FLASH: Allan Meltzer Has Failed to Mark Any of His Beliefs to Market

Paul Krugman:

Is Our Economists Learning?: David Glasner is unhappy with Allan Meltzer, who wrote an absurd op-ed in the WSJ in which Meltzer, among other things, just makes stuff up — claiming that markets are signaling fear of inflation when they are in fact doing no such thing…. But it’s actually much worse than Glasner acknowledges. Meltzer has been banging the same drum for more than three years…. You might think that the complete failure of the predicted inflation takeoff to materialize would at least give him pause. But no: his dogmatism is completely unshaken. And the thing is, he’s typical….

[H]as even one prominent economist or economic prognosticator who got everything wrong admitted it, or shown even a hint of humility? Has anyone perhaps hinted that the policy recommendations he was making might not be right, given the total failure of events to go the way he predicted?

I can’t think of one.

Glasner suggests that Meltzer has been corrupted by Murdoch’s influence. I disagree; I hold no affection for Murdoch, but one of the many unpleasant things we’ve learned in this crisis is that there was plenty of intellectual corruption in the economics profession from the get-go.