Tuesday, December 21, 2010

The Perfect is the Enemy of the Good

So Krugman, the Nobel winning anti-Chicago School economist... uh...

One thing that's interesting about him is that he seemingly didn't go so far in the direction of the Keynesians 'till relatively late in his career.

But anyway, since Obama has been in office, Krugman has been the voice on the left decrying the bailouts as not enough. I think he's gotten less hard on Obama after the first tumultuous months in part because of a realization that politics ain't as easy as thinkin' about things.
Here he says
"Free-market fundamentalists have been wrong about everything — yet they now dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever". 
Mmm... I'm not buying that. Bush actually had an Ann Rand neophyte as a Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank. Just because Rand Paul is the head of some idiot Republican Senate committee doesn't mean that the Free-market fundamentalists dominate the political scene more thoroughly than ever. It certainly means they haven't gone away and that their noise machine is powerful. But "more than ever" sounds like hyperbole to me.
But here's my big question: how accurate has Krugman been? It seems that he too was surprised at how well the bailouts and the stimulus worked.  But I don't really know. And to do a study of how accurate Krugman's predictions have been would take a lot of work and resources. Has anybody done it?

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