Krugman as usual, considers himself to be a judge of other people’s views, morals, and conscience.
I find the column title amusing.
Here’s what is so amusing and at the same time troubling about his column.
It makes me wonder if he in fact believes in the soul and the afterlife, rather than Dawkin’s thesis that God is dead which seems to be popular with the left.
After reading Willis Eschenbach’s excellent essay on how global warming alarmism and policy hurts the poor the most, watching Dr. Matt Ridley’s uplifting video on how CO2 is helping to green the planet, seeing Steve McIntyre point out that the latest Marcott hockey stick appears to be either a statistical fabrication or unrealistic data error, and noting Dr. Savory’s simple solution for rolling back how desertifcaton leads to climate change, and knowing that Paul Krugman wouldn’t see any of this as rational skepticsim, but would instead label it a sin, while promoting policies that hamper our economy and personal freedom, weaken our defense, hurt the poor, and won’t make any measurable difference to the outcome, my response becomes quite simple.
Dear Paul Krugman,
I’ll see you in hell.
Sincerely,
Anthony Watts
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The estimable Matt Ridley personally thanked me for alerting him to the 7/12/12 YouTube of economist Pedro Schwartz “schooling” Paul Krugman in Barcelona. The clip relates to Master Krugman’s penchant for opining outside his area of expertise.
@numerobis & KevinK:
I can’t speak for Anthony, but there is a basic flaw in the way your question is phrased. ( In Buddhist terms it would get a MU! and whack with a stick).
Any statement of “trend” in temperature must include a time scale.
Temperature are ALWAYS rising, falling, and staying the same. I you don’t specify your time scale, you can have no answer. It’s all about picking the end points, you see.
So today both rose (in the morning) and cooled (in the evening).
The winter fell, then rose into spring.
The PDO was cold phase from about the ’50s to mid ’70s and we had the New Little Ice Age Scare (courtesy of some of the same folks as AGW BTW)
Then it swapped to warm phase and we’ve had Global Warming! Gasp!!
Now it’s swapped back to cooling and we’ve had stasis as the curve inflects oh so slowly.
Over 5000 years, we’ve cooled. A lot. Over 200 years, we’ve warmed.
Over 20,000 years we’ve rocketed up in temperature.
Over 4 million we are sliding into the freezer.
So perhaps you can correct your question by stating “Over what time frame”?
FWIW, solely from my potentially flawed recollections, Anthony has said he thinks things have not warmed in the last dozen or so years (as that is what the data say), but that there was a small warming from the ’70s and a larger warming out of the Little Ice Age. But that it is not yet possible to state how much of the instrumental record is accurate enough, due to bad station siting, to make claims of the small amount and high precision claimed by AGW fanatics.
Oh, and given that the Little Ice Age warming happened over several hundred years without the benefit of human CO2 flux, and that it is absolutely ordinary in the range of historical swings of temperatures, attributing any of modern temperature state or change to CO2 causes is rampant speculation at best.
So, ah hem, perhaps you ought to “try again” to get your phrasing right…
Oh God, more of that Modern Monetary Theory cra…ud..
This makes the typical error of confounding printed pretty pieces of paper with real value.
Printing trainloads of currency (it isn’t really money then, money has the property “store of value” that currency need not have. They used to teach that distinction at University. It looks like the MMT folks like to ignore it) simple spreads the “going broke” around to involuntary participants. That is, anyone holding currency as that value evaporates in inflation.
The end game is the same, it just takes a bit longer for the value squandering to finish as you need to not only spend all the value in the government accounts, but all the value in all the pockets of all the currency holders via inflating it away. That is ‘going broke’, but ends in a national hyperinflationary “going broke” instead of in a government austerity and can’t make the payroll going broke.
In short, you pay back the nominal “bills due” but can’t pay the actual “value due”. In both cases you are reneging on the “promise to pay”. In one case by not delivering sufficient money to cover the value owed. In the MMT way by delivering the currency devoid of purchasing power and value. It’s still broke.
