“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically… 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
To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
- Paul Krugman in 2006
Paul Krugman believing something is an incredibly useful heuristic for that thing being completely false.
Because the way he thinks about things is fundamentally backwards. Those are just two specific pieces of thought excrement that illustrate how poor the outcomes of his thought processes tend to be
Hah. The GP comment was flagged, so I couldn't read it, and I hadn't read the article... but just from your question, I thought to myself "...must be Krugman?"
Yep.
Krugman is my illustrative example of the phenomenon of an intelligent, highly educated, Nobel-winning scientist, who is still notable for how often he's wrong. Clearly wrong, often even in his own field.
I don't even understand how that's possible. Do I only see the specific subset of articles where he's wrong? Has he been so poisoned by partisanship that he's totally lost his grounding? Is economics just voodoo? Is there some base philosophical underpinning to all his thought that is so different from mine that what constitutes reasonable thought is completely different?
I don't mean this to be an attack on the man. More just pointing out that... he puzzles me.
Instead of dredging up a couple of old quotes, how about refuting the article that is linked at the top of the page? Because unrelated quotes do not a refutation make.
I don't read every single thing that every single person writes. When you read 10 pieces from someone and every single one is a flaming pile, on the 11th time you say enough. I've given Krugaman more than that chance and I've never found a single thing I've heard him say interesting or useful
And yet no employer wants to offer full-time or stable part-time hours.
This is really the hitch.
Once you've set up to deal with not being employed, why bother coming back for an unstable, shitty job?
Anecdotally: working low end hospitality has become shittier. It seems like a lot of the nice customers are still infrequent and mostly staying home, while the selfish customers are going out (quelle surprise). Quite a few restaurants I frequent have stories about needing to call the police for patrons assaulting the waitstaff when they never needed to pre-pandemic.
This piece addresses (and provides data to refute) the common claim that increased unemployment benefits are the source of worker hesitancy.
But it doesn't address eviction moratoriums, which to me seem like they could be a pretty significant driver of this phenomenon. If you've been able to just stop paying rent, I would think the need to work is heavily diminished (or rather, other government benefits that would never be sufficient on their own can be stretched to cover all non-rent expenses).
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[ 4.9 ms ] story [ 45.2 ms ] thread- Paul Krugman
To fight this recession the Fed needs…soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
- Paul Krugman in 2006
Paul Krugman believing something is an incredibly useful heuristic for that thing being completely false.
Yep.
Krugman is my illustrative example of the phenomenon of an intelligent, highly educated, Nobel-winning scientist, who is still notable for how often he's wrong. Clearly wrong, often even in his own field.
I don't even understand how that's possible. Do I only see the specific subset of articles where he's wrong? Has he been so poisoned by partisanship that he's totally lost his grounding? Is economics just voodoo? Is there some base philosophical underpinning to all his thought that is so different from mine that what constitutes reasonable thought is completely different?
I don't mean this to be an attack on the man. More just pointing out that... he puzzles me.
This is really the hitch.
Once you've set up to deal with not being employed, why bother coming back for an unstable, shitty job?
Anecdotally: working low end hospitality has become shittier. It seems like a lot of the nice customers are still infrequent and mostly staying home, while the selfish customers are going out (quelle surprise). Quite a few restaurants I frequent have stories about needing to call the police for patrons assaulting the waitstaff when they never needed to pre-pandemic.
But it doesn't address eviction moratoriums, which to me seem like they could be a pretty significant driver of this phenomenon. If you've been able to just stop paying rent, I would think the need to work is heavily diminished (or rather, other government benefits that would never be sufficient on their own can be stretched to cover all non-rent expenses).
No idea the scale here; haven't found anything more recent than https://www.cnbc.com/2021/01/25/nearly-20percent-of-renters-...