Archive for Krugman

How to Beam Factories to Mars

I give some practical instruction in this piece. An excerpt: Now suppose that the Martians finally get their wifi routers working, and they are shocked to discover intelligent life on the nearby blue planet. After figuring out how to communicate and consummate financial transactions, an amazing thing happens: Massive amounts of financial capital from human […]

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Krugman, the Slippery One

As the man who coined the term “Krugman Kontradiction,” I am familiar with how the Nobelist can write misleading things without technically stating a falsehood. And yet, for a few moments I was scratching my head over a statement Krugman made in his latest op ed. While excoriating the Senate version of the tax plan–and […]

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In the Long Run, I Will Always Quibble With Krugman

Although Steve Landsburg is trying to talk me down from the ledge, I think there’s something rotten in economics. (Maybe this is true in every field and I just notice it here because it’s my area; I’m open to the possibility that “humans are disappointing.”) For example, DeLong and Krugman have accused Mankiw of not […]

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Confused by the Confusion

I’ve been busy with traveling (including the super duper awesome Contra Cruise II), and so I am just now catching up on all of the controversy surrounding the economics of a corporate income tax cut. As you can imagine, some conservative/libertarian economists said good things about it, and then DeLong and Krugman pointed out that […]

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Krugman on the Oregon Medicaid Experiment

Since health insurance “reform” is back in the news, I’ve been boning up on stuff, including the famous Oregon Medicaid experiment. (The Wikipedia article on it is surprisingly good, in case you never really figured out what everybody was talking about a few years ago.) To make sure I wasn’t getting duped by right wingers, […]

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Potpourri

==> Gene Epstein liked the most recent Contra Krugman, but pointed out that I missed this even more ironic–vis-a-vis his current stance–Krugman column (detailing the flaws of French regulations on labor) from 1997. An excerpt: To an Anglo-Saxon economist, France’s current problems do not seem particularly mysterious. Jobs in France are like apartments in New […]

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Contra Krugman-Feldstein

[UPDATE below with more (apparent) mistakes.] I’ve been studying this chapter by Feldstein and Krugman on VATs/income taxes (from a 1990 NBER book). It’s excellent, as far as a mathematical model goes. I highly encourage academic economists to check it out. I think I found a typo, if that motivates some of you to look […]

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Try to Reverse Engineer Krugman’s Threshold for Political Labeling

Here’s an excerpt from the latest Paul Krugman column: Let me explain what I mean by saying that bad guys hacked the election. I’m not talking about some kind of wild conspiracy theory. I’m talking about the obvious effect of two factors on voting: the steady drumbeat of Russia-contrived leaks about Democrats, and only Democrats, […]

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