FWIW, MMT grew out of a distortion of Keynes and Chartalism. The wiki isn’t too bad:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chartalism
The basic flaw in it comes from ignoring the 2nd half of Keynes. What he really said was that governments could deficit spend to get out of economic troubles for a short period of time AND if they carried a budget surplus when things got better. MMT tries to ignore the ‘carry a surplus’ half and want’s deficit spending in perpetuity. THAT is what leads to debasing the currency, the hidden taxation of inflation, and eventually to a hyperinflationary collapse. (as shown dozens of times in history up above. It’s not a theory, it’s an observable.)
In lay terms “print your way to prosperity” and “growth through increasing debt”.
This fails for several reasons (that likely don’t interest most folks here, so I’ll be brief – at the risk of incomplete).
First off, the aggregate market sees what is going on and reacts. Folks pull back on their own contributions to a recover when they see government spending like a drunken sailor and start doing things like buying gold instead of investing in plant and equipment.
Government spending isn’t “investment” and so does not increase net wealth. It is consumption, so consumes wealth. Too much of it is destructive to wealth levels.
In our present global economy where China is the maker of “stuff”, national spending to excess by the U.S. Government will cause China to have increased demand for goods, not the USA. As we will never have “excessive aggregate demand” (since it is going to China) we will simply keep printing money to worthlessness all to no avail.
During times of economic ‘hollowing out’ via mercantilist policies (such as those from China) debasing the currency relative to other currencies doesn’t “fix it”. China has a currency peg, so it mostly just exports some inflation to China. Having two countries inflate while one sucks the wealth and manufacturing capacity out of the other is not helped by having our currency debased and that value inflated away as well. The policy of ever more money printing will not change those mercantilist policies, nor get rid of the currency peg, nor lead to any increase in ‘aggregate demand’ for US production.
The notion that you can print more currency and not dilute the value of it is simply broken on the face of it. There is an identity. That identity says that the total goods sold is a product of the quantity of money and the velocity of money ( how often it changes hands). If you had $1000 of money, and it changes hands 5 times in a year, you had $5000 of Total Trade. What the government can do is when money V – velocity – slows down (as it does during recessions / depressions) it can help hold V up by continuing to spend. Yet eventually V will pick back up again. at that time it must withdraw money supply and spend less or there will be a higher product of Q quantity and V since V is now higher. Simply printing more does nothing to fix WHY the V dropped. Nor does it mean you can ignore that there is more Q now. As soon as V picks pack up, QV is larger and by definition you have inflation.
So on the one hand it doesn’t actually fix any of the real problems. It is just a ‘stop gap’ to keep QV about steady and prevent total from dropping. But it brings with it the essential requirements to a) Fix the real problems so you don’t end up in stagflation. and b) Withdraw the excess Q as soon as V is back to normal or even just headed that way fast.
Yet when did you ever see Government spend less. So it always violates that last step. So EVERY monetary 1/2 Keynesian “fix” always ends up with an inflationary kicker. And when did government ever really fix the real problem? They are not dealing with Mercantilist Policies. They are not dealing with underinvestment (the real kind, not the government consumption and calling it investment. Actual building of plant and machinery.)
Right now, since no ‘fix’ has been done, The Fed shoving buckets of money at the economy is just making an asset bubble in stocks and eventually in land (again though that is somewhat their goal – to get housing “values” back up … which is really inflating the currency enough that the underwater price becomes larger than the mortgage while buggering everyone on fixed income or salary). It is not increasing real investment nor fixing mercantilist ‘hollowing out’. It is driving up prices for “real stuff” while wages stay low. Stagflation.
We’re racking up debt at nose bleed rates. WHEN interest rates rise, debt service will rise and consume ever more of the national budget. The end of that game is Greece. Now MMT types will say we can just print the money to pay the bond holders.. but that leads to more inflation and more Q right when you want less…. Oops. So you end up with a choice between real repudiation – don’t pay the debt, repudiation via high inflation – pay in worthless paper, or paying ever higher interest rates to ‘roll over the debt’ as bond buyers realize that inflation is built in. (See Argentina for how that one worked out… they had their own currency too). In any case, you can’t borrow any more ‘real value’ as people catch on, and you don’t have enough money to support the bloated government programs. That’s “going broke”.
