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)
Being not Japanese you can be forgiven for not seeing that government running a budget surplus and spending massively on programs of dubious value, helped maintain a 20+ year-long recession.
Being not an American you can be forgiven for not understanding how U.S. Federal mandates like the Community Reinvestment Act gave banks an incentive to relax loan standards and lend according to political needs–please read “Reckless Endangerment” for the full story. The sub-prime mess in the U.S., at least, is a perfect example of public/private partnership; just as green industry will be. What went on in Europe and Asia to induce their own version of subprime mess is unknown to me.
Australia has weathered the financial crisis because of the world-wide commodities boom. Please come back some years hence when we learn how raising taxes and fees on your mining industry in the face of a decline, most likely, in commodity prices works out…
Also please have a close look at the problems of trying to save money for a rainy day on the scale of national economies. How are most of those “sovereign wealth” funds doing?
conradg says:
May 27, 2012 at 5:37 pm
“Nor did NASA get financing from private industry. It was purely a function of big government centralized planning. Socialism, in other words. Heavens, it must be evil therefore.”
It surely cost you about 5 % of your GDP each year for as long as the Apollo program ran.
conradg says:
May 27, 2012 at 4:17 pm
I can’t speak for your intelligence, but your lack of taste is almost unlimited in this regard.
Bill Maher, Jon Stewart, & Steven Colbert all use precisely the same formula:
“Guys, it’s like this: we need to round up our enemies and put them in camps. Okay, I’m only joking. But seriously, the stuff they’re doing is unbelievably evil and we need to have them barcoded and possibly executed. Yeah, that was a little bit of a joke. Okay, but have you seen this thing they do? That is deserving of death camps, for sure. Haha, no we can’t do that can we?”
Or as Sean Medlock puts it: “Clown Nose on! Clown Nose off!“
i thought that Krugman already has had his desired stimulus to the USA economy and that did not need aliens to appear either for the stimulus to happen. Just some good old fashioned lies and corruption from a cabal of climate warming scientists did the same job.
And it doesn’t seemed to have worked at all in stimulating the economy as any supposed national economic results are in the negative and the benefits of the massive government investments are not even measurable.
.
From the Australian “JoNova’s” site.
“US Government *only* spent $70 billion on climate since 2008”
http://joannenova.com.au/2012/05/us-government-only-spent-70-billion-on-climate-since-2008/
UPDATE: Table 5. Budget Authority for All Reported Climate Change Programs
FY2008 through FY2012
(in millions of nominal dollars)
Department of Agriculture 1,418
Department of Commerce 1,932
Department of Defense 776
Department of Energy 51,824
Department of Health and Human Services 21
Department of the Interior 401
Department of State 422
US Agency for International Development 1,041
Department of Transportation 295
Department of the Treasury 1,112
Environmental Protection Agency 659
NASA 6,764
National Science Foundation 1,704
Smithsonian Institution 34
Totals = 68,574 billion US dollars
[ Official totals in the Table above are given as 68, 402 billion dollars.
There appears to be a discrepancy of 171 million US dollars in the 4 year totals from the Dept of the Interior in the official table above ]
So some 68, 574 billion dollars have been spent on global warming science and CO2 mitigation [ alternative energy ] in the USA alone in the 4 years from 2008 to 2012
Double that for the world at large!
And the results
Scientifically ; status quo with only the poorly funded skeptical scientists advancing the climate knowledge base
Economically; tending towards disastrous particularly in Europe.
Socially; promotion of despair and fear and now a number of rapidly increasing and potentially catastrophic, grossly energy deficient nations and populations with all the consequences that entails towards employment, industry, health and commerce and human welfare.
All of which was and is so totally unnecessary except to those fanatical zealots who will forcibly thrust their radical Gaia ideology and dogma onto the rest of the world if they ever gain power.
