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Comment by rverghes | Hacker News Reader

5 days ago Paul Krugman said the problem was that our rich were flaunting their wealth.[1] Barely a week later, the problem is that the rich are invisible.

[1] http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/having-it-and-fl...

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You should read the article you linked to more carefully. Krugman does not criticize the flaunting of wealth at all. He is responding to an article from David Brooks who criticized the flaunting of wealth.

Krugman's point is that David Brooks' criticism of the flaunting of wealth does not jibe with Brooks opposition of progressive taxation.

Whatever else you may think of Krugman, he is a pretty smart guy and if you want to try to find flaws in his arguments you should try to pay careful attention to what he actually says.

First he says:

"...for many of the rich flaunting is what it’s all about...So it’s largely about display..."

Then he says:

"...the truly rich are so removed from ordinary people’s lives that we never see what they have."

So I guess Krugman thinks that the rich flaunt their wealth for no reason, since ordinary people never see it.

They flaunt it for other rich people to see. They don't care about the rest.

Who cares what the rich see?

Krugman is just a ridiculous hack.

It only looks inconsistent if you only read the headlines. Krugman has had a consistent position on income inequality for years. He never says "the problem was that our rich were flaunting their wealth."

>"5 days ago Paul Krugman said the problem was that our rich were flaunting their wealth."

Except he didn't say that.

It seems you couldn't be bothered to spend 2 minutes reading ~500 words and decided to compare on headline alone.

Paul Krugman received a Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008. It is rather unlikely you can find contradictions in his arguments... http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped...

There are plenty of brilliant Nobel prize laureates who make elementary mistakes on a regular basis. Tyler Cowen and Milton Friedman to name two. So it's not inconceivable that Krugman made a basic mistake here. (He didn't in this case, but not because he's too smart to make mistakes.)

Because he and NYTimes do not wish to actually discuss the issues. To wit, yesterday's Sunday Times had a full court press vilification spread on Putin and his friends. Do not recall seeing the same treatment for related matter in this USA. Same with front page treatment of protests in Cairo vs. complete silence Washington DC (post 2001).

So the reasonable question is why do you expect consistency from an apparatus of the power elite beyond consistently covering their own dirty tracks?

If Putin is indeed immensely rich then it's difficult to see how he could accumulate such wealth other than by corrruption. If corruption is responsible for some folk's wealth in the US, the appropropriate agencies should get to work and nail them and one has a reasonable expectation that due process will occur. Dream on with Putin. Isn't that the difference between Russia and the US?

The rich flaunt their wealth among other rich people. A lot of this really is invisible to regular folks. People watch celebrities and think that lifestyle is "rich". But the 20 hedge fund managers who each take home a billion a year make celebrities look like peons. The truly rich really are invisible.

The articles don't really disagree with each other but let's assume they do. You realize that differing opinions are a sign you're probably reading a good source of information right?

If you actually read both objectively, there is zero contradiction between the two.

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