Those $16T have maturities from “now” to 30 years. So on average 15 years. That means over $1 Trillion of debt MUST roll over each year. As soon as it doesn’t, rates skyrocket. If The Fed buys up the paper, more money is created. Q goes up, inflation goes up. Oops again.
MMT tries to remove from Keynes the discipline part and then layers on some hyperinflation fodder and Debtor Prison behaviours. It’s just wrong and doesn’t work. We have decades of history showing that. (Well, centuries, really, as sovereign debt and fiat money problems have been around for about 1000 years.)
BTW, this housing crisis was only different in details from many in history.
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/07/04/business-panic-of-33ad-things-never-change/
And the fix is the same. BUT when things pick up again, the “Lender of Last Resort” has to withdraw the cash to prevent inflation.
Oh, one other tidbit on MMT:
So that $Trillion owed to China and the other $Trillion owed to Japan are not “borrowed”? Riiiight… Tell that to them. Then “government debt is financial wealth”? Great, then we are all wealthy as can be. Heck, print up $10000 Trillion and we can all be super wealthy…
What that ignores is that pretty pieces of paper are not wealth. (Nor are computer bits). Real wealth is land, buildings, productive capacity, minerals, livestock, timber, corn in the field or elevator, machinery, and vehicles. The ability to do things and make things. That real, physical, tangible wealth IS wealth. It sits on one side of the equation. Piles of paper on the other. Make more piles of paper, there is less real wealth per piece of paper. Government debt is NOT “financial wealth”, it is dilution of the currency and confiscation of value of currency via inflation. It is, in short, “watering the stock” of the currency.
Now it does take time for that to show up. For folks to notice and prices to rise. But rise they do… Even if the Government chooses to ignore the price of food, gas, housing. Oddly, too, if what you BUY is going up in price, but YOU re not being paid more, or even being paid less, then there is “no inflation” if those two sets of money flows offset each other. How many of you would feel there was no inflation is goods are costing more but your paycheck is smaller?
So please, don’t go pedaling that MMT crap as though it had truth in it. It takes some things with truth and value and then corrupts them to justify money printing and value destruction, national debt to excess and impoverishing the people to the benefit of major institutions.
Ron House says @ur momisugly Anthony
no you won’t (i.e. see him in hell)– you won’t be going there! 😉
Henry@ur momisuglyRon
That is Anthony’s choice.
We all have exactly the same choice – when at Easter we arrive at the empty tomb – see here:
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/03/01/where-is-your-faith/
the only pre-condition of going to heaven is to make a confession of your faith.
Most convincing for me to make that confession was the complete change in behavior patterns of Jesus’ followers after His resurrection….there have been a few commenters here who completely missed that. Perhaps they should try to read the gospels and the acts of the apostles.before deciding that they don’t want to go to heaven to spend time with “those” people.
BTW
I am a socialist, is that wrong? Or is that not so “OK” on this blog?
The term ‘liberal’ has become corrupted over the years.
It has now come to mean well-meaning people with goofy ideas about how the real world should work. There is a cast iron cure for this: surviving a good mugging, or in very severe cases two good muggings.
I know of several instances of this and would suggest it would help Paul Krugman enormously – obviously, no one would want him to be be hurt in the experience, but it is amazing how such an unpleasant experience can cure the mind of goofy thoughts.
Go Krugman!
E.M.Smith says: “… drunken sailor…”
Having been a sailor and on one or more occasions been unsober I would like to point out I was spending my own money and I knew when to stop. 🙂
@ur momisugly Henry P.
“I am a socialist, is that wrong? Or is that not so “OK” on this blog?”
Anthony has what, half a million readers each day? No matter what view you express, there will be people who write to oppose it. And about half a million more who say nothing either way. But as far as the blog is concerned, although economics is not a matter WUWT regularly comments upon, Anthony and his team will not censor you. Subject, of course, to you not hijacking a post or being repeatedly off-topic.
