MOMMYYYY! Mr. Krugman's Scaring Me Again!

Meant to pass this along Saturday, but catching up with unread stuff, new stuff, and so on... it was a productive weekend in terms of input, but little to show for it on the blog. My brother finds Krugman's columns tedious and simplistic. I'll grant that his columns are repetitive (how many times did he warn about the liquidity trap, and how many times has he now told us that we're in that trap), and aimed at those with a basic, but only basic, understanding of economics. As it happens, that's basically where I am. Furthermore, my brother's philosophical leaning is toward Friedman; Krugman is more a disciple of Keynes. He told me last spring that Keynsian economic thought had basically been discredited- though you wouldn't know it to look at the various "stimulus packages," bailouts, and attempts to shore up credit availability that we've seen since then.

While the column I linked up front is a few days old, the issues are going to be with us for a while. One of the things that I find fascinating about economics is just how much it shares with geology. The fundamentally important ideas are actually pretty simple, but recursive feedbacks create a chaotic system that can look very confusing to someone who hasn't developed an intuitive sense of how the whole thing works (with respect to economics, I'm not there; I have to stop and think about things that initiates gloss over with "Now, obviously...). Another parallel is when someone, an expert, says "this seems likely," you pay attention. When someone says "this is what will happen," my inclination is to dismiss the person as a crank who has no idea of the limitations inherent in the discipline. When Krugman says this is what's happening, and this, this, and this are the likely consequences, it's scary.

Also wanted to pass along Krugman's blog, for those inclined to a bit more meat than one finds in his columns.