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Comment by shmeeed | Hacker News Reader

Paul Krugman* July 1978

*Assistant Professor, Yale University. This research was supported by a grant from the Committee to Re-Elect William Proxmire.

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In case people are missing the joke...

Willian Proxmire was a Senator from Wisconsin who was strongly opposed to government spending on basic research. He gave out "Golden Fleece" awards for studies that he thought were absurd. Unfortunately, it is very easy to make meaningful research sound ridiculous: bread mold as a cure for STDs? Pencil dust computers?

Krugman won the Noble Prize in economics and was an influential New York Time commentator for years. William Proxmire was a congressman famous for his laser focus on supposedly wasteful government spending who often dug up and denounced studies that sounded silly.

I saw the name and thought "that sounds familiar", only to realize it's the economist I've seen on social media a lot lately (e.g., he was recently interviewed by Hasan Minhaj [0]).

[0] https://youtu.be/qGxFLOw7KW8

He's also on substack:

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/

And before that, he was a columnist for the New York Times for 25 years.

https://www.nytimes.com/column/paul-krugman

And winner of the 2008 Nobel Prize in economics.

And the subject of this 2009 early-YouTube "viral" song: https://youtu.be/XOYAuk809fY?si=sFuFdmrF0cizn5W5

(Somewhat embarrassed to admit this is how I learned of Paul Krugman)

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