Late Night Video — Paul Krugman
This is a lecture that Paul Krugman gave at MIT recently — The Economic Meltdown: What Have We Learned, if Anything? Krugman tried to explain how we got here AND why it seems so hard to wrap our minds around strong policy to fix it. In many ways, he thinks that we never really learned the lessons of the Great Depression, including that for all of the risk that bankers put us in, the greatest risk may just be a government policy apparatus that will be happier with a political fix rather than a systemic one.
“What actually seems to be happening is that by avoiding real disaster, we also managed to avoid confronting our own intellectual failings. … It’s as if it were still 2007: we’ve gone back to it. People are espousing the same positions, the same rhetoric about private sector dynamism and the evils of big government. The same denunciations of Keynesian economics are right back in vogue. ”
This video is about an hour long, so get your wine or cognac or single malt before settling in to watch:
Also very good is Joseph Stiglitz,s 1 hour interview on book tv now on the web at book tv.org, their similar in content but Stiglitz is the better speaker by far.
Behind Every Irate Man Is an Irate Woman
The New Yorker’s profile of former Enron adviser Paul Krugman has some interesting nuggets, none more so than the revelation that Krugman’s wife, Robin Wells, has significant input into his column:
“When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot–she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” . . .
On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant. ”
If you’ve ever thought there’s something unmanly about Krugman’s rage, now you know the reason why. The anger isn’t even his; it comes from his bitter half.
WSJ.COM
WOW romeo….wow. The unscrutable Krugman unveiled.
I like Dean Baker. There is a great post on FDL from the weekend with Baker answering bloggers questions about the economy and his newest book.
What a charmingly troglodytic analysis — “something unmanly about his rage”? Issues, darling?
And an analysis that may not be in the WSJ — I can’t find it and certainly the linkless wonder won’t provide one.
But here would be the New Yorker profile of Krugman that is referenced. Certainly readers here will be more interested in this rather than romeo’s continually made up bullshit.