I had no more than published the QOTW yesterday, and this one popped up. I’m of the opinion now that NYT economist and columnist Paul Krugman has gone insane, because nobody with any intact cognition would make a statement like this. Even Al Gore hasn’t gone this far, this is in nucking futz territory.
The scene is set on HBO’s Real Time Friday. Krugman is a guest, pitching his book, but at the same time pitching an idea that he’s totally serious about. It involves aliens and scientists and lies to the public on a grand scale, plus a shout out to California’s high-speed rail boondoggle. Here’s the transcript, brace yourself.
PAUL KRUGMAN, NEW YORK TIMES: This is hard to get people to do, much better, obviously, to build bridges and roads and healthcare clinics and schools. But my proposed, I actually have a serious proposal which is that we have to get a bunch of scientists to tell us that we’re facing a threatened alien invasion, and in order to be prepared for that alien invasion we have to do things like build high-speed rail. And the, once we’ve recovered, we can say, “Look, there were no aliens.”
But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and that somebody has to be the U.S. government.
Watch the video here: http://newsbusters.org/blogs/noel-sheppard/2012/05/26/krugman-scientists-should-falsely-predict-alien-invasion-so-governmen#ixzz1w5zk6aAO
UPDATE: one commenter thinks he’s being sarcastic or tongue in cheek, here’s my response –
If he had left the comment at that, I’d agree with you, but he added this without saying “I’m joking” or “That’s silly but…”
But look, I mean, whatever it takes because right now we need somebody to spend, and that somebody has to be the U.S. government.
He’s a big boy, he knows the ropes of these interviews, and he didn’t insert an appropriate caveat. – Anthony
UPDATE2: This is now a theme with Krugman. Obviously he stands by his words or he would not have repeated it. See 1:01 in this Aug 14th, 2011 video.
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The signs have been there. In Feb 2011, Krugman pulled another whopper. Paul Krugman’s opinion in the NY Times blamed climate change for the unrest in Egypt.
Dr. Ryan N. Maue wrote then:
Based upon this quote from Krugman:
But the evidence tells a different, much more ominous story. While several factors have contributed to soaring food prices, what really stands out is the extent to which severe weather events have disrupted agricultural production. And these severe weather events are exactly the kind of thing we’d expect to see as rising concentrations of greenhouse gases change our climate — which means that the current food price surge may be just the beginning.
There is no other way to interpret this than “I told you so” from Krugman directly linking climate change and the disparate weather events of the past year or two to food prices and the crises in the Arab world. To various commenters who are defending Krugman religiously, do you doubt that Krugman is linking the events implicitly or explicitly? Remind you, this is the same Nobel prize winner that less than a few hours after Congresswoman Giffords was shot blamed conservatives for the so-called “Climate of Hate“. How does he have ANY credibility at all — especially with anything related to physical sciences?
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Indeed.
h/t to WUWT reader “good business”
Related articles
- Krugman: scientists should falsely predict alien invasion (motls.blogspot.com)
- Krugman: Scientists Should Falsely Predict Alien Invasion So Government Will Spend More Money (newsbusters.org)
- Krugman : Scientists Should Lie – To Force The Country Further Into Debt (stevengoddard.wordpress.com)
And the, once we’ve recovered, we can say, “Look, there were no aliens.”
Replace “aliens” with “AGW” and I think you’ve got the climate alarmists in a nutshell. Of course instead of high speed trains, we’re talking de-industrialization and political funding shifts to the cronies of the left
byz says:
May 27, 2012 at 12:47 pm
Let me give a example where western governments have really got things wrong at present. …
So when Keynesian economics fail, it’s always because it’s imperfectly implemented? Rather like Marxism then?
Um… This is a proposal to tell a direct lie in order to get a national government to fund a course of action which they would not otherwise undertake.
I am not sure how many laws are being broken here. Fraud is an obvious initial point – you do not have to make a FINANCIAL advantage out of a lie to be guilty of fraud, simply a dishonest one. I suspect that treason is another point to consider. There are probably several other crimes which a skilled prosecutor could suggest.