Krugman has already had his big scare campaign that was supposedly needed to stimulate economic activity, the results of which are just the opposite to what he claimed would happen
The source for the figures above are from Table 5
; Funding for Federal Climate Change Activities, FY2008 to FY2012
Congressional Research Service; April 26th 2012
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=91e9fae6-083a-44f6-b47c-33fdac25d6e0
Krugman and much of the world has forgotten that at the start of the current recession, some years ago now, the old Keynesian theories of the 1930’s were adopted vis. “Spend your way out of it.” This was adopted with enthusiasm by many countries. Unfortunately the double dip recession has meant that countries like Greece, Italy and Spain are now unable to service this debt.
byz says:
May 27, 2012 at 3:14 pm
“DirkH
stop trolling!!
I am being straight over this and not diverting, I have read his works and Keynes’s works and they do not agree.
As to the prison population they are like having someone unemployed, it would be better to have them doing useful work, than being locked in their cells 23 hours a day.
Afganistan is down to you not spending money on intelligence and defence in the first place, the US had been warned about those involved in 9/11 and didn’t act on it, you then paid the price.”
I wasn’t trolling. I was asking a polite question. And you have completely misunderstood the question.
First: The prison population. You say they are like unemployed – well, I don’t know what you do with your inmates but here in Germany they need to work if they want to earn money with which they can buy cigarettes – simple work, badly paid, but they are doing something useful – for instance folding leaflets or something like that.
But my question was: Is the COST of your prison system, the money you pay to the wardens etc., a boost to your economy? It should be according to Keynes.
Second: Afghanistan. Again, you misunderstand me entirely. I didn’t ask how you got into that situation or how you could have avoided that. As I was specifically asking for what Keynes would say about it, I was meaning to ask does the COST of the military operations boost your economy?
Sorry if you think I’m trolling. If a Keynesian does not like to be asked about these things, then it is difficult to fathom how a debate about Keynesianism with a Keynesian can be possible. Maybe Keynesians like it better not to be made aware of the contradictions of their belief system.
“Every violation of truth is not only a sort of suicide in the liar, but is a stab at the health of human society.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
Why does spending money on battling non-existent aliens work to improve the economy but tax breaks to all tax payers does not?
Yes, because conservative supply-side trickle down economics was such a HUGE success. Let’s blame it all on the liberals…
Money is not a real thing, it is always a purely relative measure. If you think it is an absolute physical entity you have no standing to talk about economics in my opinion, and that is where virtually all the criticism of Keynes stems from. Did it not occur to you that this may be the reason why we had a gold standard in the past (until a CONSERVATIVE president dropped it)?
Stick to the science plx. Kthx.
Also, you are saying that you don’t think that this is what the “War on Drugs” and all of these other things are? Making up aliens is far less crazy that the war on drugs, let me assure you. And that isn’t the only thing either…
Kevin Kilty,
Please point to the experiment in which we tried Libertarian, Laissez Faire, open markets, for long enough time to consider the results definitive, found them wanting, and then tried something else. Please point to exactly what didn’t work and how what we tried next improved upon it.
Ah, so you’re operating under the fantasy that there are, indeed, truly workable economic systems out there, that we just haven’t tried yet. Communists still make that claim, that “true communism” hasn’t been tried yet. It’s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy. Well, this one is impossible to refute, and so you are welcome to the fantasy. Just keep in mind that every economic system that has ever actually been tried, has been riddled with errors and problems. I think you should be a bit humbler about things, given that track record. I’m sure there are better systems out there, but the thing about problems is that solving them just creates more problems. And that applies doubly to economics. There’s no end to problems, and no end to people whining about them, and people claiming to have all the answers. It’s that kind of hubris which I thought this site was trying to combat.
As for the US becoming like Greece, that could only happen if the rest of the world is hugely more productive than the US. Greece isn’t in the problem they’re in because of debt, but because of lack of productivity. You seem not to understand that currency is literally relative. It has no value of its own. Where exactly is all that money supposed to go? It’s just paper and electrons, after all. It goes towards production.
