Krugman criticism from Rajan

Paul Krugman is very smart, tremendously well-informed and a skilled writer. But he lacks wisdom, judgment and character. Thus he has become not only partisan, but also exceptionally dishonest as a debater.

There is a professional ethic among economists to be intellectually honest in debates. Krugman keeps violating this rule, with articles heavy on ad-hominem personal attacks, straw-man misrepresentations of the claims of his opponent, a refusal to ever admit that he is wrong, and ignoring fact and logic whenever it suits him just to appear stronger in the debate.

Everything is about maximizing the short run argument in favor of the policies that Krugman favors, rather than finding out the truth, which is what economists are supposedly supposed to do.

For example Krugman pretends that European policies do not harm economic performance by looking at growth rates, despite the fact that he knows perfectly well that established economic theory predicts that the costs of policies that dampen economic activity appear as different levels of output, not growth paths.

Krugman's audience are unsophisticated non-trained economists, which makes all his violations of the academic rule of conduct worse.

When the policies pushed by Krugman did worse than he promised, he does not update his views. He just becomes even louder, claiming that the lack of success of Krugmaonomics just proves we need more of the exact same Krugman-style economics.

Imagine Krugman's reaction if the Bush administration people argued that the failure of their foreign policy and economic policy just proves we need more of the exact same recipe.

One of Krugman's dubious and partisan claims is that government policies to increase home ownership among poor americans and minorities had nothing to do with the sub prime-mortgage bubble. Here star Raghuram Rajan, a University of Chicago professor takes Krugman to task. Read it carefully.

If I understand the history involved correctly, the government sponsored enterprises that we have all come to know and love in the last few years invented sub-prime mortgage backed securities (MBS), which gives them a part of the blame of the crisis even if they had done nothing after this (which they did).

So, go read it all. It´s good for you.