As with Global Warming, so also with economics, when we have strong informed views, it becomes hard to avoid the temptation to evangalise. When we interject our enthusiasms inappropriately, then we are being crackpots.
On a blog that is not devoted to economic theory, the views of others will tend to be distributed in accordance with their distribution in the wider community. Yours is a minority view, and as such will be rejected by the majority.
I jam not a Socialist. The problems the Red Brigades set out to solve have long been solved. The test of reality has shown Socialism to be wrong in both geography and time specifically with North and South Korea, East and West Germany, and pre and post ‘Capitalist way’ China.
These prove in practice that Socialism does less for the people than Capitalism. We have the economics of the Austrian theorists that explain why this is so.
My personal judgment is your socialism is “OK” on the blog, but Socialist theory is wrong.
I am an atheist and a classical liberal. To lump all liberals under the same banner as socialists, communists and Marxists is as categorically wrong as to lump conservatives with the Religious Right, Nazism, creationists, extreme nationalism and Holocaust Deniers.
Paul Krugman does not speak for liberals – he speaks only for himself.
In my view of environmentalism and the global warming panic in general, it is striking to me how much of the belief systems of climate alarm cannot be rationally distinguished from creationism and apocalyptic beliefs regarding the End of the World (which are as old as humanity, as far as I can tell). Thus James Hansen, who is a Christian, has a perfect symmetry between his repeated warnings about saving the planet from the effects of fossil fuel uses and the coming Judgment Day as described in the Bible with lurid descriptions of plagues, earthquakes and global upheaval.
But Christians I know are hardly in the same camp as James Hansen. Ross McKitrick is a self-described believer in God and yet finds the claims made about the climate and the environment to be as exaggerated and ill-thought out as I.
What is most striking about the debates surrounding climate science has been the complete lack of self-criticism or even self-analysis as one preposterous meme of impending doom as followed another.
Many people who don’t believe in any God or Gods find the claims of the climate apocalyptics to be preposterous and false and a form of disguised fundamentalist religious beliefs that they have already rejected, even though some of those who make such claims are self-described atheists.
I think there are rational people who believe in God and equally rational people who do not. Nor do people’s belief systems stay static over time. I once thought that the claims of global warming to be credible – now I do not. I think James Lovelock has moved considerably from positions he held even five years ago
My observation is that most people cling to their innermost beliefs about the world and select those facts or observations that reinforce those beliefs and discount or ignore those that do not. Capitalists and socialists do this. Liberals, socialists, Marxists and conservatives do this. Atheists and Theists do this. Fox News and CNN and the BBC do this. No-one is wholly orthodox or completely rational in all of their thinking.
Carl Sagan was a wonderful teacher of the history of science and the progress of scientific discovery. He was also a believer in the baleful effects of nuclear winter and promoted global warming panic. Isaac Newton made such incredible discoveries about physics and maths that everybody today learns his science and mathematical in schools and colleges to this day. But he was also a proponent of preposterous nonsense about the Bible and Ancient Egypt. Johannes Kepler was a superb observational astronomer who nevertheless cast horoscopes and produced streams of nonsense about supposed “celestial spheres” in the Heavens using the seven platonic solids.
I have lots in common in terms of outlook with Anthony Watts, Steve McIntyre, Ross McKitrick, Willis Eschenbach and Roy Spencer. But I have criticisms of certain beliefs or viewpoints with all of them. Sometimes I have criticized them on the Internet for saying certain things.
But you know what? I think we’d have great creative arguments about lots of things and still respect each other in the morning.
I think its called maturity.
HenryP says:
March 16, 2013 at 3:22 am
“BTW
I am a socialist, is that wrong?”
Well then google Kolyma, maybe that cures you.
Never mind…Schwartz/Krugman imported above at 3/15 @ur momisugly 11:51
I’m not seeing evidence that Krugman has a conscience, based on the article. He does seem to be liberal.* I’d suggest he change his column to “Baseless Fact-Free Ravings of a Liberal” but that’s just me. YMMV.
