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)
It’s not the first trip down Alien Invasion Road for Krugman, it’s his own personal Broken Windows Fallacy.
Though I’m far less offended by someone going on about aliens than I am by somebody who thinks the solution to massive debt and grinding regulations stifling an economy is more debt and political graft (which is all we got out of the last doses of “stimulus”).
Krugman is the economic equivalent of a mad bomber.
Also, “take ideology out of it” has always meant “follow my ideology,” 100% of the time. There is no exception. Everyone but a handful of “radicals” thinks they are moderate and middle-of-the-road, and even the radicals often claim that.
And on top of that, international discussions on politics are almost impossible because, as DesterYote pointed out, the words don’t mean the same things, even if the language looks alike. Most of the commonwealth doesn’t have anything like the “American Right,” the political traditions aren’t the same, especially the words “right wing” mean totally different things in the US than the commonwealth or Europe.
conradg says:
May 27, 2012 at 5:55 pm
“REPLY: Reality check Conrad. Explain how you’ll personally be paying back the $138,000 you owe squandered by the US government on deficit spending”
First, I don’t owe that money, the government does, and so the creditors can’t come after me for it.
The creditors can’t, but the IRS can — and if you think the government isn’t going to raise your taxes to cut some of that deficit, you’re in for a rude awakening.
And frankly, most of the people who are owed that money are not my concern. The debt is a fiction of currency swaps.
Swapping currency from one person (or entity) to another based solely on a promise to repay is a debt. When you go grocery shopping, the food in your cart is debt until you arrive at the register and pay for it.
Hansen, Krugman, Suzuki and such
These global warmists are nucking futz
Check for mercury in the water supply
The New Mad Hatters are riding high
“”””” ROM says:
May 27, 2012 at 9:41 pm
Socialism is very successful until it runs out of OPM.
[ OPM = “Other People’s Money”. ] “””
Strange; the exact same thing is true of Capitalism. Smart investors always play only with OPM.
Yes, Krugman is serious about his proposal to concoct a story about an alien invasion…Of course, he’s making a point about economics, that it doesn’t matter how you justify a stimulus from economic standpoint as long as it is enacted…
You guys have a lot of difficulty with abstraction apparently…My advice: Take a literature class and an economics class as well…
Actually the ‘big lie’ to engender a common popular action as directed by a particular priesthood/leader/elite/ruling class is as old as civilisation itself. How do you get a mass population to engage in a common effort for which they would normally have little interest in expending their energies or changing their established way of life in order to achieve the required objectives?
The methods are:
Slavery, enslave a workforce/population and force them to obey a central will, whips and threat of death and work camps and a police state.
Fear, instil in a population the belief of an external or internal threat great enough so that self interest dictates the required common action. This could be an external enemy or a minority population like the Jews or an invented entity.
Fraud, make up a God illusion that the population can hold in common and spread the word that this superhuman God wishes for some works to be done. Spread through a priesthood that the God/s will be angry and visit fury and vengeance upon them if they fail to engage in the common activity.
Self interest, make it known that unless an action is taken disaster is certain to strike, that unless common action and sacrifices are made now the future will be an awful hell on earth with fire and brimstone and pain and suffering, people throughout the ages have feared the future more than anything else and are likely to take any action if they can be fooled into taking action that they believe will help them in the future.
The beauty of these three methods are that they are infinitely interchangeable, combinations can be used to great effect to gain the trust of a population, instil fear, encourage mass group identity, encourage hatred of those who do not wish to take part. The CAGW fraud is not a new phenomenon at all, in fact frauds like it have been a central part of the human story from Stonehenge to the pyramids to Nazi Germany. How to get a population to obey a central or individual will, how to construct something new or destroy something old, how to gain power or how to seize a throne or overthrow an old deity. The central players are always the elites, the tiny minority who need the muscle power or obedience of the greater mass to achieve their aims. This elite will lie and cheat and deceive and manipulate and terrorize to reach their common objectives, the fewer morals they have and hold the greater the chance of success, at least in the short term. The fact that like death, the ends of such advancement of a cause always ends in the death/collapse/destruction of that cause is ignored. A peculiar contradiction of this paradigm that the ends justify the means directly causes the ultimate failure of the project itself and yet this lesson is seemingly never learned by the current architects of the current fraud. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, maybe that is humanitys curse.
