Roger Pielke, Jr. Fri Jun 06, 05:24:00 PM MDT writes:
A delightful comment at the NY Times under Krugman’s post:
Link: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/06/05/energy-choices/?smid=tw-share#permid=11963264
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BlueSky Phoenix, AZ 7 hours ago
Almost every one of you is mistaken. Krugman made up the argument that a percent reduction in emissions translates into a percent reduction in GDP, one-for-one.
Pielke didn’t say anything remotely like that. He never even mentioned any magnitdues or sizes or numbers pertaining to reduction of emissions translating to GDP loss.
What you’re doing now, running for the hills talking about how stupid or dishonest Pielke is, because this guy you like who is on your team said that Pielke is stupid or dishonest — this is bogus. You have no idea what you’re talking about. Neither does Krugman. He doesn’t understand the Kaya Identity. He doesn’t understand Pielke’s argument, and he certainly hasn’t reported it to his readers.
Pielke is saying that we can’t just wave a wand and instantiate some linear growth in technology that costs the same as oil, coal, gas. He said technological progress is not linear. He said technological progress is not completely predictable. These are perfectly reasonable things to say, epecially since they happen to be true. He didn’t make any wild claims.
I think people in the future will have empathy for us. It’s really weird to see Nobel laureates be such terrible sources, isn’t it? It’s unbelievably weird. A Nobel economist should never make the errors Krugman makes, and no human being should so revel in his own malice and hatred that he openly expresses joy at purporting to find out that someone is stupid or dishonest. This is the New York Times??
The difference between a lapdog (Krugman) and its master (the Administration) is that the lapdog will take all the ill-deserved awards and praise it is offered and the master will actually issue scorn (to the Norwegan representative) when the praise is ill conceived and factually premature.
Just as Suzuki has long abandoned scientific objectivity, Krugman has abandoned those critical faculties which won him the Nobel Prize. Suzuki and Krugman are now thoroughly political animals, intolerant of dissent on any front.
Is it not all about the money? here is where a lot of it flows through to these GRANT SCIENCE supporters.
http://www.westernjournalism.com/exclusive-investigative-reports/who-funds-the-radical-left-in-america/
stockdoc77 says:
June 9, 2014 at 8:58 am
“Couple of points. Keynes never suggested that countries needed to accumulate surpluses, his view was that balanced budgets during good times and deficit spending during bad would be the path out of the great depression, he was right. Such a policy would result in rising debt to GDP ratio during recessions and falling ratios during booms, in the long run keeping it acceptable.”
In the long run? Keynes said, In The Long Run, We Are All Dead.
Which is of course an entirely logical thing to say for a homosexual without children like him; yet less than satisfactory as a perspective for people who take the burden upon themselves to bring up the next generation and actually creating a future for human society.
DirkH,
Keynes rejected his theory before he died – he endorsed Adam Smith’s Invisible Hand.
Postwar[edit]
After the war, Keynes continued to represent the United Kingdom in international negotiations despite his deteriorating health. He succeeded in obtaining preferential terms from the United States for new and outstanding debts to facilitate the rebuilding of the British economy.[55]
Just before his death in 1946, Keynes told Henry Clay, a professor of Social Economics and Advisor to the Bank of England [56] of his hopes that Adam Smith’s ‘invisible hand’ can help Britain out of the economic hole it is in: “I find myself more and more relying for a solution of our problems on the invisible hand which I tried to eject from economic thinking twenty years ago.” [57]
The aliens that Krugman hoped would invade have in fact invaded already. They’re secretly turning his brain to mush so they can suck it out with a straw when it finally dissolves completely. Because this invasion of his gray matter renders him senseless, his columns are now being written by an alien ghost writer who’s in orbit in the mother ship.
So who was it that claimed this board is full of high-minded critics and not just ad hominem attacks? Dirk does not understands Keynes and then adds an irrelevant aside about his lack of children as though that should be the basis of evaluating an idea. How interesting an approach, I’ve never used that one.
For Dirk’s benefit, Keynes was arguing against the classical economists who assumed that all recessions were inherently self-correcting and that no change in government policy was necessary despite the Great Depression going on year after year (the US spent 10 years below full employment). The classical economists had no answers to why the Depression dragged on other than to say in the long run it would end. Keynes agreed that in the long run it would end, that would be very long time indeed, and if economics could not address the great challenge of its time then it was a useless discipline. He argued that action should be taken immediately to end the Great Depression, and not rely passively on the system eventually self-correcting in the long run.
“This is the New York Times??”
Yes. That is why I quit reading it a couple of years ago.
