Overlooked in the excitement of the moment...
A few days ago, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called for an invasion of earth by space aliens.
Well, OK, not exactly. But the entire exchange is noted in video excerpted here.
Krugman said at one point:
It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better -
And a few second later added:
No, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
There are many things wrong with Krugman's analogy, but here are two (one a quibble, the other pretty big) that Krugman overlooked:
It's not bad enough that a leading NYT columnist is drawing economic plans from science fiction, he's picking ideas that were failures.
Well, OK, not exactly. But the entire exchange is noted in video excerpted here.
Krugman said at one point:
It's very hard to get inflation in a depressed economy. But if you had a program of government spending plus an expansionary policy by the Fed, you could get that. So, if you think about using all of these things together, you could accomplish, you know, a great deal.
If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months. And then if we discovered, oops, we made a mistake, there aren't any aliens, we'd be better -
And a few second later added:
No, there was a "Twilight Zone" episode like this in which scientists fake an alien threat in order to achieve world peace. Well, this time, we don't need it, we need it in order to get some fiscal stimulus.
There are many things wrong with Krugman's analogy, but here are two (one a quibble, the other pretty big) that Krugman overlooked:
- The Quibble: It wasn't "Twilight Zone," it was "The Outer Limits" in an episode entitled The Architects of Fear.
- The big one: Oh yeah...the plan didn't actually work.
It's not bad enough that a leading NYT columnist is drawing economic plans from science fiction, he's picking ideas that were failures.