“”””” DirkH says:
May 27, 2012 at 6:49 pm
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. “””””
Need to check your history DirkH. The Apollo Program didn’t cost US taxpayers one brass razoo !
President John F Kennedy, committed the US to investing $40B and ten years to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth.
The program came in two years ahead of schedule, and under budget ($35B). That entire investment was recouped and then some in the next 8 years, simply from the reduction in crop losses in the US South East, as a consequence of improved forward weather forecasting and severe weather warning. That came about because Apollo was a manned project, and it was required to maintain round the world round the clock continuous contact with the vehicles, and with the world weathr conditions, for crew safety. Now when you consider the vast array of advabced materials and technologies that were developed for that program, it is easy to see, that the astronauts just went along for the ride. The project was a technology tour de force, that may never be surpassed.
Compare CERN with Apollo as an investment in useful science and technology. Well CERN is at least useful in employing thousands of otherwise unemployable people.
And the “Planning” of the ApolloProgram had very little to do with the three branches of the US federal government. It was in fact a result of competent corporate managers, in addition to the NASA umbrella. More like big industry.
I must once again jump to the defence of Keynes here, even though I have significant reservations about his views. Poor man, he has been misinterpreted and demonised, especially thanks to charlatans like Krugman.
Keynes never said that the way to dig yourself out of structural debt is to spend more.
Keynes never said that having more people in prison, or war, is good for the economy because it creates jobs.
His work was much more nuanced than people give it credit for. And, his prescription for short term volatility (save in good times, spend in bad) is hardly controversial. The problems faced by many Western economies are a result of long-term, structural, unsustainable deficits. Not the same thing at all.
As for the effect of war on economies, it varies. Destruction of old infrastructure can result in building new, state of the art infrastructure, as happened in Japan, South Korea and Germany – provided the conditions are right and capital is available. But, wartime restrictions can become bad habits, for example the retention of rationing and associated regulation for years afterwards, which happened in both the UK and Australia (that I know of). Only when rationing was abolished, and production deregulated, did supply and demand match up again.
Desertguy, I think your comments about the left/right dichotomy are very insightful. There is a lot of miscommunication on this blog and more generally because (a) people don’t understand that the US political tradition is quite different from the European, British and their derived ones; and (b) it follows that the terminology causes confusion. And I say that as an Australian, who is more in the Euro/UK camp in terms of political tradition, but has spent time in the US.
Gary Pearse says:
May 27, 2012 at 5:12 pm
Prime Minister Harper of Canada has, so far, steered through the global economic minefield that has been blowing up countries large and small. ……..
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Exactly, he got the government out of the way and let people do what they do best. Further, his encouragement, allowed for real wealth creation and not some silly market/money switch trick. He’s set Canada on solid footing and is a worthy study.
Krugman wasn’t always crazy. The baby sitting club was quite good.
http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1998/08/babysitting_the_economy.html
How foolish. What’s worse is there are many people who will automatically believe him.
Here’s how Krugman economics really work:
The Broken Window Fallacy
Krugman is missing a trick here, the economy is no more complex than the climate.
Why dont we have a great big model, written by the most brilliant scientific econo-gurus that the world has ever seen. They can base their global economy algorithms on the micro economy of – say – a small town in Northern Siberia.
