BRYAN CAPLAN
May 7, 2013
Keynesian Bets: What's Out There
May 6, 2013
Keynesian Bets Bleg
May 6, 2013
The Pyramid of Macroeconomic Insight and Virtue
May 2, 2013
A Natalist Provision
May 1, 2013
I Was a Teenage Misanthrope
DAVID HENDERSON
May 5, 2013
John Thacker on Vaccinations and the Sequester
May 3, 2013
Chef Rudy's Virtues Project
May 2, 2013
My take on Reinhart and Rogoff
May 1, 2013
Medicare Kills a Program
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I misread #1 as "Sumerian" monetary policy. Which I guess would be a silver standard? :P
Can Nobel prizes be recalled, I wonder?
No. Next question.
Krugman has an ideé fixe: that all bad policy is the result of right-of-center prescriptions. Anything that doesn't fit that template is summarily discarded.
Dogma consumed a beautiful mind.
Bryan,
Your link to Sumner's reply is actually a link to Krugman's book.
Best,
David
I venture that Krugman's approach to policy recommendations was shaped heavily by the Iraq war - being carefully rational and making only first-best recommendations only resulted in being ignored or dismissed as "shrill".
Given that the neoconservative case for war was politically negligible compared to mass mis-perceptions as the case for war (particularly over the link, or rather lack thereof, between 9/11 and Iraq), it's become clear that political tenability rather than rigorous reasoning is the primary driver of US policy. If your intellectual purity permits you no allies, then nobody is going to listen to your arguments to begin with.
I venture that the new Krugman has more influence on policy than the entire libertarian intelligentsia combined. He certainly has more influence than the old Krugman. Like it or not, the demos is more influenced by political compromise than by first-best rationality.
david writes:
I venture that the new Krugman has more influence on policy than the entire libertarian intelligentsia combined. He certainly has more influence than the old Krugman. Like it or not, the demos is more influenced by political compromise than by first-best rationality.
Not necessarily by political compromise, but by political appeal.
Good politics trumps good economics every time. This is why public choice is the queen of economic disciplines (and why I'm a political theorist as well as an economist).
@ Brandon: Scott Sumner says to target expected nominal GDP growth. Here is a post that is recent and indicative:
http://blogsandwikis.bentley.edu/themoneyillusion/?p=2914
DeLong offered a policy catagorization that helps clarify talk on these, monetary (interest rates and reserves), fiscal (spending), quantitative easing (Sumner's), and bank (what the Fed has done with corporates and mortgages). It helps prevent confusion.