A lot of people seem not to understand that the only purpose of money is to maximize productivity. It’s the creation of governments, used to make capital mobile and to ensure that as many people are working productively as possible. If it ceases to perform that function, we have economic collapses. It’s not due to debt, but to a misallocation of capital in inefficient ways. Unemployment is one of the most egregious forms of inefficient productivity, and using money and debt in various fictitious ways to get everyone working is what it’s all for.
And this is the underlying truth behind Krugman’s joke. As an economist, he knows better than most that money and debt is a useful fiction, kind of like inventing a story about aliens invading to get the everyone working again. Deficit spending is very much like that – a useful fiction about fictitious money used to get everyone working again, solving a lack of faith in the system of fictitious currency. Much of economic life involves the suspension of disbelief in various fictitious forms of money and debt so as to get everyone working more productively and taking part in the fruits of that.
Keynsian Economics and CAGW are both failed theories resulting from the same fundamental mistakes: distortion of historical data, basing assumptions on failed models, confusing correlation with causation, a belief system based on dogma rather than evidence, failure to address unintended consequences, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad verecundiam, political agendas supersedes contrarian evidence, etc.
Eventually, both theories will be thrown on the trash heap of history because they simply don’t work and evidence to the contrary invalidates them.
“The last card they will play will be alien invasion” – Attributed to Werner Von Braun by his assistant (Dr. Carol Rosin) for the last several years of his life.
Glenn Tamblyn
May 27, 2012 at 6:20 pm
###
You appear to be confused by a few things, but mostly about the nature of what is happening in the US, its politics, and the diversity of its citizen’s world view. Not to be insulting, but this is understandable as your only source of data has been predigested to conform to a world-view that you have been trained to have. I really doubt that you can understand a traditional American conservative world-view. I hope I am wrong. I have met many Australians who do understand, but finding that out was difficult due to language. because of the stranglehold on public discourse held by lefties until recently, conservatives have not had much of a chance to develop a common vocabulary.
Any system of thought that puts validity in the “Left-Right” dichotomy is going to be socialist. The dichotomy is a deliberate creation of socialists. The purpose is to severely limit political discussion so that it is always within a Marxist world view. With that, no mater which side “wins” socialism succeeds. Every political ideology that is not lefty, is mapped onto this abstract “right” by academia and the new media. Any characteristic that does not conform and can not be reinterpreted, is ignored and forgotten. That which can be reinterpreted, is then represented (usually with some distortion) as aspects of this “Right”. Then remaining characteristics are in filled, without any supporting evidence. Lack of supporting evidence does not matter because that evidence will be imagined and in remembrance, the imagined and the real become one.
In a very real sense every problem in the US can be laid right at the feet of socialists.
Governments can not fix anything. The more they try, the more they break things, even with good intentions. So even ascribing good intentions, which is quite a stretch when socialists are involved, by the time a government reacts to a trend, the trend has changed and whatever the reaction was is ineffective at best, but more usually damaging.
BTW, a socialist is anyone who believes that society needs to be engineered and it is the roll of government to do that engineering.
One more thing. I am pretty autistic and trying to serialize out complex thoughts is difficult. That is why I tend to limit my input to inanities. I hope what I wrote makes sense, but I fear that I might as well have been writing in Japanese.
“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.”
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Why? If the government is going to borrow money, why not give it to the people and let them spend it? They will most certainly do a better job than the government.
In effect the government is like your children when they borrow your credit card. They go to the store and buy a bunch of stuff they don’t really need of dubious quality, because it isn’t their money. They don’t care. Heck they might even buy stuff for their friends if you aren’t watching.
However, when the bills come at the end of the month you have to make the payments – while the kids are out partying – laughing at your stupidity.
The US Federal Reserve is NOT owned by the people of the US. It is owned by private bankers. Their interests are not the same as those of the US people. When the US government borrows money from the Federal Reserve, the government isn’t going to pay it back. They are going to spend it and a lot of it they will spend foolishly.
It is you the taxpayer that will have to pay it back. One way of the other.
YIKES!!!
