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)
I saw the video and I thought he was exaggerating a tad, but he clearly is obsessed about the government spending more money. It’s better to spend the money on “energy saving” things such as the High Cost Rail than hostpitals or bridges, or other useless tat like that. He does clearly also advocate a comprehensive and deliberately dishonest propaganda campaign to achieve his goals.
Goldie,
The US Interstate system was built starting with the Eisenhower Administration in the 1950’s.
Much is revealed about Keynes’s intentions by reading the foreword to the 1936 German edition of the “General Theory”…
“The theory of aggregate production, which is the point of the following book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory. Since it is based on fewer hypotheses than the orthodox theory, it can accommodate itself all the easier to a wider field of varying conditions.
Although I have, after all, worked it out with a view to the conditions prevailing in the Anglo-Saxon countries where a large degree of laissez-faire still prevails, nevertheless it remains applicable to situations in which state management is more pronounced. For the theory of psychological laws which bring consumption and saving into relationship with each other, the influence of loan expenditures on prices, and real wages, the role played by the rate of interest — all these basic ideas also remain under such conditions necessary parts of our plan of thought.” …
“7 September 1936
J.M. Keynes”
http://mises.org/daily/3693
Essentially Keynes promotes the totalitarian, or at least the fascist, state – he advocates the state control of markets and of the means of production.
Argh! he must have watched the Australian Greens politician Bob Brown, giving his “inspired” Hobart, Tasmania, speech on Aliens watching us. Maybe he will follow bob’s example and gracefully retire one step ahead of the aliens……..
Apparently Krugman is not smart enough to notice that the US government is already spending more than any government ever has in the history of the world and it isn’t helping. How much more must the government spend before Krugman realizes his folly? Draining money from the private sector to fuel excess government spending for wasteful projects like Solyndra and high-speed rail-to-nowhere is exactly what has kept us in recession for so long. FDR prolonged the Great Depression with his government programs and excess spending. It wasn’t until World War II forced him to take his boot off the necks of the private sector and loosen government regulations that the country finally came out of the depression.
Fareed Zakariah interviewing Paul Krugman and Kenneth Rogoff about the efficacy of Keensian economics… My, what a happy confluence!
Oh, come on, Dude. I saw this on Bill Maher the other night, and he was so obviously joking, this whole post makes me think you must be joking to put it up here. I mean, seriously? Have you been so wrapped up in these climate wars you’ve lost all sense of humor? I suggest some whacky tobaccy and an evening of cartoons.
Bill Maher is a comedy show where he and all his guests are encouraged to make up ridiculous jokes and examples to make their points with humor. That’s all Krugman did. The point was serious, of course, in the sense that some massive public works project like fighting WWII (or aliens for that matter) would very quickly get everyone back to work and end the recession/depression. He just chose a ridiculous example so as to make it funny also. It’s not Meet the Press.
REPLY: I’d agree with you, except he’s said this before. See the second video interview from August 2011. He’s a regular on programs like this and knows enough about how media works to have the good sense to put in a caveat if he was in fact joking. He’s dead serious. – Anthony
“Anything is acceptable if it leads to a successful result.”
Wrong is wrong, even from a poet and clergyman.
Take an ethics class while you can… better yet, learn from one…
I’d have said “Keynesian” had my spelling been more keen.
“”””” Ian Weiss says:
May 27, 2012 at 3:53 pm
As if there are no real problems that we could mobilize people to invest in solving…..Paul, have you ever heard of malaria? I believe the malaria problem was solved 70-80 years ago; the solution was known as DDT. Then Rachel Carson wrote her sky is falling book, and malaria became an aceptable disease again. We still know how to make DDT.
As for HIV, it is spread by people with the disease (whoever heard of that concept). The solution is to quarantine everybody who doesn’t have the disease, so they don’t catch it.
In fairness to Keynes, he never advocated entrenching fiscal debt through entitlement programs and getting in debt up to your eyeballs and then trying to spend your way out of it. Agree with him or not, he was not a fool. Counter-cyclical economics means saving in the good years (ie running budget surpluses) and spending in the bad years (which may involve some temporary, non-structural debt).
The trouble is, politicians have used the national credit card to buy votes, ie they never did the saving in good years bit. Trying to spend your way out of bankrupcy is obviously a lunatic solution. The so-called ‘austerity’ measures in Europe and the UK aren’t even attacking the debt principal – they are just slowing down the rate of increase.
They are behaving like gambling addicts in serious denial, and it will end badly.
I have not commented to US economics because there are lots of people here better placed to do so than me, but my feeling is that if politicians have the guts to bite the bullet on public debt, the resilience and ingenuity that has powered the country’s economy for the last 100 years will enable it to bounce back after a few years of serious belt-tightening. Europe is so bound up with regulations and subsidies that recovery is a much longer, harder road for them.