@HenryP
I’m perfectly OK with you being a socialist. As for being wrong… ;o)
(I’m a Tribalist. In a matter of years, Gangs will be the dominant form of government.)
*Did that put me in the running for the “Understatement of the Year” award?
Henry@ur momisuglyLeopold Danze Morgan
The examples you cite are communism, not socialism. There is a big difference> With communism there is no incentive to work hard.
Examples of countries where the per capita income are the highest in the world in the order as far as I can remember are: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Japan, Sweden, Finland, Germany. These are the countries where the income distribution between the highest earners and the lowest earners is the lowest, Most lately Brazil has been doing quite well in bringing the ginnie factor down by introducing good socialist policies. Hence they are growing tremendously. My own country of residence, South Africa, is not doing well in this area. Even the tax policy here of the ANC has made richer people richer..Hence we are suffering from a lot of strikes and social unrest.The ANC is not a socialist party, as far as I am concerned, and neither is the opposition. Perhaps we should start a new party here with a clear social program…..
Henry @ur momisugly John A
I am a Christian, I am a socialist, I don’t believe in AGW or CAGW. I believe CO2 and H2O are like my father and mother and anyone wanting less of either must be daft.
Note, as in my reply to Leo Morgan, I am those things because I have verified all the facts available. As to my Christian faith, I have related in my previous post here what convinced me. Like you I also believed in AGW but I was not so sure anymore, when, one day I arrived at WUWT. I therefore decided to conduct my own statistical test,
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
The facts are clear. We are cooling, globally, and it is going to get worse.
Russ R. says:
March 15, 2013 at 10:08 pm
I think he forgot a hyphen in the title:
The Con-Science of a Liberal.
True that.
DirkH – Thanks for the link to the Rio+2 document, “World In Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability,” from the German Advisory Council on Global Change. It is heart-warming to read such global overlord strategizing as this, at page 20: -well worth readnig to see what these totalitarians actually believe–
“Equitable new global system (high ambition level):In accordance with the global social contract for sustainability, the ultimate goal of a revised global governance architecture must be the creation of a new, equitable global system. Its institutions must put the international community in a position that leaves them capable of appreciating the complex interdependencies of the global society within the scope determined by the limits imposed by our planet, as soon as within the first half of the 21st century, to allow for timely and adequate response. This demanding process is comparable with the embedding of market dynamics in constitutional states, democracies and welfare states during the last great transformation into an industrialised society, which led to the stabilisation and acceptance of this new form of society in the first place.
“Politically, this requires a historically unprecedented transcending of established sovereignty concepts and purely power-driven global politics in favour of ensuring the long-term availability of global commons. Sustainable strategies and concepts must be developed for this in order to embed sustainable global development in transnational democratic structures, to formulate answers to the 21st century questions regarding global equity and distribution of resources, and, not least, to be able to claim world-wide legitimacy.
“This means concrete academic search processes, for example by global governance theoreticians, international law experts, cosmopolitans, transnationalists and philosophers of justice to formulate legitimate and realisable norms, rules and procedures which, all together, could form the basis of an ideal global social contract. This would be something of a quantum leap for civilisation, on par for example with the transition of the feudal systems to constitutional states and democracy. Comparably to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, however, it should in principle also be possible to reach a universal consensus regarding human civilisation‘s ability to survive within the natural boundaries imposed by planet Earth. This necessarily presupposes an extensive ‘Global Enlightenment’, which must be aimed towards promoting cooperative behaviour and accelerating the formation of relevant global social standards and debate. The WBGU strongly advises the use of the coming Rio+20 Conference as a historic chance for such an enlightenment process.”
Krugman sees ‘d*niers’ everywhere. His latest victim is Olli Rehn, the soft-spoken Finnish EU economics Commissioner. While I have no love of the EU, Krugman’s comments grate even more.
Krugman commented last week that, after “browsing through the collected speeches of Olli Rehn”, he was “the face of d*nialism when it comes to the effects of austerity”.
