Posted on 04/13/2012 6:09:36 AM PDT by richardb72
Few prominent economists have a worse record predicting the impact of Obamas economic policies than Paul Krugman. Writing for the New York Times and touting his close genuine contact with the smart economists and others in the Obama administration and the Democratic congressional leadership, Krugman has been, and remains, Obamas most important champion. Not only has he been defending Obamas Keynesian-type deficit-spending, but he has been advocating still more of these same failed policies.
The economy just cant gain ground. Thirty-four months since the "recovery" started in June 2009 and the actual number of jobs have increased by just 0.4%. Hardly making up for the 5.5 percent drop in jobs from the peak. Given Krugmans continued prominence in supporting Obama during the coming election, the best way of evaluating the advice is going to give voters is to see how accurate his claims have been up to this point.
It is important to realize just how terrible Krugmans record has been. He predicted on CNBC: I am still guessing that we will peak out at around 9 percent [unemployment] and that would be late this year. He assured listeners that double-digit unemployment was not the most likely event and Actually, we are already seeing some positive effects [from the Stimulus]. . . .
(Excerpt) Read more at foxnews.com ...
News Bulletin!
NASA has just announced that space aliens are planning to attack and we need a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat!
‘Economist’ Paul Krugman and president obama overjoyed at the news.
Jughead the old media has lost what credibility they had over the Treyvon lies and race baiting!
Never again!
“The Economics Prize has been handed out almost always on the basis of solid scientific work (Arthur Lewis was the only glaring exception I can remember)”
Although Arthur Lewis was a Social Democrat, he did very solid work in economic development for which he was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize (IMO).
>> Although Arthur Lewis was a Social Democrat, he did very solid work in economic development for which he was rightly awarded the Nobel Prize (IMO). <<
I must respectfully disagree. I was truly appalled when the Nobel Committee split the 1979 economics prize between Ted Schultz and Sir Arthur, and my opinion has never since wavered. The two men’s basic outlooks on economic development were virtually 180° out of phase with one another, and I viewed it as an insult to Schultz that the Committee paired him with Lewis.
To make a long story short, by 1979 Schultz’s analytical framework on the productivity of peasant agriculture had been verified time and again by empirical work, while Sir Arthur’s belief in a “zero marginal product” in agriculture had already failed the empirical test and was being rejected by one competent development economist after another. Today, Lewis’ theory is all but forgotten, while Schultz’s contributions live on — not only his work on the economics of agriculture, but even more importantly on the economics of human capital.
If I wanted to be kind to Lewis, I guess I’d say that he was perhaps the first economist in the post-WW2 era to articulate a logically coherent, systematic and “holistic” theory of economic development for third-world countries. Hurrah! But the trouble is, his beautiful theory simply didn’t measure up to facts on the ground, and it led to bad policies in many countries.
Schultz, on the other hand, changed the way most development economists view peasant agriculture and pioneered the kind of thinking that supported the Green Revolution. And more or less at the same time, he and his acolytes (both colleagues and students) at the University of Chicago created a new discipline, the economics of human capital.
Obama is flirting with disaster, politically, unless he is willing to bend his stiff-necked ideology to the demands of reality. However there is no strong reason to believe he will do so.
>> didn’t Menchu win it for literature, with her phoney baloney diary? <<
You’ve got it. The Committee’s original decision to award her the prize was bad enough in the first place — although I suppose it was understandable if you look at such matters with a leftwing perspective.
But what was most deeply disgraceful, and not understandable even if you can imagine yourself as a full-blown Democratic Socialist, was the Committee’s failure to revoke the prize once Rigoberta’s “literary” fraud had been fully exposed.
But then we’re talking about Norway, a quaint and charming country with plenty of delightful people — and where Democratic Socialist ideology still is able to survive and even to thrive thanks to the nation’s virtually unlimited supplies of offshore petroleum and natural gas.
(Moreover, at least a few things about Norway are worth emulating. For example, it’s among only three countries in the whole world where you can walk into a restaurant and LEGALLY eat whale-meat steak. Needless to say, this situation drives the neighboring Swedish and Danish enviros crazy, and it’s one of several factors that keeps Norway out of the EU.)
Thanks DJ MacWoW for posting this:
Thanks richardb72.
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