Hacker News Reader

Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Are you suggesting that Nobel Prize Winner Paul Krugman is speaking out against Amazon because Hachette have drafted him for some sort of PR campaign?

View on HN

I am suggesting that Paul Krugman is speaking as a New York Times Op Ed writer whose duty is to sell newspapers, rather than as an academic.

This has been true for years.

Why is that so outrageous? Double Nobel winner Linus Pauling became a complete nutcase in later life, for example, strenuously advocating baseless and potentially destructive alternative medicine. Winning a Nobel Prize doesn't make a person immune to misbehavior.

So many Nobel winners have said or endorsed crazy shit, that some people have even created a name specifically for the phenomenon: "The Nobel Disease": http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Nobel_disease

Yes he is, and it looks like that to me as well. What's the deal with Paul Krugman being a Nobel Prize winner? [1]

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_accomplishment

Tyrannosaurs may have been tongue-in-cheek there; certainly the capitalised 'Winner' suggests so. (Relevant: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2014-04-16/paul-krugma... .)

As long as we're talking about former Enron adviser Paul Krugman, we can look up a fuller bio.

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

You mean the Paul Krugman who was chief staffer (international economics) on the Council of Economic Advisors under the Reagan Administration and was hand-picked by Martin Feldstein?

Krugman has a very full bio so you can find all sorts of things there, he hasn't hesitated to work with anyone willing to listen to his opinions and expertise.

That's the guy, yep.

http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economic-sciences/lau... quoting Wikipedia "Krugman was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (informally the Nobel Prize in Economics), the sole recipient for 2008. " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#Nobel_Memorial_Pri...

It's not intended as an appeal to accomplishment, more as a suggestion that he would have as much to lose in reputation than to gain by getting involved in such a thing if he didn't genuinely believe his position.

EDIT: I'd also suggest that as a default with the participants in this particular disagreement, anyone with self interest at heart should probably think about siding with Amazon. Jeff Bezos doesn't lose too many fights.

In the academic world Krugman-the-journalist has never had that much reputation. It was Krugman-the-academic the one who won the Nobel Memorial Prize.

You can check out some of Krugman-the-journalist's most notorious contradictions here: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman#Contradictions

People can be extremely wrong even if they were extremely right in the past. And the opposite

Clearly we don't expect his journalism to have the same level of rigour as his academic work.

That's a very different thing to any suggestion he might be part of an orchestrated PR move by Hachette which was the original implication.

You are completely right, sorry about that.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com