how much of an impact did the fax machine have on the economy?
Back to topic...
I'm surprised you have the nerve to even post. Dunce.
so you can't answer the question
Understood. You lose.
Ha ha. You're the fool. You lose. Even Krugman didn't imply that it had any meaning dork. That was the whole point of the quote. Whooosh. It went straight over your head.
HE MEANT that the the fax machine had little to no impact on the economy. STOOGE.
We emailed Krugman for a comment on the quote and here's his explanation:
Well, two things.
First, look at the whole piece. It was a thing for the Times magazine's 100th anniversary, written as if by someone looking back from 2098, so the point was to be fun and provocative, not to engage in careful forecasting; I mean, there are lines in there about St. Petersburg having more skyscrapers than New York, which was not a prediction, just a thought-provoker.
But the main point is that I don't claim any special expertise in technology -- I almost never make technological forecasts, and the only reason there was stuff like that in the 98 piece was because the assignment required that I do that sort of thing. The issues about Bitcoin, however, are not technological! Everyone agrees that it's technically very sweet. But does it work as money? That's a very different kind of question.
And the fact that people are throwing around my 98 quote actually shows that they don't get this point -- that they're confusing technology with monetary economics.
After writing the post, Bitcoin supporters started flogging his inbox with "rage-filled missives," says
Krugman in a follow up post.
He also said that the Bitcoin people have no sense of humor, and he suggested his "Bitcoin is Evil" headline was a "joke." In his defense, he really didn't write a post about why it was "evil," he just said he was skeptical that Bitcoin could work.
In addition to jamming his inbox with angry emails people in the tech world have started passing around his dreadful prediction from 1998 about the impact of the Internet.
Here's the image which we've seen tweeted:
Let's not bandy about. What he won his Nobel prize for, that new trade theory and new economic geography, definitely has merit, but let's face it, he's an avowed partisan. To make matters worse, he belongs squarely to the Keynsian school of economic theory. For that, in order for one's articles and pieces to have any credibility, one needs to use government data. That is, massaged numbers.
If you want an economist whose opinion you can trust about things such as consumer demand around a variety of goods, or the nature of economies of scale in the modern world? Sure, he's your man. If you want a guy you can trust to analyze the relationship between government spending and corporate job growth? Maybe not so much. His politics and trust in Big Government and Fed reports will bias his analysis too much.
The MAIN REASON those of us with any memory at all will forever HATE this asshole, is because, in the early part of this millennia, when there was a tech bubble, he was advocating creating a housing bubble to lessen the stress on the economy and to make sure THAT recovery didn't end. Imagine, to advocate that the Fed and investment banks purposely create a second bubble, a real estate bubble. Well, we all know how THAT turned out, eh?
Back then, several Austrian economists could see the writing on the wall. He didn't have clue in till, oh, say around 2007. They all knew way before then. I knew by 2005, 2006? Was he being coy, or did he really just not know? Either way, if he had been half-way decent, he could have been a champion for the American people. As it was, he sold out the economics profession and the American people.
If you want to know why the Bankers got a bail out? Blame Krugman.
HOW DID PAUL KRUGMAN
GET IT SO WRONG?
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/john.cochrane/research/papers/ecaf_2077.pdf
"Krugman does not even have anything to say about the Federal Reserve Board (Fed). Ben Bernanke did a lot more in 2007 – 08 than set central bank interest rates to zero and then go off on vacation and wait for fiscal policy to do its magic. Leaving aside the string of bailouts, the Fed started term lending to securities dealers. Then, rather than buy US government bonds in exchange for reserves, it essentially sold government bonds in exchange for private debt. Though the funds rate was near zero, the Fed noticed huge commercial paper and securitised-debt spreads, and intervened in those markets. There is no such thing as ‘the’ interest rate anymore: the Fed is attempting to manage all interest rates.
Monetary policy now has little to do with ‘money’ versus ‘bonds’ with all the latter lumped together. Monetary policyhas become wide-ranging financial policy. Does any of thiswork? What are the dangers? Can the Fed stay independent in this new role? These are the questions of our time. Paul Krugman has nothing to say about them.
To Krugman, the crash was caused by ‘irrationality’. To Krugman, there is one magic cure-all for all economic problems: fiscal stimulus. It’s really a remarkably empty view of the world.
Krugman claims a cabal of obvious crackpots bedazzled all of macroeconomics with the beauty of their mathematics, to the point of inducing policy paralysis. Alas, that won’t stick. The sad fact is that few in Washington pay the slightest attention to modern macroeconomic research, in particular to anything with a serious intertemporal dimension. Krugman’s simple Keynesianism has dominated policy analysis for decades and continues to do so. Policy-makers just add up consumer, investment and government ‘demand’ to forecast output and use simple Phillips curves to think about inflation. If a failure of ideas caused bad policy, it’s Krugman’s
simple-minded 1960's Keynesianism that failed.
