I may have said this before, but I despise Paul Krugman and his over-inflated sense of righteousness in his defense of his Economic theories. He just can not admit that he was wrong, and he’d have our country go bankrupt just to prove Keynes right. Rarely do I have the pleasure of watching an academic win such accolades (a Noble Prize), and then utterly destroy any & all credibility by allowing his personal politics to so firmly pin his science & objectivity. Yet over the past two years or so, I’ve not only got to watch Krugman immolate himself, but a bunch of overheated climate scientists as well.
This is good, I think the media has helped to produce far too many scientists who are “media darlings”. I think these scientists are still stuck in high school getting swirlies & wedgies, and they enjoy the attention & popularity of the media a bit too much (we are supposed to be happy with the recognition of our peers, people who can actually understand our work, not the fawning admiration of a public that gets all hot & bothered over the vacuous opinions of the glitterati & the antics of a sparkly vampire & his dishrag slave of a heroine). Maybe now more scientists will remember that they are scientists first, and their only duty is to the discovery of the unfettered truth, not science to support political whims & media sound bytes.
Meh. First, one has to believe that economics is science. I think it’s far more hype and politics than science, but then, I just barely got “c”s in the subject in college.
I think Economics is a science, much in the same way that Climate Science is a science. Honest practitioners know that their predictive capabilities are severely hampered by the vast quantity of unknown & unknowable variables that govern the science. Dishonest ones insist that they know what is going to happen, if only we’d do X.
I’ve run into a few of the Krugman acolytes before, and it’s very hard to argue with them, because they tend to keep saying “but he’s won a Nobel Prize, and he wouldn’t lie, so he MUST be right.” I commend the folks who argued him into walking away and de facto admitting defeat. But, as Joe Huffman has pointed out on his blog several times, when someone has a vested interest in being right, they tend to deny proof of being right ever more vigorously – see “When Prophecy Fails” or similar book for details.
FWIW, I do think economics is a science, just a fuzzy, imprecise science that uses a lot of probability in it’s predictions, much like the weather forecast, just with a lot worse signal:noise ratio on the feedback mechanism.
it’s very hard to argue with them, because they tend to keep saying “but he’s won a Nobel Prize, and he wouldn’t lie, so he MUST be right.â€
The same people use the same line of “reasoning” to justify every utterance from The Teleprompter Messiah, too, I’ll bet.