him emails, picking his brain out with notion of Nobel as bankers award and unofficial ban on studying and talking about money flow in economy.

Tom Hickey said...

@ Jose, Jure

Paul Krugman is committed to the notion that all assertions have to be modeled. That is his major beef with MMT — that it doesn't have a model he can recognize — and for some reason he and other mainstreamers don't want to look at Godley & Lavoie, which is all about SFC macro modeling. I guess because it doesn't have lines.