I think people are mispronouncing [trimmed] York Times
[Please. The New York Times has enough credibility problems as it is now. .mod]
Hayek thinks Keynes knows nothing about Economics. And he’s right. Keynesian theory is a blight on Economics
The corn growing ( and other “plans” such as algae) for fuel is patently ridiculous. Have any of these advocates ever been to a plant that builds a 175 hp John Deere Tractor and all the other equipment needed to work the land? And then the fuel it needs to till the land, plant it, grow it and harvest it and mill it?. The roads (and all of the infrastructure needed to maintain that alone), railroads, trains locomotives, ships and the containers to move it around the world, add then the people that have to drive to work to do all of this? The concept is far away from reality and then to add that wind power and solar is “closing the gap” it makes my head spin. As someone else said there will eventually be a break through but it is not one of those two. There are many bright people working on solutions but those two are not it, to me me it is a “feel good” approach that is blinding millions of people.
“In the UK until about a year ago the BBC used to regularly trot out Krugman to explain how dangerous and plain wrong our Chancellor of the Exchequer, George Osborne was in pursuing an austerity policy to bring our economy under control and generate a recovery. He said on many occasions this policy had never worked and had no chance of succeeding this time. Now that we are one of the fastest growing economies in the developed world we never see Krugman this side of the pond. Good riddance”
Although the austerity policy has led to a dramatic increase in the UK deficit!
Maybe George has been consulting economics laureates?
When population growth is taken into account, GDP growth looks much less impressive.
And look at benefits paid to people working, up from around 11 billion £ to over 30 billion/yr in a few years.
The flack Pielke gets for simply pointing out the obvious is a reflection of the degree to which climate has become a religion and one reason my lack of trust for anything alarmists say became exponential.
Krugman received his Nobel Memorial prize for Economics for his work
on international trade. This work was largely done between 1979 & 1991.
The concepts he put forth were received significant empirical support
and were viewed as transformative in analyses of international trade patterns.
In recent years, it seems that Dr. Krugman has taken advantage of his
Nobel Memorial award reputation to simply put forth opinions on any subject
even vaguely related to any form of economics. He doesn’t limit himself
to the area he made his reputation in–international trade–and thus he frequently
makes himself sound as ridiculous as a cow attempting to play the violin.
Bah. Delete the first “were” in the first paragraph.
stockdoc77 says:
June 9, 2014 at 8:58 am
Jim’s comments don’t take into account the difference between total federal debt, which includes debt assets held by the Social Security Trust Fund, and net federal debt, which is debt held by the public. Even in the late 90′s the gross debt still rose slowly because social security taxes were in such surplus over benefits, the surplus was and still is “invested” in government bonds, but those bonds are held by one arm of the Federal government and owed to the other, they do not add to net publicly held debt, which is the metric that is used by most. If we count the bonds held by Social Security as a real debt, then Social Security is solvent for decades, and there is no need to cut benefits.
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You have two choices. You can count the intragovernment borrowing as real debt and claim that SS is solvent for slightly less than 2 decades, or you can claim that only debt held by the public is real debt but then SS is insolvent today since payroll taxes do not cover current outlays and haven’t for a few years now. What you can’t get away from is the fact that all of that SS spending is going to turn into real public debt as the liability isn’t going away. Incidentally, the cash accounting methods used by the government do not conform to GAAP standards and would probably be illegal if practiced in the private sector. Certainly the SEC would want to have a very long and detailed talk with you.
To think about it another way, borrow and spend your entire 401k balance and then come back and tell us how solvent your retirement is. After all, you owe yourself that money, and you’re good for it, right?
Paul Krugman? You mean THE Paul Krugman? The guy who’s never wrong?
““The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in “Metcalfe’s law”–which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants–becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” – Paul Krugman 1998
http://the-libertarian.co.uk/paul-krugman-quotes/
NikFromNYC says:
June 8, 2014 at 10:01 am
Incompetent fool though Krugman may be, he received his $37,500 from Enron before he worked for NY Times:
http://www.pkarchive.org/personal/EnronFAQ.html
–AGF
I used to read Krugman’s blog daily as a way of keeping apprised of “liberal” views. I stopped doing so after a few months as it became abundantly clear that he was so blind to opposing viewpoints and so intolerant of any ideas but those he supported. If you disagree with liberal ideas, you aren’t just different, you aren’t “just” wrong, you are EVIL in the eyes of Dr. K. I rarely read him anymore. My view is that he is on a mission to save the world through denigrating conservatives. I do think, in his own mind, he is fighting the good fight, but then, that was also true of Bin Laden (no direct comparison intended). He seems child-like and oddly naive in some ways. I am a long way from being able to judge his economics, but I am comfortable rejecting his politics.
Arthur4563:
“(reduce the money supply and prices go up and economic activity suffers)”
How does that work? Less money chasing the same amount of goods causing their prices to rise?
Less money will need prices to fall in order to clear the market. Prices tend to rise with the inflation of the amount of money in the market.