Krugman Then and Now

     What I notice in discussions about Krugman-and for Krugman bashers, there is nothing else to talk about-I mean what would Bob Murphy do without Krugman? Then there's Stephen Williamson; enough said-is there is a sense among conservatives and mainstream economists that there was a 90s Krugman and today's Krugman and the 90s Krugman was much preferable. 

    So much of what attacks on Krugman amount to is just plain old jealousy. However, the main criticism that conservative economists have to him are these:

    1. He insults people he disagrees with rather than fairly considering their argument

    2. The 90s Krugman was an economist whereas today's Krugman basically allows his political agenda to supersede good economics. 

    Nobody is more anti Krugman than Williamson of course. Here he is on 90s Krugman:

    "Someone forwarded a link to this post, from October 25, 1996, by Paul Krugman in Slate. This is an excellent piece. It's beautifully written and well-argued. I agree with essentially everything in it. It's bold, in that Krugman sticks up for Economic Science in the face of a barrage of criticism from what he thinks are loose-thinking innumerate "economists." He concludes with:

The literati truly cannot be satisfied unless they get economics back from the nerds. But they can't have it, because we nerds have the better claim.

     "I know some nerds too. Bob Lucas: nerd. Mark Gertler: nerd. Nobu Kiyotaki: serious nerd. Ed Prescott: very serious nerd. Mike Woodford: nerd. Neil Wallace: serious nerd. Tom Sargent: incredibly serious nerd nerd."

      "But somewhere between 1996 and 2012, Krugman changed his tune. He stopped being defender-of-the-nerds and went over to the dark side. What happened in between? Was it like the 3 stooges where the bowling ball falls off the shelf and hits Curly in the head? Here's my interpretation of events. I can't remember exactly when Krugman began writing op-eds for the NYT, but that certainly predates the Bush administration. My memory of the early NYT period was that Krugman was pretty much in defend-the-nerds mode. The bowling ball hit the head during the George W. Bush administration. You can find an account of Krugman's political metamorphosis in this New Yorker article. I can remember reading Krugman's political op-eds during this period. They were somewhat over-the-top, but I pretty much agreed with him."

      http://newmonetarism.blogspot.com/2012/02/paul-krugman-we-used-to-love.html

      To the contrary, the other day Tony Yates meant to praise Krugman so he said he's been showing signs of 90s Krugman again. 

      An interesting question is how different is he really? He does, as Williamson said, say that things changed for him after watching the 2000 election-just how dishonest the Bush campaign was and how the media let him skate. 

      It seems to me that the highwater mark of the 90s Krugman was his book Pop International. 

      http://www.amazon.com/Pop-Internationalism-Paul-Krugman-ebook/dp/B002XQ2BW4/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1433425766&sr=1-1&keywords=pop+internationalism

      Sumner is always approvingly referring to it-with the implicit admonition that Krugman has since allowed politics to cloud his analysis. 

      I've actually started reading this book and it's very interesting. It's in the backdrop of the debate over world trade and trade agreements-NATO and all that. 

     Krugman criticizes opponents of trade deals for talking about them hurting American competitiveness but he also criticizes some proponents of the deals. 

     So how much has he changed since then? I think that's an open question. What's clear is that he had something of an epiphany during these debates that made him feel that he had to be able to talk to the intelligent layman about economics-as these are the kinds of people who are policymakers or concerned citizens, etc. 

     Reading it, you have to be impressed with his ability to make difficult subjects easy to understand. He also explains that his epiphany came when he realized that as 'obvious' as he and his fellow economists feel stuff like Ricardo's trade theory is, it's not at all obvious to even very intelligent laymen. 

      http://web.mit.edu/krugman/www/ricardo.htm

      He would, however, seem to have changed his views on trade at least somewhat. 

      http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring-2008/2008a_bpea_krugman.pdf

      However, in reading him then and now it seems to me that there is a thread that connects it all: you might say that he is a credentialist. He claims to have no use for such a thing. 

      http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/03/who-should-we-listen-to/

      But what motivated him in the 90s was the feeling that people who understood nothing about standard economics were giving terrible analysis of things like free trade. He feared that policymakers and others would be mislead by such ignorant analysis. 

      Today, he is still always declaring that standard economic theory-for him that's basically the Samuelson IS-LM model with a little DSGE additions-has been right in its predictions all along-but, ignorant hacks and ideologues have poisoned the debate with lies. 

      In both the 90s and today standard economics is the savior and the bane is people willfully ignorant of what standard economics knows. 

      P.S. The question ofthe 90s Krugman vs. today can cut the other way as well as those he's now embracing are skeptical that he's really changed. 

      http://www.thenation.com/article/173593/why-was-paul-krugman-so-wrong

      P.S.S Overall, it seems that his 90s book is still very relevant to today with all the debate about the current TPP trade deal in Congress. One thing that he was clear on then and now is he doesn't think that these deals do a lot to either increase or decrease net American jobs. 

       Even with his 90s orthodox trade theory there was room to argue that trade with 3rd world countries conceivably could lower wages at least for the unskilled workers. 

      He did argue that he saw the tech revolution as being a much bigger drag on jobs-which is a debate that is now very topical for liberals. 

      I can buy that NAFTA style trade deals don't kill jobs but I do think they lower wages. Even 90s Krugman had said that what was happening was a transformation of the country from a manufacturing economic to a service economy. 

      It seems to me that service jobs are much lower paying jobs. He talked about skilled vs. unskilled workers but it seems to me that many more Americans are now in unskilled jobs-I'd love to see data on all this. 

      What does the median service job of today pay vs. the median manufacturing job paid back in the heyday? I'd guess considerably less. Service jobs are mostly crappy jobs. 

       UPDATE: Another piece by Krugman on TPP

       http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/19/suspicious-nonsense-on-trade-agreements/