What’s The Matter With Paul Krugman?

I’m not a member of the “White Working Class”. I worked pretty hard to not be part of it, earlier in my life. For better or worse, I’m a service-economy guy.

Paul Krugman new yhork times.

Democrats have to figure out why the white working class just voted overwhelmingly against its own economic interests, not pretend that a bit more populism would solve the problem.

Here’s a word to the wise, Paul Krugman – but since it’s you, I’ll have to explain it.

Being told what “one’s best interests” are is a good enough reason by itself.

Would Paul Krugman tell black people, or Native Americans, or women, what’s “in their best interests?” That would be racist, sexist and mansplaining.

It’s no different when you Bluesplain to people you don’t know, have never met, will never meet, and whose lives would kill you dead in half an hour what “their best interests” are. There’s no cutesy PC social-justice-academy term for it – but it’s the same thing.

And that’s when the Bluesplaining comes from someone who’s actually got a point – which Paul Krugman does not. How do we know this?

Because he wrote this…:

Any claim that changed policy positions will win elections assumes that the public will hear about those positions. How is that supposed to happen, when most of the news media simply refuse to cover policy substance? Remember, over the course of the 2016 campaign, the three network news shows devoted a total of 35 minutes combined to policy issues — all policy issues. Meanwhile, they devoted 125 minutes to Mrs. Clinton’s emails.

Right. The press was hard on Hillary.

Oh, yeah. And…:

Beyond this, the fact is that Democrats have already been pursuing policies that are much better for the white working class than anything the other party has to offer. Yet this has brought no political reward.

No, they do not – and yes, the reward has been bestowed.

Krugman is just too much of a clown to know it.

At least one professor got the message and got some useful takeaways from the complete failure of the “academic-industrial complex” for which Krugman is a poster child:

First, we must stop being insufferable know-it-alls. As scribes and scholars, we have expertise in a particular beat or field, but that doesn’t make us qualified to determine which candidate is best to lead 320 million Americans, each of whom has many and varied needs. Nor is it our job.

God knows it’ll never be Krugman.

Posted

November 29, 2016

Narrative For Sale!

Mitch Berg

Tags:

Comments

20 responses to “What’s The Matter With Paul Krugman?”

Prince of Darkness_666

November 29, 2016

They didnt, they were tired of being taken for granted and sneered at by coastal elites like him. Plus all those old union jobs are what hes pushing for. If he can open up a couple hundred coal mines and such we could be looking at the red firewall
Joe Doakes

November 29, 2016

I worked my way through night school. When I got my degree, the starting pay in my field was less than I was making at my day job. I quit the day job anyway. Because now that I have experience in my field, my pay is miles above where I would have been.

I voted against my own SHORT TERM economic interests in hopes that my decision would lead to LONG TERM improvement. You’d think a big-shot economist would understand that concept, and that it might apply to political choices, as well.
.
.
nerdbert

November 29, 2016

“Against their own interests” is an interesting claim from the genius stock market predictor Krugman — I really hope he invested his funds as he propounded.

Let’s consider how idiotic these folks are and how disconnected they are from reality by considering Hillary’s quote about how she was viewing coal miners’ interest:

So for example, I’m the only candidate which has a policy about how to bring economic opportunity using clean renewable energy as the key into coal country. Because we’re going to put a lot of coal miners and coal companies out of business, right?

And we’re going to make it clear that we don’t want to forget those people. Those people labored in those mines for generations, losing their health, often losing their lives to turn on our lights and power our factories.

So she thinks putting coal miners out of business was a good thing, but she’ll make it better by retraining in service sector jobs and technologies.

There’s a problem, though. Those coal miners aren’t stupid. They look around and see how many IT jobs are in their area. Even if they could retrain, and even if they want to change fields from a physical one to an intellectual one (and intellectual ones don’t appeal to everyone), where are they going to work? All those lucrative new jobs Hillary was saying she was going to open up won’t be in the area they’re in. And most folks who aren’t city-bred have little interest in moving to the city.

So those coal miners look at Hillary and say, “You’re going to kill the only good jobs in the area where my family is and where I want to live. You’re telling me to give up my preferred lifestyle to take up one you think is better and I think is sh*t. And you think I’m going to vote for you?”