In my post, that “new media” was supposed to be “news media”. It has been “new media” that has provided the remedy!
BTW, any economist (Keynes) that had put faith in their ability to model the effects of government involvement in a economy were fooling them selves because the mathematical tools to do that modeling did not exist until fairly recently. Some early economist were rightly suspicious of the utility of such modeling.
Glenn Tamblyn says:
May 27, 2012 at 6:20 pm
“Maybe America is in so much trouble because your ideas about yourselves and what America is are just too simplistic. Noble ideas are usually wrong because they just don’t accept the reality of how messy reality actually is.”
Glenn,
Our Dear Leader and his socialist supporters have stabilized the economy of the United States of America in an unrelenting recession! Their misguided actions, of inflating the money supply to support incredibly wasteful public sector spending while simultaneously strangling private enterprise job creation with suffocating regulations, are destroying creativity and profits while driving energy costs ever higher. We have coal and oil reserves within the contiguous United States sufficient to meet our energy needs for the next 300 years, yet we can’t tap and develop them because our socialist governments policies and regulations prevent their development!
This is not ‘The Capitalist Regulated American Model’ of our fathers. This is The Ig-Noble Socialist Model of the Neo-European America! Or should I say Nobel Socialist European Model?! It is killing my country. We accept the reality of just how destructive the Ig-Nobel Socialist European Model really is and how incredibly messy and wasteful it is! We are determined to take our country back before Our Dear Leader and his socialist supporters can drive us past the economic tipping point of NO return that Europe finds itself on the precipice of now. We damn well know what works best! We’ve been there….
Glenn, You don’t have to look any further than the economic mess that is the European Union right now, to see the simple truth that socialist ‘noble ideas’ yield an unrecoverable economic mess that leaves destruction and despair nearly everywhere it is embraced. When the economic destruction is sufficient, revolutions, wars, and famines result. With this on the horizon, why would any sane person continue to ‘compromise’? With this on the horizon, why would any sane person advocate more ‘compromise’? Compromise and tolerance are what have brought us to the point of anarchy and destruction. The hard times are here, thanks to ‘compromise’.
Screw ‘compromise’. Compromise has screwed us! No more…..
MtK
Samurai says:
May 27, 2012 at 7:43 pm
“Keynsian Economics and CAGW are both failed theories resulting from the same fundamental mistakes: distortion of historical data, basing assumptions on failed models, confusing correlation with causation, a belief system based on dogma rather than evidence, failure to address unintended consequences, argumentum ad populum, argumentum ad verecundiam, political agendas supersedes contrarian evidence, etc.
Eventually, both theories will be thrown on the trash heap of history because they simply don’t work and evidence to the contrary invalidates them.”
Nice parallel, Samurai !!
MtK
Nenndul says:
May 27, 2012 at 7:25 pm
Money is not a real thing, it is always a purely relative measure.
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The banks will not agree when they foreclose. Money is a promise to pay. A Promissory Note. And the Law says you will pay or lose your property.
Right now every man, woman and child in the US owes $50,000 and this is increasing exponentially. This debt is the modern day equivalent of slavery. Indentured servitude wearing lipstick and a filly dress.
This is the single greatest threat facing the US people and it is beyond the ability of the government to solve. When the money runs out, great empires collapse first from within.
If we are to believe the demographers, sometime around 2050 the world’s population will finally cease to grow and then may plateau for a generation or so before it begins to fall. That fall in quite a lot of the developed world’s national populations can already be found by checking through the “Index Mundi” site which uses the CIA facts book as it’s original source.
http://www.indexmundi.com/g/g.aspx?v=24&c=xx&l=en
Our capitalism system relies upon growth in every field, increasing money supply, increasing population to consume, increasing industrial output, increasing consumption and etc for it’s very survival.
After the global population ceases increasing there will be long period where the standards of living in a very large part of the global population will continue to rise and so the increases in consumption and much else needed for our present type of capitalistic system to survive will continue on.