These alorithms can then churn away in the model (Been Had Crud) and the resulting concensus will be that we need a high speed rail link paid for by the fed
It might be better to call his ideas nuts – calling someone nucking futz could be regarded as a mini-Heartland-poster moment! The fruitcake/weirdo descriptions don’t move the argument forward (ask the UK’s Cameron about that!)
on food prices: i seem to remember they took off as more and more corn was diverted to ethanol production…corn ethanol does not make much sense if you compare the energy input and output…by the way the Indian govt is sitting on 75 million tons of food grains, much of which will go to waste once the monsoon starts…
on the alien lie idea: i thought we already tried that when we went to war in Iraq over imaginary WMD…without raising taxes and doubling the national debt in the process
on climate: Krugman does not know what he is talking about…i think politics has no place in this debate…unfortunately it has deteriorated into mutual abuse
Krugman debate
Bring it on!
http://www.krugmandebate.com/
Now if we really do have an alien invasion no one will believe them…
I’m not sure if he’s completely nuts, but basically what he seems to be saying is “scientists should tell huge lies to the public to get the public to support political agendas that I happen to believe in but which are not currently supported by the public”.
….which sounds awfully similar to the AGW approach.
Looks like he’s read Adam Robert’s sci-fi masterpiece ‘Yellow Blue Tibia’.
http://www.amazon.com/Yellow-Blue-Tibia-Adam-Roberts/dp/0575083573
EternalOptimist,
the models are needed to make the arbiters right. Macro-economic models serve economic central planning, warming models do the same -no coincidence.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter what we think about government crackpots because come every election cycle, we’re ducks in a pond fighting over bread crumbs. We refuse to give up on the central planners.
If you think about it, high speed rail would be an ideal way of detering any conquest-mined aliens; it’d be clear and convincing proof that there’s no inteligent life on this planet.
Clearly, he is calling for a Martian Plan.
8-]
DirkH says:
May 27, 2012 at 7:10 pm
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.”
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.
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http://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=8289
“There are approximately 2 million inmates in state, federal and private prisons throughout the country. According to California Prison Focus, “no other society in human history has imprisoned so many of its own citizens.” The figures show that the United States has locked up more people than any other country: a half million more than China, which has a population five times greater than the U.S. Statistics reveal that the United States holds 25% of the world’s prison population, but only 5% of the world’s people. From less than 300,000 inmates in 1972, the jail population grew to 2 million by the year 2000. In 1990 it was one million. Ten years ago there were only five private prisons in the country, with a population of 2,000 inmates; now, there are 100, with 62,000 inmates. It is expected that by the coming decade, the number will hit 360,000, according to reports.
What has happened over the last 10 years? Why are there so many prisoners?
“The private contracting of prisoners for work fosters incentives to lock people up. Prisons depend on this income. Corporate stockholders who make money off prisoners’ work lobby for longer sentences, in order to expand their workforce. The system feeds itself,” says a study by the Progressive Labor Party, which accuses the prison industry of being “an imitation of Nazi Germany with respect to forced slave labor and concentration camps.”
The prison industry complex is one of the fastest-growing industries in the United States and its investors are on Wall Street. “This multimillion-dollar industry has its own trade exhibitions, conventions, websites, and mail-order/Internet catalogs. It also has direct advertising campaigns, architecture companies, construction companies, investment houses on Wall Street, plumbing supply companies, food supply companies, armed security, and padded cells in a large variety of colors.”
According to the Left Business Observer, the federal prison industry produces 100% of all military helmets, ammunition belts, bullet-proof vests, ID tags, shirts, pants, tents, bags, and canteens. Along with war supplies, prison workers supply 98% of the entire market for equipment assembly services; 93% of paints and paintbrushes; 92% of stove assembly; 46% of body armor; 36% of home appliances; 30% of headphones/microphones/speakers; and 21% of office furniture. Airplane parts, medical supplies, and much more: prisoners are even raising seeing-eye dogs for blind people.”
Slave labour for capitalists and jobs taken out of the market place. And re Afghanistan, on the back of the bwankers industrial/military business.
“Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.”
-Albert Einstein
What else needs to be said.
FD
I think you’re wrong here: the real idiocy does start after he mentions the aliens, when he calls for the US Government to spend spend spend. That’s lunacy, what’s needed that the govenment shrinks as part of GDP and as quickly as possible. But then again you’re right, there are people who are pathologocally incapable of recognising their own nonsense.