There’s a serious superiority bubble among the “intelligentsia” and coastal-city elites that they still really can’t see. They claim to be all about lifestyle diversity, but when they say that they’re talking about sexual activities and practices, not actual lifestyles other than what you do with your sexual organs.
Night Writer

November 29, 2016

The working class had plenty of “policy” to go on, thanks to Obamacare – and responded emphatically in its own interests in the 2010 and 2014 mid-terms. The Dems ignored the response twice. As did the Republicans – hence, President-elect Trump.
Prince of Darkness_666

November 29, 2016

outside of the insufferable left in general the #1 reason we have Preisent-elect Trump is because Barack Obama. So far its about the only fucking thing hes done right
nerdbert

November 29, 2016

Complete aside. Can I go all Angie Craig commercial here?

Voiceover: We can’t elect Hillary Clinton president. She’s admitted she’s a satanist who wants to destroy the US.

Hillary audio clip: “So for example, I’m the only candidate which.”

Voiceover: Vote Trump. We can’t afford to let this country go to the devil.
bikebubba

November 29, 2016

One thing I’d add–to pile on to Krugman as it were–is that how Hilliary took care of classified and government information IS a policy issue. It has to do with whether the candidate takes national security seriously or not. In Mrs. Clinton’s case, the answer is clearly no, and that’s what we’d have inferred about the Democrats in general due to their handling of the Middle East, especially Iran and Israel, as well as their deal with Cuba for no concessions. Giving away the store to people who want to nuke us is generally a sign you’re not strong on national security.

But that is chump change compared to Krugman’s economic idiocy. There are pluses and minuses to Trump’s proposals, but to state point blank without evidence that it’s a universal minus is just to ignore reality. One of the biggest things that afflicts blue collar workers is the simple cost of employing them here–one estimate I’ve seen is that the cost of regulation is something like 16% of the economy. Add more for taxation, spending….it’s really amazing that anyone without a college degree gets to work at all, when you think about it.
nerdbert

November 29, 2016

BB, in all fairness to the Hillster, her cavalier view of the treatment of classified government information is not without basis. After all, we’ve see how well the OPM did at protecting spies’ names and data. And the view that even the DoD leaks like a sieve has merit, too.

So the cynic in me says that Hillary’s disdain for security measures could have been warranted given how well we’ve seen the Obama administration protect secrets. Well, secrets that weren’t covered by FOIA channels, at least.
Emery Incognito

November 29, 2016

My explanation for Trump’s win in is that white people voted for the party that seems to like white people and against the party that professes to dislike them. Nothing more natural in the world.

That said, nothing has actually changed in the American temperament. It is still a democracy and moderation is still the virtue most prized by Americans in their politics. The Left pushed too hard with its Identity Politics — people pushed back.
bikebubba

November 29, 2016

Nerdbert: true, but isn’t that a “my brother did it too” argument? Wouldn’t have flown when I worked in Space Park, that’s for sure–they’d have said “oh, really….tell me about your brother sharing state secrets.” Would have been a long afternoon with the FBI back in the days when we took security seriously.
mjb003

November 29, 2016

“Would Paul Krugman tell black people, or Native Americans, or women, what’s “in their best interests?”

I wouldn’t be so quick to say he wouldn’t.
Jethrene

November 29, 2016

This is typical Krugman. He puts on his economist hat and talks about public policy, which is based on values, not economics.
The foundation of market economics is the assumption that people know what is in their own interests. Seriously, you can’t even begin to discuss economics if people are not the best judge of their own interests. It would be like trying to do physics if Newton’s laws of motion changed arbitrarily at arbitrary times. There would be nothing to study.
Krugman’s problem is that he does not share the values of the people who vote GOP and he lacks the imaginative capacity to understand them. He does understand economics (in theory, anyhow), so he tries to take a problem of values into a problem of economics.
Lack of imagination is liberalism’s biggest problem.
Jethrene

November 29, 2016

Emery Incognito on November 29, 2016 at 1:33 pm said:
My explanation for Trump’s win in is that white people voted for the party that seems to like white people and against the party that professes to dislike them. Nothing more natural in the world.
You really should look at this, Emery:
http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2016/11/09/behind-trumps-victory-divisions-by-race-gender-education/
The percentage of whites, blacks, and hispanics that voted for Trump are nearly identical to the percentages that voted for Bush in 2004. More college educated whites voted for Hillary, but more less-then-college educated whites went for Trump. The absolute percentage of whites voting D and R is almost identical to 2012.
The stock market likes Trump’s appreciation of economic growth. The Dems don’t even talk about the importance of economic growth anymore. They are all about dividing the pie, not increasing its size.
Chuck

November 29, 2016

MN Democrat (and Crystal Sugar stooge) Collin Peterson and Obama Ag Sec’y Tom Vilsack (of Iowa) both said this past week that the Democrats need to get through to rural voters how great the Democrat party is. How much a Democrat run gov’t can do things for them (but I would say “too them”). They say its not the policies, but its just getting their message out.

