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Comment by late2part | Hacker News Reader

Krugman is a moron. Just ignore him, he'll go away soon.

I always see at least one ad hominem remark made in any thread that might relate to Krugman. I'm actually curious, as someone who is not embedded in finance or economics, what are people's detractions against this guy (who won a Nobel prize)?

A lot of it has to do with the fact that he is a mainstream economist who pointedly makes fun of the ideas promulgated by the Chicago School, Ayn Rand and the general sort of things you find at mises.org and other right wing watering holes.

I suspect most of his critics are the sort of folks who think that they would be billionaires if only their taxes were low enough and governments weren't so restrictive about things like labor laws and environmental regulations.

Yep, the problem with Krugman is that he only "makes fun" of opposing ideas (and not just in the realm of economics). As someone incapable of considering other viewpoints on their own merits and engaging them in good faith, he's not worth taking seriously as a columnist.

He's only one among many such types penning editorials for NYT.

I'd say there are three main reason, in decreasing order of legitimacy: 1) he uses his academic credentials to write a more-or-less partisan column 2) a lot of the time he can't just disagree with someone, he has to call them an idiot and corrupt as well 3) he's a keynesian and hard money supporters are loud on the internet

When he sticks to economics (his blog has a higher percentage of economic material compared to his column) he is definitely worth reading and shouldn't be dismissed with ad hominem attacks.

Partisanship accusations are what people make when they can't rebut the actual argument.

Krugman is known to throw ad hominem remarks himself + when criticizing BTC he openly advocates for government violence as fundamentally good (without mentioning that everyone involved in bitcoin are doing it voluntarily and not dragging others against their will). With that attitude this man deserves to be called names, IMO.

Citation?

"To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble." - Paul Krugman, 2002

He doesn't always give the best advice...

It did work, it killed the recession.

Had there not been CDO's threatening to take down the world economy, the credit drying up in 2008 would have been far less severe.

That said, I believe he's describing, not advising

i don't think you could possibly read that quote and think that he was advising that there be a housing bubble...

Maybe he is, but he correctly points out that "awesome transaction technology" has nothing to do with value of total monetary supply. The tech works equally well when BTC is worth $0.01 as well as $1000.

Only if there is sufficient liquidity at $0.01.

Krugman's actual objection was that there is no reason to transfer value from Bitcoin-the-technology to Bitcoin-the-currency.

Bitcoin could literally be a trillion dollar a year technology. Ten years from now there could be a trillion dollars a year of transactions flowing through servers running the exact same software that is running today.

This could be true AND it could simultaneously be true that all Bitcoins currently in existence are worth $0. Why? Someone could take the exact same technology, and start a competing "coin" -- the way dozens of people already have -- and if one of those manages to win, then the "original" Bitcoins are worthless.

The technology could succeed while the currency fails.

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