That should clear up some smoke if you people really want to ‘know’ rather than gup-shup. I try not to ‘generalize’,but there is a greater folly, to ‘intellectualize’.

P.S.this is just another well without water !Good Luck with each other.

Krugman has been a harsh critic of the Bush administration and the Republican Party in The New York Times, where he writes a regular column………..He has also taken the Bush administration to task over the current financial meltdown, blaming its pursuit of deregulation and unencumbered fiscal policies for the financial crisis that has threatened the global economy with recession…………Krugman has also come out forcefully against John McCain during the economic meltdown, saying the Republican presidential candidate is “more frightening now than he was a few weeks ago.” Krugman also has derided the Republicans as becoming “the party of stupid.”

[Krugman was also an early opponent of the war on Iraq. If Obama is the political leader of the hour, Krugman is the economist of the hour. Laissez faire capitalism deserves to be consigned to the same dustbin of history as communism]

The global economic crisis is a result of the “comprehensive failure of extreme capitalism,” Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd said Wednesday……..”– extreme capitalism which now turns to government to prevent systemic failure,”……..”Obscene failures in corporate governance which rewarded greed without any regard to the integrity of the financial system” were one of the factors behind the collapse, Rudd said…….Governments should act so that greed and lax regulation were never allowed to put the world in the same position again, he said, adding that Australia would press for this at a meeting of the G20 group of 20 rich and emerging nations next month………..”Asia is the fastest-growing part of the global economy, by a long shot,” he said………..”Right now the world needs China’s economic strength at a time when growth is under threat.”

Thanks guys. I didn’t think anybody would be interested in such a geeky, inside baseball, post. Heck, I cleaned it up to remove discussions of New Trade Theory and Krugman’s other contributions to make it shorter and get to the desi bits faster. So I’m pleased to see the response.

Why not add them add them as an update now?

I don’t think there’s a dispute around the value of Krugman’s contributions to international trade theory (i.e., as valid, significant, etc.). I think it’s becoming increasingly common to separate one’s “public” voice from the tone and rigor of their academic voices; another great example is Levitt’s Freakonomics, which is written for a “trade” (i.e., non-academy) audience and does not do justice to Levitt’s research. Krugman is similar. I don’t judge the quality of his academic work by the tone he takes in his “trade” voice on the op-ed page of the NYT.

Whaaaat?! Are you serious?

Wait.Stop.

University of Chicago’s post is a troll, folks.

At one point Jagdish explained to us his personal theory of reincarnation, which was that if you are a good economist, a virtuous economist, you are reborn as a physicist, and if you are an evil, wicked economist, you are reborn as a sociologist. I’m not sure if even Jagdish remembers this.

Haha. But Krugman did not internalize academia’s caste system.

Of course, at first I thought that it was really funny, and then, as I began to, as I had broader experiences, I began to think that it was somewhat unfair. I’ve come to know some sociologists who turned out to be very, very smart and nice people. I’ve also come to know some physicists. But, of course, the point is the joke is not about sociologists or physicists. The joke is about economists. It’s about people who – economists – who aspire to what they imagine physicists to be, to this rigor and certainty and mathematical complexity. So I’m keying off Bob Solow a little bit here – there is this tendency which Jagdish knew better about all the time, that you do not – that the models are there to enlighten – not to be a show-off of your mathematical technique, which was terribly – I think I might say crucially – important in my own life.

A lot of people who do (macro) economics also seem to write columns and blogs, so it is kinda hard to see where the columnist ends and the economist begins, and what is the essential distinction between the two. Particularly when the concepts, categories and the general nature of data used by economics tend towards folk psychology.

Maybe I should take up Curling.