They don’t get it. They see nothing wrong with the gender studies staff of NYU. Drag queens in the girls locker room. Banning Thomas Jefferson. The war on grandmother bakers. Illegal aliens (and calling them “undocumented immigrants”) And Obamacare is great, isn’t it?
Chuck

November 29, 2016

And to add to what Jeth says….. telling us that all the women and all the men who work for the same company have to, on average, make the same amount of compensation…and the federal gov’t enforcing this…is not a winning issue for the Democrats.
Jethrene

November 30, 2016

Chuck on November 29, 2016 at 10:46 pm said:
“. . . telling us that all the women and all the men who work for the same company have to, on average, make the same amount of compensation . . .”
Despite my moniker and and avatar, I am not a woman. Well, no more than Jethrene was a woman. It’s a Beverly Hillbillies ref, if you are so young you don’t get it.
Anyways, I am certain I make more $ than my female coworkers.
The reason I make more $ is seniority. Men tend to stick to this job. I’ve had two bosses over the past couple of decades. Both were women. The first boss made it a practice to work very hard to hire women. Most of the women she hired quit after a year or two. The men tended to linger. Doing this job requires an awful lot of time away from home and family, working weird hours. You are literally not allowed to work on site if you are pregnant. It’s a harsh, industrial environment. At one time we had a stay at home dad doing a daily 70 mile round trip to pick up breast milk from a coworker.
About 1/4 of the people filling my position are female, and they have been here a long time. Not many men are a good fit for this job, and fewer women are a good fit for this job.
God only knows what the SJW’s would think if they got hold of our personnel records.
Swiftee Plisken

November 30, 2016

Another good thing about working at 14,000 feet; after reaching the protest site, SJW’s won’t have much vim and vigor left to light fires that won’t burn in dumpsters that aren’t around.

Also, there aren’t any hair weave shops to make the trip financially rewarding enough to attract attention.

I’d wave those sexist employment records around like a flag, Jethrene.
Seflores

November 30, 2016

Not to many years ago there was a TV game show named “Deal or No Deal” that had a huge audience and eventually became a worldwide sensation. The contestant had to choose between 30 identical cases that had values between $1 and $1MM secretly hidden inside (and held by a smokin’ hot female). The contestant would eliminate cases trying to find the elusive million dollar case all while a ‘banker’ tried to buy them out prior to the all of the cases being opened. The bankers offer rose or fell based on the unknown values still hidden in the unopened cases.
I remember reading an article at the time that economists were fascinated by how people decided when to take the bankers offer. Often times, the contestants went way beyond what was prudent, thinking that they had some magic sense of which case contained the elusive big money. The lesson being that people often don’t know what is in their ‘best interest’. But years of observing government dependence both here in the US to overseas has taught many that what the government considers to be in their best interest, rarely works out in the long run to be so.
nerdbert

November 30, 2016

Seflores, I’ve seen those analyses and I wasn’t impressed. They were done by economists and it shows, since they really don’t know statistics all that well. To put it simply, they were using the Normal (aka Gaussian) Distribution for their analysis. For the banker side, and assuming you are doing many, many such deals that’s the basically the right statistical distribution to use since the real distribution will, with enough trials, devolve to something Gaussian.

But the distribution you need to use for a very infrequent events, like you actually making it onto a game show that one time in your life, is very, very different. Given how Deal or No Deal was set up, the proper distribution is something like the hypergeomtric distribution given the small sample size and non-replacement of samples. In a distribution of that format, you actually should be much, much more “aggressive” in your betting style than you would be in a Gaussian distribution and the contestants were actually not too far off from where they should have been.

I grant you that the idea that the contestants were doing the right thing without understanding all the ridiculous math behind it may seem strange and coincidental, but that an economist got something wrong by blindly applying simplistic analysis is sadly all too common.
Seflores

November 30, 2016

nerdbert, you and I are in accord regarding the simplistic methods economists used to measure the best interests of people in general from a relative handful of people participating in a game show.
One of the things I took from the article (and I lacked the time to note in my earlier comment) was how economists deciding what is in the best interests of game show contestants can be extrapolated to a handful of economists (including “political” economists like Paul Krugman) view what is in the best interests of the broader economy. Central Planning never seems to deliver the goods & services people decide they need, yet many people treat the pronouncements of economists as something of a Commandment handed down from on high. Peak Oil was something I heard from the economics staff at my business school nearly three decades ago and that my generation would be dealing with no oil today. Funny how people who study scarcity always predict more scarcity.