But there will come a time when the both the consumption of goods and services by individuals and by entire populations and societies will level off which can generally be defined as the level where individual’s and society’s energy needs plateau per unit of population.
And by then late in the 21st century there is likely to be a long slow decline in human populations under way.
When this global population decline and the slow down in the rise of living standards and consumption cross over, then the present capitalist system as we know it will likely fail.
Japan has been the canary in the mine in this regard with it’s 2 decade long stagnation of it’s economy and it’s rapidly aging and now declining population. Russia is not far behind with it’s rapidly declining population as is the case with many developed western countries.
Japan’s salvation is that despite a high level of xenophobia, they are able to and have been importing large numbers of younger labour from surrounding Asian nations to keep their industry manned and their economy and industry still running at a reasonable level of efficiency.
And they have been exporting their industry into cheaper labour markets but maintaining the underpinning technology within their own ranks and in doing so importing the wealth generated by others back into Japan which has helped Japan to maintain a consistently high standard of living despite it’s rapidly aging and now falling population.
That option will soon run out for Japan as other nations start to face the same labour shortage situation, a shortage that even China may start to face around 2020 as the long term outcome, the aging of offspring of their now 2 or 3 decades old one child policy starts to cascade down though their society.
i am an old man now but much of this will happen within the lifetimes of those who are now in their early working lives and who still have another half a century at least of a lifetime ahead of them.
That old Chinese curse may yet carry far more angst for future generations than any might wish for.
“May you live in interesting times”
DesertYote says:
May 27, 2012 at 7:51 pm
“…….In a very real sense every problem in the US can be laid right at the feet of socialists.
Governments can not fix anything. The more they try, the more they break things, even with good intentions. So even ascribing good intentions, which is quite a stretch when socialists are involved, by the time a government reacts to a trend, the trend has changed and whatever the reaction was is ineffective at best, but more usually damaging.
BTW, a socialist is anyone who believes that society needs to be engineered and it is the roll of government to do that engineering.
One more thing. I am pretty autistic and trying to serialize out complex thoughts is difficult. That is why I tend to limit my input to inanities. I hope what I wrote makes sense, but I fear that I might as well have been writing in Japanese.”
DesertYote,
Thank You! You make perfect sense to me, Sir!
MtK
“this is in nucking futz territory”
How so very………….engineerish!
(If you can make up words, so can I.)
Love this site. Keep up the good work!
By the way, I tried looking up the “old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times”. The phrase was first mentioned mid 1930’s by people in the diplomatic service, although no actual Chinese translation is noted. It was used by Robert Kennedy in 1966 who may (or may not) have gotten it out of a fortune cookie. But is does sound learned, cool, and inscrutable. I used to use it that way (to appear learned, cool and inscrutable) until I looked it up. Oh, fiddlesticks!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/May_you_live_in_interesting_times
Steamboat Jack (Jon Jewett’s evil twin)
US government debt has risen from around 70% to over 100% of GDP in the last two years (compared to around 120% in 1946).
http://www.tradingeconomics.com/united-states/government-debt-to-gdp
Krugman’s answer is that the stimulus spending was not enough, which is a form of Zeno’s paradox.
How far does Krugman want to push it?
No, I am asking you to point out where these tests have been made that you claim disprove each and every economic system.
Greece is in the pickle it is because it has low productivity AND has been using debt to live beyond its means. Without the debt there’d be no issue, would there? If Greeks want to live in a manner befitting low productivity then that is their business, but if they want to live better, yet do so through borrowing, then that becomes a larger issue. The lenders have already taken a haircut, but they aren’t lending new money to Greece at low rates, and this is where Greece is currently in a tight spot.
What I do or do not understand about currency you don’t know about at all; what I do know is that lenders do not perpetually throw good money after bad. They will go looking for better investments, or they will get interest rates that befit the risk.
Why is it that when I see an image labeled “Paul Krugman” I see Wesley Mooch looking back?
Socialism is very successful until it runs out of OPM.
[ OPM = “Other People’s Money”. ]