Krugman seems to have become a leading voice in the cognitive dissonance wing of the economics “profession”. [...] it seems to me that Krugman is a deeply unintelligent man. Yes, he lucked into a Nobel Prize in 2008 (for work he did almost 30 years earlier), but even that seems undeserved. According to the Nobel Committee’s announcement, Krugman’s “seminal” 1979 article posited a radical new idea about consumer choice: “Krugman’s new theory was based on an assumption that consumers appreciate diversity in their consumption.” Now there’s a startling revelation! If it’s true, as the Committee asserts, that “at the time, this was a rather new concept in economics”, that merely speaks to the intellectual vacuity of economists, not the merit of Krugman’s vaunted “discovery”. The Committee does have the grace to note that “the basic idea is rather self-evident” (which is clearly at odds with its other statement), so it appears that Krugman’s only real contribution was some form of quantification of the concept (although I can’t find his original article, so I’m not entirely sure about exactly what he did). That might have been an adequate basis for a master’s thesis, but certainly not a doctoral dissertation and absolutely not a Nobel Prize. One can only conclude that Krugman’s Nobel has roughly the same merit as Obama’s, which awarded the following year. L.
Posted on: Sat, 31 May 2014 09:19:06 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015