Assorted Krugman

Krugman: Income Inequality Pricks 'Conscience'

Faces for radio: spiteful economists on inequality

The World According to Paul Krugman;

Mr. Krugman has written a sweeping political history of the past 135 years from a stridently liberal Democratic viewpoint. In Krugman's worldview, noble Democratic progressives have long battled a conspiracy of Republican knaves who are themselves the pawns of selfish plutocrats.

He advances his viewpoint not by misstating facts but by omitting those parts of the past that make history messier. He expresses outrage that Democrat Samuel Tilden "essentially had the electoral vote stolen" in 1876, but does not mention that Tilden's Southern victories were achieved through the violent suppression of black votes by Democratic henchmen and the Ku Klux Klan. He derides Barry Goldwater for his long-standing support of Joseph McCarthy, but does not seem disturbed that John F. Kennedy also chose not to censure "Tailgunner Joe." We read a great deal about Nixon's Southern strategy and implicit Republican appeals to racism after 1964, but little about the explicit Democratic strategy of race hatred that was the norm among many of leading Democratic legislators such as Theodore Bilbo. But while Mr. Krugman's prose is one-sided, his two major themes are correct. His first theme is that the Democratic party has long battled inequality. His second theme is that Republicans have done a lot of dubious things in their quest for political dominance.

Paul Krugman, pussycat

Bastiat vs. Krugman

The free trade perspective lives on;

The most striking dissent over free trade, the equivalent of a category five storm, came from Paul Krugman. He extended the theory of imperfect competition to international trade and began to argue in the late 1980s that “free trade was passé after all”. The effect on the media, and on the opponents of free trade, was electric, largely because the rise of Japan, and the allegations that it was protectionist while the US was a free trader, had fed the frenzy that called for a reputable economist to be an icon for “reactive” protectionists.

Robert Kuttner, now the editor of The American Prospect and long a sceptic on free trade, celebrated Mr Krugman’s apparent heresy. Karen Pennar wrote in Business Week (February 27 1989), under the heading “The Gospel of Free Trade is Losing Its Apostles”, that: “Free trade is good for you . . . Now more and more economists aren’t so sure”.

Mr Krugman was right at the level of theory. For two centuries, we had known that imperfect competition among producers could undermine the case for free trade: Mr Krugman’s brilliant work had deepened that insight. But eventually Mr Krugman and other trade economists came back to free trade, abandoning Mr Kuttner et al to twist in the wind. Some returned to the fold by saying that “there was no beef” – that the product market imperfections were, on empirical investigation, not substantial enough to warrant departing from free trade. Others, Mr Krugman among them, bought into the conservative argument that protection in practice would make matters worse, not better.

The protectionists who had celebrated Mr Krugman as their icon were disappointed, even furious: Mr Kuttner would write fierce critiques of Mr Krugman for years. Moreover, even as these economists came back to the fold on free trade, with the consensus on free trade reinvigorated, Japan ceased to be a threat and protectionist demands against Japan subsided

What makes me happy