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Comment by fulafel | Hacker News Reader

He does have a very polemical writing style but of the New Keynesian vs Chicago school (or saltvater vs freshwater) camps his side does come out of the post-2008 crisis looking better, if you look at the predictions.

Pro-austerity camp have been on pretty weak ice recently, with the IMF admitting the big multiplier and European states (eg. Britain) doing so poorly with austerity. And now this.

And yeah, he's not really blaming Excel, just ridiculing the programming error lightly. Hw could be saying Word if it turned out some key wording had been autocorrected to an unintended meaning.

Edit: your amended discussion about austerity goes ad-hominem against Krugman ("not serious"?, he's got a Nobel, and is one of the most respected & prolific guys in the field) and is based on counterfactual claims (absence of "serious growth in last 50 years", see eg. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_regions_by_past_GDP_%28...)

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The Keynesians were never wrong. The issue is that the rich countries, especially the US, have never followed a Keynesian policy of minimal to no deficit during periods of private sector growth, They only follow Keynesian philosophy when they are in recession and they want to run high deficits then. Rather than acknowledge this, the austerity people scream out that Keynes is flawed, when in reality its the democratic tendency towards giving people low taxes and lots of services that is the problem.

Yeah which pretty much make Keynesian policy useless since it can't be implemented within a democracy.

It can if you have a balanced budget mechanism which allows tax cuts only if they are paid for, based on a broad-spectrum analysis of GDP growth rate. Not one study, but a Nate Silver like approach to measuring GDP.

Which no politician is going to vote for because it curtails their ability to be re-elected.

In the US under Clinton, the budget had surplus and government debt was reduced. See eg. http://www.factcheck.org/2008/02/the-budget-and-deficit-unde...

Same has routinely happened in many places in times of growth, eg. in northern Europe.

Yeah, but this was during the 90s, a period of growth caused by IT and finance developments. That budget surplus was a result of high economic growth, not a cause. Which, incidentally, is what the data that R/R distorted so much supports: that low growth causes high public debt, not the reverse.

Erm. I think you're agreeing with me but thought I said something about the growth period's cause? I was providing a counterexample to his claim that "rich countries, especially the US, have never followed a Keynesian policy of minimal to no deficit during periods of private sector growth".

I don't think he is agreeing with you at all. The state just spent the social security surplus instead of going into debt. If you followed Keynesian policy you would of saved the money caused by the boom.

No, this is unrelated, and false (did you read the link?).

Exactly what kind of "austerity" do you think is happening in Britain? Government spending has gone up. Saying something doesn't make it true.

Right, I forgot that part. If you look at spending, it's actually quite a challenge to see any real "austerity" going on. Spending is up and did not go down much in most of the western countries during the last years.

There are lots of references here. Everyone in the UK seems to agree they have a austerity program.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Kingdom_government_auste...

If the spending isn't going down that just means it's not working very well even for its stated purpouse, nevermind its damaging effects to the economy. More people will be falling on the social safety net programs.

See this.

http://notthetreasuryview.blogspot.co.uk/2013/01/the-austeri...

OTOH, Latvia and Estonia have both done very well with austerity.

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