“…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.”
We’ve already had the alien invasion, and we’re going to expel them this coming November.
High speed rail to Paris or Amsterdam would be worthwhile, but I can’t think of any place around Houston I’d like to get to fast.
Also, your absurd point (given to similar comments above) that unless he gives cavaets that he’s joking, we are supposed to take him seriously, fails to take into account that Maher’s show is a comedy show. You might as well say that unless Steven Colbert inserts a cavaet at the end of each of his bits, we should presume he’s dead serious. Have you really no sense of humor anymore? The seriousness with which you are now defending yourself is not a good sign. I mean, honestly, get a grip. You may not agree with Krugman’s Keynsian economics, but give him credit for coming up with a funny way of expressing his point. I certainly laughed when I heard it. Now, maybe you’re just not familiar with Maher’s show. Maybe you think it’s some kind of PBS News Hour Interview panel. Or maybe you’re just losing any ability to find an even keel in the midst of these culture wars. But let’s be clear, you’re just plain wrong, and also wrong to expect that Krugman has to insert a cavaet here. I mean, any reasonable person with a sense of humor knows Krugman was joking. Everyone in the room with me watching knew he was joking. If you need cavaets, that’s not a good sign, my friend. Love your website and work here, but you clearly need to get some rest and a fresh perspective.
Krugman is a crazy bastard. It was a tongue in cheek comment but but for an economist to believe the tripe he spews he’d have to be completely insane.
“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…””
That’s your rule, Anthony. Not anyone else’s. When you speak about aliens, it’s pretty much guaranteed to be sarcasm unless you’re Giorgio A. Tsoukalos. Krugman even mentioned directly the faking of a crisis to get more government spending. That’s what he’s after regardless of the means. He’s willing to lie to the people in order to bring about what he thinks is a better future even though he’s completely wrong of course. George W. Bush even mentioned this exact scenario about “world peace”.
So Krugman is not serious on the alien thing, but he is serious about faking a crisis to get more government spending.
Goldie says:
May 27, 2012 at 3:53 pm
It’s an interesting controversy this one. I may be wrong, but didn’t the US build it’s way out of the 1920s recession by constructing the interstate.
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It seems your history is mixed up.
Anybody that has ever attacked U.S. soil, has never been seen on the battlefield again.
condrag,
Once, maybe it’s a joke. But Krugman has been on his ‘aliens’ theme for too long. As Stark wrote upthread, Krugman “…obviously does believe in aliens, and he wants you to believe as well, but he can’t bring himself to mention them, unless he can (clumsily) pass it off as a joke when somebody calls him on his crap.”
Again, in reply to my first post, he’s joking. That he’s told this particular absurd example before doesn’t mean he isn’t still joking. He’s using a joke to make a point about economics, at least what he believes to be true, that massive government spending will indeed cure a depression caused by a lack of demand. That’s the serious part of his argument. The joke part of it is that to get that stimulus you would lie to the people and invent an alien invasion to justify it.
And let’s be clear: every economist agrees that it was the massive government spending on WWII that ended the depression. He’s quite right there. Whether it would do the trick again under present circumstances is a different question, and he could be wrong there. (I don’t think he is).
People used humor to make points like this all the time. Your own websites uses such jokes. You’ve even written whole posts tongue in cheek to make such points. And really, if Krugman were actually serious about this alien invasion proposal, don’t you think he just ruined the plan?
I don’t know if Krugman actually believes in aliens, but I do know that a lot of scientists do. Carl Sagan does. Millions have been spent on SETI. It’s not a crackpot idea, even if Krugman does believe in them. Hell, I half do myself. The mathematical odds of us being alone in the universe are vanishingly small. Nonetheless, the idea is part of our culture as a kind of running half-joke. We make blockbuster movies about this subject every other year or so. No one takes it seriously serious except for crackpots. And I think Krugman was quite obviously using the notion of an alien invasion in that cultural context. It’s certainly true that if one of those movie scenarios actually happened, we definitely would gear up the economy to a wartime level of full employment almost instantly. But we also know to treat the context as a fantasy. I guess if you live in a black underground survival bunker and have never read science fiction or watched these movies or watched a modern comedy show, Krugman might be taken seriously. Kind of like Orson Welles’ audience back in 1938. These days, if people tried to announce an alien invasion, it would be assumed to be a joke, and it would take a long time to convince anyone that it was real.