Is there such a person in the WUWT audience…?
He writes for the New York Times for heaven’s sake! I need say no more.
Krugman is clearly saying, by means of his unfortunate space-alien example, that fiscal stimulus, that is, government spending, in a recession or depression, will bring the economy out of the doldrums. He isn’t saying there is a space-alien threat. Like anybody, he could be wrong, but he’s not mentally ill.
I think the current lack of government interest in high speed rail is partly due to the poor economic health of the airlines and the auto industry. Rail takes decades for ROI, so government help makes some sense. The US government helped the railroads way back when, and helped the airlines and the auto companies (the national highways) in the middle of the 20th century. It builds the economy.
Current interest rates are near zero, so borrowing is affordable. In fact, if you have something really useful to build, it’s almost crazy not to borrow at 0% and build it.
Keep talking Paul Krugman… Keep talking Al Gore… Keep Talking David Suzuki…Keep faking Peter Gleick, Keep lying Micheal Mann, Keep hiding data Phil Jones….. Just keep doing what you do so well. It is working just fine.
Krugman is basically a joke. He is on record calling for a housing bubble:
From http://archive.mises.org/12389/krugman-and-the-bubble/, “To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.”
If you want to learn actual economics, read Hazlitt, von Mises, or Rothbard.
Paul Krugman has just described the AGW scare to a T. 😉
Wasn’t it Calvin Coolidge who was faced with a serious recession and responded by cutting taxes and eliminating half of the federal government at the time ? The recession was over in two years.
Krugman should work a little harder on fine tuning his meds, cognitive dissonance is starting to overload his two or three neurons that are still holding hands.
Chris Horner’s Heartland session is very interesting
http://climateconferences.heartland.org/christopher-horner-iccc7/
It illustrates another Keynesian failure. Spain has borrowed and spent up to the limit on wind power, and can’t do it any more, because the country is broke. Spanish government bonds are next to worthless, the interest rate on them is so high.
Spain’s problem isn’t that Spain is broke, though. The problem is that Germany is broke.
Krugman – Nothing like liberal monetary policy, high inflation and more government borrowing to help fix an economy.
Other economists – We learned in the 1980s that conservative monetary policy, low stable inflation, balanced budgets, low government debt and low taxes is the key to a strong economy.
The US hasn’t actually tried out what the other economists have been saying but there sure has been alot of Krugman-type advice taken.
Not much different than the climate change debate – there is theory and then there is what is actually happening in the real climate / what actually works in a real economy.
Elliot says:
May 27, 2012 at 12:40 pm
The only way I can explain why Europe and china have lots of high speed rail and US has none is to say US is either disfunctional, backward or both which is just sad.
It’s neither. The reason we don’t have high-speed rail in the US is because of our population distribution, interstate highway system, and network of public airports, none of which have either european or Chinese counterparts. European high-speed rail lines travel through sparsely-populated countryside; China just drew straight lines linking their cities and bulldozed any houses for 50 meters on either side of those lines.
The only place high-speed lines are feasible in the US is in the Southwest. Problem is, you can’t draw a straight line linking major cities without encroaching into one or more military training areas. If it’s in the middle of nowhere, there’s a training site there; in fact, being in the middle of nowhere is the *reason* the military put them there — no civilians to injure when ordnance lands outside the impact areas or when armor is conducting large-scale maneuvers (ever been inside a tank? You can’t see a %$#@ur momisugly! thing except straight to your front).
What he’s actually saying is: ‘It doesn’t matter what you spend money on, just spend, spend, spend’.
That’s crazy enough, the aliens thing is just to emphasise how urgent he thinks it is (and that people are stupid enough to believe anything).
And this is the Economist who want to lead the Europeans from their current predicament to the promise land. Help! Where is Von Hayek when we need him.
@MarkG
“…WWII ‘saved’ America because it required the rolling back of numerous regulations which had seriously harmed American business, and because most of America’s economic competitors were either bankrupt or bombed to heck afterward.”
