Commentary

Krugmania: Part Deux

Steve Horwitz puzzles over why Krugman doesn’t understand the relationship between prices and wages. But to really dig in to Krugman folly, check out this analysis by Dan Klein and Harika Anna Bartlett based on all 654 of his NYTimes columns between 1997 and 2006 (you gotta want it!).

Krugman is best interpreted as a committed social democrat and Democratic partisan. My main contention is that his social-democratic impetus sometimes trumps people’s interests, notably poor people’s interests. The tension surfaces in what Krugman has written about immigration and the threat it is poses to the US welfare state. But the tension is found in his writings on several topics, and, importantly, in omissions in his writings. Krugman has almost never come out against extant government interventions, even ones that expert economists seem to agree are bad, and especially so for the poor.