Paul Krugman:
Smuggish Thoughts (Self-indulgent) - NYTimes.com: the models seem to work. It appears that I wasn’t just a successful self-marketer, that I really did and do know something.So that’s great – except that it turns out that one form of anxiety has just been replaced with another. It’s great to have confirmation that you weren’t just playing career games; it is, however, not just frustrating but terrifying to watch decision-makers ignore all the hard-won evidence and knowledge, and repeat the mistakes of the 1930s. The good news is that I’m not Sammy Glick; the bad news is that I’m Cassandra.
But there are an awful lot of economists who are Sammy Glicks, and an awful lot more who simply have not done their homework. Why aren't they marking their beliefs to market?
It would be better to be not Cassandra but Tiresias. And we can wish that none of this had ever happened--that Geithner, Paulson, and Bernanke had understood that they could not let Lehmann fail in an uncontrolled fashion, and that Bernanke had understood thereafter that he needed to start stabilizing nominal GDP as fast as possible, and that the EU had recognized at the end of 2008 that it needed an immediate fiscal and regulatory union.And we do so wish, as do all who live in such times.
But that is not for us to decide.
All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us.
Given the sheer volume of the #*^& that has been thrown at Paul Krugman over the past thirteen years by all of the mendacious partisan, bipartisan, nonpartisan, and simply underbriefed and ideological hacks, I think he should be very proud.