++++++++++
Hmm…Well, the US companies like that owned by the G Bush family made off like bandits selling steel to Germany during the most expansive phases of WWII when steel was at a premium. In the case of Bush Sr the company only stopped trading with Nazis when Federal agents put chains on the doors of their office in NY. War is good for business, especially when you are not involved except to sell weapons and materials to both sides.
The idea that you can spend un-backed Dollars printed for convenience and fund a war (or a Maglev train) is simply untrue. That is why the government had to borrow so much from China to fund the war in Iraq. Ditto the UK in WWI when they went off the Gold Standard. War goods have to be paid for in real terms, not imaginary money fancied by the Social Credit Party of Canada (“Give municipalities money for the cost of printing it”).
A war against global warming/climate change/disruption is no more fundable with funny-money than any other war. Printing money creates inflation. That is Piggy Banking 101. Inflation eats everyone’s savings because there is no free lunch. An alien invasion would re-direct spending, but there is no ‘little green men economy’. It is just pooling everyone’s money to be eaten by a greener version of Daddy Warbucks. Different players, same M.O.
“If you doubt whether this is a worthwhile endeavor I suggest you go to Italy and take a train trip from Rome to Florence.”
How many people want to take a train from Rome to Florence?
And now many of them are willing to pay the true cost of that train ride?
As far as I’m aware, high-speed rail is heavily subsidised in most of the world because it makes no economic sense. If you disagree, you should be able to build a convincing business case and convince someone to invest in your project. The fact that people are demanding tax-payers money to fund it is pretty clear proof that nineteenth century transport technology doesn’t make sense as a solution to twenty-first century transport problems.
When I lived in the UK we had high-speed trains (at least 120mph or so) but driving to my parents’ house was much faster because they went from where I didn’t want to be (the station nearest me) to where I didn’t want to be (the station nearest my parents) via where I didn’t want to go (central London to change stations and get a different train).
Oh, and the ticket was also more expensive despite about 300% fuel tax.
Sorry Anthony, this really doesn’t work that way 🙂
You do realise that he already gave away that there really wouldn’t be any aliens, after all – so it’s not a ‘secret’ anymore, and hence can’t be a ‘serious plan’. Of course he is saying that to illustrate how urgent it is to get people going in his view.
hewhotypes says:
May 27, 2012 at 1:05 pm
40% of the debt is borrowed from China.
Tell ya what–we’ll do a lot more borrowing if you can somehow get China to agree to your 0% interest rate.
Please stay in touch; let us know how negotiations are proceeding.
I diagnosed Krugman as a paranoid schizophrenic the first time I saw him on a news show. It’s the way the beady eyes moved around, disconnected to any idea or point he was making. The diabolical and inappropriate grin makes the diagnosis easier, of course. But the clincher is the actual words that come out of his mouth.
In today’s political, educational, and journalistic climate, being a schizophrenic turns out to be a big plus.
Having a degree in economics, I assure that Krugman is indeed insane. Many economists have pondered this. While his thesis was lightweight and not deserving of a Nobel Prize, his textbook is well respected and enunciates classic economic principles and formulae well. It is suggested that that laudatory reportage and praise from the left wing faculty when he became an early adherent of some mildly leftists economic theory, at a time when economists were still capitalists so pleased him that it led to ever more bizarre leftist thought in search of more praise..
Andrew says:
Krugman has also very seriously implied that natural disasters are good for the economy:
http://spectator.org/archives/2012/05/23/a-tsunami-of-bad-economics
Presumably Krugman, since he believes in CAGW, also prays that we will have more CAGW, since it supposedly causes all manner of disasters, and disasters are supposedly good for the economy.
Krugman has a point. The Black Death wiped out at least a third of the British population (and that of most other European countries too). Afterwards, there was a shortage of labour and the big landowners were obliged to treat the peasants better and pay them more for their work. Therefore the living conditions of most of the ordinary people who were lucky enough to survive the epidemic improved.