“Nucking-Futs” is a new expression to me but I will treasure it and apply it to all future similar outbreaks. Perhaps they could store him in the basement of Fort Knox so that he can see how low reserves have got. If it wasn’t all so dangerous it would be laughable.
byz says:
May 27, 2012 at 2:39 pm
AnotherPhilC says:
May 27, 2012 at 12:59 pm
“So when Keynesian economics fail, it’s always because it’s imperfectly implemented? Rather like Marxism then?”
If Keynesian economics fails then we are all up sh*t creek without a paddle 😮
Currently we only have two tested forms of economics Neoclassical (which is what 99% of all current economists are including Krugman) or Keynesianism, we know from past situations that Keynesianism works in the current situation, however it hits the rich and market speculation (it is better for the poor and the average man as it creates employment). The mess we currently have is a result of 40 years of Neoclassical economics which removed constraints to what banks could do (just like in the 1920′s).
Keynesian economics isn’t perfect (it doesn’t work when you have stagflation), however it is the best we have for the current situation. The only reason the west escaped the 1930′s depression ultimately was due to WWII, and that was a classic Keynesian expansion (we expanded because we had too).
What many people putting down Keynesianism are forgetting the massive expansion of the US in the 1950′s and 60′s which was down to following Keynesian economics, if Neoclassical economics had been in place the USSR would have been first to the Moon!!!!
Why did we never get out of earth orbit for the last 40 years? Because we have had a neoclassical system in place.
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Sorry, but this is utter nonsense. Keynesianism got us to the Moon?! Seriously?? Sure a lot of government spending went into Apollo but in no way was it dependent upon deficit spending. The fact that we were financing Vietnam at the same time clearly demonstrates just how false that notion is. The US got to the moon first for a variety of reasons. The first is that we had more resources to put into the project. The second is that we got a bigger piece of the German technical team than the Soviets did. And third, let’s not forget just how close the race was. Korolev was no idiot. Fourth, the Russian can still get to space; the US government can’t. Fifth, SpaceX is demonstrating just how pathetically low is the rate of return on government spending on NASA and ULA. Hell, we won’t even get the Orion capsule for what it has cost SpaceX to build a capsule AND TWO lift stacks. That’s the success of your Keynesianism?
And can we stop with the nonsense that says that WWII ended the depression? Please? Wars destroy things. They kill people. Both of those are the very definition of destruction of capital. Wars do NOT fix economies. US debt increased to over 100% of GDP during the war. The only reason that the US did so well afterwards was that it was literally the only industrial economy left standing. The UK had never truly recovered from WWI and had already begun its decline before WWII even started. The US had begun to come out of the depression even before the war started in spite of all of the command economy tactics that Roosevelt tried. You can argue all you like about moral and ethical reasons to fund likes like the WPA, but economically it just doesn’t hold water. Note that I do understand the problem of the commons and I do understand the need for some amount of infrastructure spending by the government as a result.
We will be just fine if Keynesian economics fails. In fact, the sooner the better. Many have argued that it already has multiple times. The problem in the West is that we have propped up economies with unsustainable government spending for so long that the hangover is going to be massive. If dot.bomb and housing were bubbles, then government overspending is a hyperbubble. Fundamentally, the world needs to relearn that genuine economic growth comes from individuals exploiting resources in novel ways to improve efficiency and make more widgets for us all. Every time that the government attempts this results in a terrible waste of capital. Solyndra, anyone?
And lest you believe that the West is the only place that has this problem, then I suggest you take a look at China. They pumped in a much bigger stimulus than the US and yet as that has run out so too is their economy cooling. In fact manufacturing has been contracting for months now. Really, the only reason they’re still growing is because the West has propped up their exports and they have some very low hanging fruit for domestic development, i.e. electricity and running water.
Krugmannian neo-Keynesianism is to real Keynesianism what Islam is to Judaism.
So conradg, Krugman says (seriously) that our govenment should lie to us so they can be empowered to do what is best for us and you think the important part is the aliens? Wow, you cannot see the forest for all the trees.
Europe has a much bigger problem: demographics. All the right economic policy in the world won’t save them from that problem.
Unfortunately, Krugman doesn’t joke about government spending. He believes heavy government expenditures on practically any project will help fire up the economy – even if the money comes from borrowing. Debt is good. He is saying here that an alien invasion has the same threat value for political exploitation as global warming. Either (or both) are adequate and useful chimeras to arouse public alarm and create the kind of spending that he wants. Most reasonable people would agree that this is a somewhat cynical view of the citizenry whom he wants to manipulate, although some people appear to appreciate what he is doing.
When he wasn’t appointed by the Obama administration, he embarked on the populist journalistic / blogging path to get his ideas out, though I doubt he is sanguine about any political future for himself at this point – unless it is post-2020.