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All the president's zombies
- Thread starter Bob
- Start date
Bob
SoWal Insider
where is your graph?Didn't Al Gore win one of those too???
30ashopper
SoWal Insider
Median income increases have generally been constant over the last 50 years. Krugman, in all his wisdom, singles out Reagan policy and claims that it failed, even though there's no evidence of this. Average growth was the same under Carter, Reagan, Clinton, and Bush. The largest short term increases were under Reagan and Clinton! Krugman is a partisan hack.
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Beach Runner
beats on hood
Beach Jacket's nanny used to tell me that I was spending too much. But I told her, "Why not? I'm getting a tax deduction for it?"...filter, off! Oh, BR...you really are too much.
OOPS! Times have changed. I pay cash except at NM where I get my points plus Perk Cards or at Banana/Gap/ON where I get discount cards for charging. But then I pay it down each month. Mama didn't raise no fool.
Bob
SoWal Insider
http://www.sowal.com/bb/newreply.php?do=newreply&p=602678 Political hack
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Jump to: navigation, search
For other senses of this word, see hack (disambiguation).
A political hack is a negative term ascribed to a person who is part of the political party apparatus, but whose intentions are more aligned with victory than personal conviction. The term "hired gun" is often used in tandem to further describe the moral bankruptcy of the "hack".
Political hack may also be used by a political opponent in order to erode confidence or credentials of an opponent or his hired campaign help. Often used to demean well credentialed individuals for political purposes.
Bob
SoWal Insider
Paul Krugman, Nobel - Forbes.com Paul Krugman, Nobel
Arvind Panagariya, 10.13.08, 12:14 PM EDT
Next, Jagdish Bhagwati?
pic
After nearly 30 years, the Swedish Academy has returned to international trade awarding the Nobel Prize to Princeton economist Paul Krugman. Earlier, in 1977, the award had gone to two giants, Bertil Ohlin and James Meade, whose brilliant work formed the foundations of trade theory as it was taught when I came to Princeton to do my Ph.D. in 1974. Krugman, no less a giant, revolutionized the field.
Until the end of the 1970s, the Heckscher-Ohlin theory for which Bertil Ohlin won the prize--Eli Heckscher died before the Nobel Prize in economics was instituted--dominated the field. This theory explained well why labor-abundant countries such as South Korea and Taiwan would export labor-intensive products such apparel, toys and footwear and capital-abundant countries such as the United States would export machinery and aircraft.
But it could not satisfactorily explain the two-way trade that was widely known to exist: Many countries exported automobiles and televisions, but they also imported them. The Heckscher-Ohlin theory also did not adequately explain why rich entities such as Europe and the United States, which had very similar endowments of capital and labor, traded more intensively than those with very dissimilar endowments. While descriptive explanations of these phenomena existed, a tight theory explaining them was lacking.
Starting in 1979, Krugman published a series of papers that successfully tackled these and many other related questions. He postulated that consumers like variety in what they consume. For the same expenditure, their satisfaction is greater if they have a larger variety of products available. This creates the incentive for firms to produce a large variety of products. But the production of a new variety has setup costs. This leads to declining per-unit costs as a larger quantity of the variety is produced and places a limit on the number of varieties the market can profitably supply. A firm produces a new variety only if it can capture a large enough market to allow profitable sales.
This seemingly simple structure gives rise to a tight theory that leads to rich implications: Countries gain from trade not only because larger market allows them to better exploit scale economies, but also because consumers can access a larger variety of products. And even identical economies can gain from trade through scale economies and a larger variety of products. The theory also brought imperfect competition into a formal trade model.
In subsequent work, Krugman combined this simple model of product differentiation and scale economies with transport costs. Scale economies push toward production in one location to minimize costs and then shipping the product to the locations where consumers are. But transport costs push toward locating production near consumers. These opposing forces give rise to large concentrations of populations such as those along the East Coast corridor of the United States.
A hallmark of Krugman's work is parsimony. His models are among the most elegant: lean and thin and transparent. They have all the required parts but no unnecessary fat. It is quite remarkable that while other scholars in the field handsomely incorporated the Krugman model into their research, perhaps the most insightful and elegant applications still came from Krugman, as a quick reading of the chapter on economies of scale in my graduate textbook (co-authored with Jagdish Bhagwati and T. N. Srinivasan) would testify.
Arvind Panagariya, 10.13.08, 12:14 PM EDT
Next, Jagdish Bhagwati?
pic
After nearly 30 years, the Swedish Academy has returned to international trade awarding the Nobel Prize to Princeton economist Paul Krugman. Earlier, in 1977, the award had gone to two giants, Bertil Ohlin and James Meade, whose brilliant work formed the foundations of trade theory as it was taught when I came to Princeton to do my Ph.D. in 1974. Krugman, no less a giant, revolutionized the field.
Until the end of the 1970s, the Heckscher-Ohlin theory for which Bertil Ohlin won the prize--Eli Heckscher died before the Nobel Prize in economics was instituted--dominated the field. This theory explained well why labor-abundant countries such as South Korea and Taiwan would export labor-intensive products such apparel, toys and footwear and capital-abundant countries such as the United States would export machinery and aircraft.
But it could not satisfactorily explain the two-way trade that was widely known to exist: Many countries exported automobiles and televisions, but they also imported them. The Heckscher-Ohlin theory also did not adequately explain why rich entities such as Europe and the United States, which had very similar endowments of capital and labor, traded more intensively than those with very dissimilar endowments. While descriptive explanations of these phenomena existed, a tight theory explaining them was lacking.
Starting in 1979, Krugman published a series of papers that successfully tackled these and many other related questions. He postulated that consumers like variety in what they consume. For the same expenditure, their satisfaction is greater if they have a larger variety of products available. This creates the incentive for firms to produce a large variety of products. But the production of a new variety has setup costs. This leads to declining per-unit costs as a larger quantity of the variety is produced and places a limit on the number of varieties the market can profitably supply. A firm produces a new variety only if it can capture a large enough market to allow profitable sales.
This seemingly simple structure gives rise to a tight theory that leads to rich implications: Countries gain from trade not only because larger market allows them to better exploit scale economies, but also because consumers can access a larger variety of products. And even identical economies can gain from trade through scale economies and a larger variety of products. The theory also brought imperfect competition into a formal trade model.
In subsequent work, Krugman combined this simple model of product differentiation and scale economies with transport costs. Scale economies push toward production in one location to minimize costs and then shipping the product to the locations where consumers are. But transport costs push toward locating production near consumers. These opposing forces give rise to large concentrations of populations such as those along the East Coast corridor of the United States.
A hallmark of Krugman's work is parsimony. His models are among the most elegant: lean and thin and transparent. They have all the required parts but no unnecessary fat. It is quite remarkable that while other scholars in the field handsomely incorporated the Krugman model into their research, perhaps the most insightful and elegant applications still came from Krugman, as a quick reading of the chapter on economies of scale in my graduate textbook (co-authored with Jagdish Bhagwati and T. N. Srinivasan) would testify.
Mango
SoWal Insider
I like Paul Krugman about as much as I like the Heritage Foundation Think Tank. I find his op-eds a bit naive and simplistic. I have found the best ideas and come from relatively unknown economists. The only "stock" economist I listen to occasionally is Nouriel Roubini, who predicted this economic mess. But even he will say what's needed or will say something outlandish to scare the bejeebers out of peeps to promote his RGE Monitor (which is excellent, BTW)
I think any economist who writes for any politically slanted venue can be deemed a partisan hack.
I think any economist who writes for any politically slanted venue can be deemed a partisan hack.
