Be Skeptical of Experts: The Paul Krugman Experience

Like every left-leaning economist, Paul Kurgman has been wrong about pretty much everything.

Yet the failure is still hailed as an “expert”:

Did Paul Krugman Say the Internet’s Effect on the World Economy Would Be ‘No Greater Than the Fax Machine’s’?

In a 1998 article about the pitfalls of making predictions about technological progress, the Nobel Prize-winning economist questioned the future role of the Internet.

Venturing predictions of large-scale socioeconomic trends is part and parcel of what economists do, so for members of that august profession the odds are fairly high that now and again one will be required to eat one’s own words. Sometimes those words will even be served back to one on a silver platter, as in the case of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who thanks to the Internet, will probably never live down a prediction he allegedly once made about the Internet.

And that’s coming from the left-leaning Snopes website.

Whereas Paul has also been wrong about every single thing regarding the Trump economy:

One of the nation’s leading doomsayers has been the New York Times’ perpetually mistaken Paul Krugman, who warned shortly after the 2016 election that Trump’s victory would trigger a global recession “with no end in sight.” We could file that under “post-election hysteria,” but as late as April of this year he was still telling crowds that the bond-market signals predicted “a pretty good chance of a recession sometime in the next year or so.” And he has kept this going all year:

February 11: Paul Krugman expects a global recession this year, warns “we don’t have an effective response.”

August 1: “Why Was Trumponomics a Flop?”

August 15: “From Trump Boom to Trump Gloom”

September 5: “Trumpism Is Bad for Business”

October 3: “Here Comes the Trump Slump”

October 24: “The Day the Trump Boom Died”

A couple of weeks after the Trump Boom expired, CNBC reported that “October job creation comes in at 128,000, easily topping estimates even with GM auto strike.”

This cycle has been going on for three years.

(My favorite Trump-era Krugmanism, though, is when the esteemed economist explains away his bad predictions by claiming that the economy’s successes are really just driven by instances of his own political preferences playing out — “Impeaching Trump Is Good for the Economy,” “The Economics of Donald J. Keynes,” and so on.)

At some point, of course, doomsayers such as Krugman are going to be right. In the past 60 years the United States has been hit with recessions in 1960–61, 1969–70, 1973–75, 1980, 1981–82, 1990–91, 2001, and 2007–09. History says we’re probably due for another one soon. When it hits, Krugman will blame tax cuts, unfettered capitalist greed, a dearth of regulations — and maybe climate change, or whatever hobbyhorse he’s riding at the time. MSNBC hosts will hail him as a seer.

What an amazing seer he would be; if he could get anything right.

Because we have hit the recession at this point. But… not quite for the reasons he predicted.

Instead, I think the leftist race riots and the leftist lockdown have far more to do with a tanking economy than Trump.

The average person gives far too much credit to the President for the economy, anyway. But it doesn’t negate the fact that the “expert” has been wrong about everything for four years, until he was right – and only because his own political party started destroying businesses and forcing them to stay closed.

On Globalism

However, the more interesting part of this failure is the collapse of his entire ideology. In a column for Bloomburg, Krugman admitted how insanely inept he and every other left-leaning economist was concerning globalism for the past three decades:

Concerns about adverse effects from globalization aren’t new. As U.S. income inequality began rising in the 1980s, many commentators were quick to link this new phenomenon to another new phenomenon: the rise of manufactured exports from newly industrializing economies.

And so during the 1990s, a number of economists, myself included, tried to figure out how much the changing trade landscape was contributing to rising inequality. They generally concluded that the effect was relatively modest and not the central factor in the widening income gap. So academic interest in the possible adverse effects of trade, while it never went away, waned.

In the past few years, however, worries about globalization have shot back to the top of the agenda, partly due to new research and partly due to the political shocks of Brexit and U.S. President Donald Trump. And as one of the people who helped shape the 1990s consensus — that the contribution of rising trade to rising inequality was real but modest — it seems appropriate for me to ask now what we missed.

The pro-globalization consensus of the 1990s, which concluded that trade contributed little to rising inequality, relied on models that asked how the growth of trade had affected the incomes of broad classes of workers, such as those who didn’t go to college. It’s possible, and probably even correct, to think of these models as accurate in the long run. Consensus economists didn’t turn much to analytic methods that focus on workers in particular industries and communities, which would have given a better picture of short-run trends. This was, I now believe, a major mistake — one in which I shared a hand.

So the economists that sent us into this globalist sh*tshow attempt to justify it by saying “eh, how could we ever know it would happen?”:

To make partial excuses for those of us who failed to consider these issues 25 years ago, at the time we had no way to know that either the hyperglobalization that began in the 1990s or the trade-deficit surge a decade later were going to happen.

No, clearly we could never know. Who could have ever surmised that if we forced globalization on a world-wide scale… that globalization would then occur on a worldwide scale?

Must be above his pay grade.

Krugman ends with this masterpiece:

As a result, major disruptions now would be more likely to come from an attempt to reverse globalization than from leaving the current trade regime in place. At this point, millions of decisions about where to put plants, and where to move and take jobs, have been made on the assumption that the open world trading system will continue. Making that assumption false, by raising tariffs and forcing a contraction of world trade, would set off a whole new wave of disruption along with a whole new set of winners and losers.

So while the 1990s consensus on the effect of globalization hasn’t stood the test of time, its shortcomings don’t make a case for protectionism now. We might have done things differently if we had known what was coming, but that’s not a good reason to turn back the clock.

“We failed all our predictions last time, but if we try to change it we know exactly what will happen 100% next time and it will be bad”.

It’s hard not to laugh.

But he did get one piece right: There would be winners and losers if we ditch globalism. And the American people would be the winners.

They were wrong about the effect of globalization on the American worker. They were wrong about the effect of globalization on the American nation. And they were damn wrong about surrendering our economy to nations that hate us to save a few cents on toilet paper.

But hey, at least he admitted it. Better late than never.

Remember: this failure is an “expert“. With a Nobel prize. This is why we can’t trust the system at all.

I’ve said it on this website before and I’ll say it again: Don’t trust the damn experts.

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