World War II did great damage to the economies of most of the countries involved including some of the victors such as the Soviet Union and Great Britain (despite many British advances in technology during the War) but the United States ended the War richer than it entered it. Even before the United States entered the War its economy was being dragged out of the Depression by orders for Britain, e.g. under the lend/lease program.
Nobody would say that the Black Death was a good thing or that World War II was either. But that does not mean that they did not have some benefits for some people.
During the Great Depression Keynes said that the economy could be helped by paying people to dig holes and then fill them in again. He was perfectly serious, but that does not mean that he actually wanted the British government to pay people to dig holes and fill them in. He knew perfectly well that there were far more useful things for the government to spend money on. Roosevelt realised that too and had a certain amount of success with infrastructure projects such as those undertaken by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Adolf Hitler was a lot more successful in ending mass unemployment with his rearmament programme, although tackling unemployment was not his main motive.
When Krugman talks about Alien invasions I think he is simply making sure that he will get his point across – just like Keynes did with his proposal for paying people to dig holes and fill them in again. You may not agree with him, but that is no excuse for misunderstanding him.
Nobody in Britain ever puts /sarc/ after a sarcastic comment. We assume that readers are intelligent enough to recognise sarcasm when they see it, although we do realise that people who are not native speakers of English, including Americans /sarc/, might not get the point! The same goes for irony. However there is a widespread view in Britain that most Americans, with the possible exception of New Yorkers, do not understand irony. The attacks on Krugman, not for his arguments but for the way he makes them, suggest that is true.
“Fake aliens to scare us into creating a world government” is the plot of the short-story “The Martian Shop” by the writer (and Communist Party USA member) Howard Fast, who is best-known for writing “Spartacus”.
Spending money just to spend money has never worked to permanently stimulate the economy. The spending of the New Deal helped to alleviate the Great Depression, but was only marginally successful and was followed immediately by another recession. Even the spending on WWII, which broke the recession of 1937, was followed by a recession when the spending stopped again.
We are spending at an unsustainable rate now, but predictably, it isn’t working. Krugman wants to spend more (he really doesn’t care on what), which will not work and will result in calls for even more spending. Maybe Krugman would benefit from learning something about system response to step changes in input.
We have mortgaged our grand children’s futures already, and he wants to make it worse, ensuring that the economy collapses totally. He really is insane. He likely thinks like Nancy Pelosi that every dollar spent by government returns $1.50 in taxes, so why worry.
His call for a false report of a space-alien threat is a parallel to the warmists’ false reports of CAGW. They are really no different. Both are based on the use of fear mongering rather than logic. Was he serious? Perhaps he was tongue-in-cheek when advocating the use of a space-alien scare, but he was serious when he called for mindless spending on pointless projects. He doesn’t care what tactic is used to achieve the end. Spending on projects that we need, for example replacing major infrastructure and power distribution systems, would make some sense. High Speed Rail is probably sexier in the eye of a liberal.
Gary Hladik says:
May 27, 2012 at 12:51 pm
Dr Ken Pollock says (May 27, 2012 at 12:13 pm): ‘This is the basic premise of “Report from Iron Mountain” thoght to have been written by John Kenneth Galbraith. Invent an alien threat to get the nations to work together.’
Or he’s seen too many movies/TV shows, e.g.
Watchmen 2009: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0409459/
Outer Limits 1963: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Architects_of_Fear
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Haven’t they already tried dipping a toe into this scenario? NASA and the Very Angry Aliens who intend to do something about those humans releasing more carbon dioxide and cooking the Earth..
Actually, everything he said here is true. It IS true that if we thought as serious a crisis was in the offing as a space alien invasion–or a world war–then we would prime the pump and End This Depression Now, the way we did when we armed Europe against the Nazis. You guys all need to get a grip.
On the other hand, Krugman’s views on climate change mirror the AGW orthodoxy, which I find terribly disappointing. One really should stay within one’s discipline.