When Rehn retorted in tweets, Krugman said “I never asserted that Mr. Rehn’s mother was a hamster and his father smelt of elderberries” – a reference to Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Sadly this was bad timing. Rehn commented in an interview “We should perhaps be grateful to Mr Krugman for his generosity in promising at least not to compare my recently-deceased mother to a hamster.”
Later Rehn said Krugman was guilty of talking in “modified truths”. This is polite Finnish for what in UK politics is known as “being economical with the truth” and in US politics as a “mis-speak”.
HenryP says:
March 16, 2013 at 6:24 am
“There is a big difference> With communism there is no incentive to work hard.”
Here in Germany there is no incentive to work hard either as the marginal income tax rate is 70%.
As requested by the communist manifesto – high tax progression. That’s the main reason Germany has lower wages than Italy or Spain. We have simply given up fighting for wage increases.
“Examples of countries where the per capita income are the highest in the world in the order as far as I can remember are: Luxembourg, Switzerland, Denmark, Netherlands, Norway, Japan, Sweden, Finland, Germany.”
Oh, you can look that up in the CIA world fact book. There are many many countries you left out, the USA is 30% higher than the Western European economies; you left out Singapore as well, probably doesn’t fit the narrative. Luxembourg is not exactly the posterchild example of a socialist nation either as it is basically a city with a bunch of banks.
E.M.Smith says: @ur momisugly 3:00 am
The notion that you can print more currency and not dilute the value of it is simply broken on the face of it. There is an identity.
******************
E.M.Smith for President!!
Why we have so many stupid intellectuals that can not, or will not, understand the basic concepts of valuations behind a currency, is a mystery to me.
I find it hard to believe that they can not understand it, so I am left to think, that they will not. Even faced with the miserable record of failure, of deficit fiscal policy, coupled with inflationary monetary policy. They continue to “believe”, that this time, will be different.
If you choose to run, you have my support.
thelastdemocrat says:
March 16, 2013 at 7:57 am
“DirkH – Thanks for the link to the Rio+2 document, “World In Transition: A Social Contract for Sustainability,” from the German Advisory Council on Global Change. It is heart-warming to read such global overlord strategizing as this, at page 20: -well worth readnig to see what these totalitarians actually believe–”
Please remove beverages from the proximity of sensitive electronic equipment before proceeding to read – Thanks.
When I mentioned comic book supervillains, I completely forgot that Schellnhuber is…
…a comic book hero now.
http://notrickszone.com/2013/02/06/climate-science-turns-comic-john-schellnhuber-now-depicted-as-planet-saving-comic-hero-in-germany/
@DirkH
You are OK in Germany. USA is red,, a lot worse, probably 30% lower, not higher.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_equality
This happened a few years ago, the warmists made this in to a moral debate, because they knew they had no evidence of global warming, so they did a bait and switch, and I think that is immoral.
again@DirkH
the point I was trying to make is that the countries with the lowest gini factor (more light and yellow colour on the chart) currently also have the highest per capita income…..
HenryP says:
March 16, 2013 at 9:26 am
“@DirkH
You are OK in Germany. USA is red,, a lot worse, probably 30% lower, not higher.”
You were talking about GDP/capita, now you bring up an equality map.
So I take it that for you wealth is not important but it is important to you that everybody else gets exactly the same as you.
I notice that the wikipedia has no data for Cuba. That is interesting. I guess when you exclude the nomenklatura, they have perfect equality; when you include the nomenklatura, perfect inequality.
A bizarre result, but typical for socialism.
HenryP, with regards to the Gini coefficient in the US you might be interested in this:
“Why is income inequality rising for U.S. families and households, but not for individual Americans? ”
http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.de/2011/10/real-story-behind-rising-us-income.html#.UUSiwDflqiM
Krugman using an elitist snobbery joust to demean and ridicule…
Sounds to me like he knows that he and his ilk have lost the battle and they are lashing about like a fish out of water… Gasping for their last breath..