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Comment by kcatskcolbdi | Hacker News Reader

Is Paul Krugman ever correct about predictions? The only two I know from him are his famous prediction about the internet, that "by 2005, it would become clear that the Internet's effect on the economy is no greater than the fax machine's" and his child-like theory that two countries with McDonald's wouldn't go to war with one another.

Is there any value in listening to a man who is consistently wrong? Did he get something profoundly correct that I just never learned of?

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This is an ad hominem attack in the sense that PK has laid out the logic underlying his statement here. He is not asking that you are to trust his point based solely on his say-so.

The right approach is: "This argument is dubious / incorrect / however you might want to refer to 'wrong' because X" where X could be "there's this and that proof that there -are- deals being made" or "Here is proof the Japanese DID drop bowling balls" or even a more esoteric "I don't think grousing about one-party rule and the death of US democracy is reasonable; these concerns are overblown", which feels more like a slugfest between 2 'vibes' which seems kinda silly, but, by all means, share your opinion here.

But, "Paul Krugman said it therefore what the fuck who cares?" is a logical fallacy and it should have no place here on HN.

If someone is famous for being wrong, shouldn't that be considered in evaluating hen's statements?

Famous according to who? I would judge his record as probably mixed, like most predictions ("predictions are hard, especially about the future."*) Otherwise picking stocks would do better than random chance.

One could be wrong despite the right reasoning or right for the wrong reasons.

And yet, at some level, I agree with you. It's natural to weight what other people say by perception of their prior predictions. I have a similar reaction to Larry Kudlow or Jim Cramer: if one of them told me the sky was blue, I would have to go outside and double check.

Thinking about it some more, I think I can reconcile the difference by looking at the reasoning versus looking at the result. Like poker: you can make the right move and still lose, or make the wrong move and still win.

To bring that back to the current topic: Trump may yet escape causing a recession, but the reasoning for "this tariff war is a terrible idea" has thus far struck me as a lot more coherent than the reasoning for "this tariff war will lead to prosperity"

* funny enough, after writing this whole spiel, I looked it up to see if I got the Yogi Berra quote right (I didn't), but what did I find? An article about this exact topic (Krugman's predictions): https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/12/predict...

That's judging a book by its cover territory.

You can do that: Life is too short to do a whole bunch of research just to check anything you hear, so you have to judge statements using known imprecise and dangerously oversimplified mechanisms such as 'well, this guy has been wrong so often, lets just assume also wrong here'. But _if_ you do that, you should know you're using really bad guidelines, and you should definitely NOT spread that around and start using it as a logical argument. You, personally, aren't going to bother checking the truth of a statement if it comes from a source you consider exceedingly dubious. Fine. But don't tell others it's a load of horsepuckey because X said it. At best, state that X's personal assurances it is true aren't worth anything.

The right move would be to not click it on HN and not comment on it. If you care enough to comment, why not just check the statements or argue based on them?

He was consistently right during the Great Financial Crisis. That the "grownups" who cut their teeth in the 70s, a supply side recession, were applying the wrong lessons to the GFC, a demand side recession. Europe kept trying and failing to austerity its way to growth. The Republicans shrieked the same, and cost us a perfect opportunity to improve infrastructure basically "for free" as investors paid for safety, i.e. borrowing money was free (recall that in Switzerland rates not only went zero but negative).

Also Hungary's Fidesz basically spelling the end of their democracy.

I thought the McDonald's thing was Friedman?

Also that the euro is a straitjacket: tying together monetary policy in the absence of shared responsibility is a bad thing. Germany didn't want to bail out profligate Greece, Portugal, etc. Meanwhile it had benefited from the euro being weaker than it would have been without them (making German exports more attractive). In fact, shades of today (with respect to the tariff circus): Germany said, basically, "well everyone should be responsible enough to have a trade surplus", which is of course mathematically impossible because, and this is another one that stuck with me, my spending is your income and your spending is my income.

Incidentally this is why businessmen's experience is of little value to being president. Laying off a division doesn't solve anything in macroeconomic-land.

> The only two I know from him

maybe do some a bit deeper research before claiming "man who is consistently wrong"?

You are referring to a different Times columnist, writing 4 years before Krugman worked for the Times.

"In 1996, columnist Thomas Friedman came up with what is known as the Golden Arches Theory of Conflict Prevention, the notion that no two countries with McDonald's franchises have ever gone to war with each other. "

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/mcdonalds-countries-war/

"So I've had this thesis for a long time and came here to Hamburger University at McDonald's headquarters to finally test it out. The thesis is this: No two countries that both have a McDonald's have ever fought a war against each other."

Friedman, Thomas L. https://www.nytimes.com/1996/12/08/opinion/foreign-affairs-b...

Krugman is a Nobel-prize winning economist. You're referencing Thomas Friedman, who was a reasonably successful journalist before breaking into the opinion game and laying down some infamous stinkers.

He was predicting the Biden post covid economic policy was sensible and inflation would come down without there being a recession when a lot of others, especially Republicans were saying it would be a disaster in various ways.

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