[Futurebot]

Your first link is a known biased source.

Your second one doesn't undermine the case; it mainly discusses that tweaks are needed, not that the social democratic system doesn't work as you've implied. No one is arguing that the numbers never need to change; the entire discussion about the US is that the numbers need to change (in the other direction.)

As far as whether those people would accept the offers, it's possible at the margin, which are the minor effects I've mentioned. The numbers matter, though. France is a particularly bad example to use considering its job performance:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/05/21/cheese-eating-jo...

[patrickaljord]

Sorry but if you are just going to dismiss my sources because they are too biased then there is no point in continuing this conversation. Not to mention the irony of following that with a Krugman article which as biased as can be.

[Futurebot]

There's little irony. Krugman has publicly changed his opinion on several items over the years, and isn't an advocacy organization or a think tank. Cato's raison d'etre is the promotion of "negative liberty" to the exclusion of virtually everything else. I regularly read Cato, and I even agree with some of their work (things like replacing the welfare state with a GBI, free speech absolutism, etc.), but I still consider them a biased source even if their views sometimes dovetail with my own.

It'd be different if you cited credible right-wing (economic) sources, but there are few left since the intellectual foundations of much of what passes for economics on that side of the divide (a chaotic Reagan-Thatcherism, a right-of-center Neoliberalism (older FT/Economist-style), or a wild-eyed goldbuggery) have fallen apart in the modern world. It's not symmetric at this juncture.

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-06-03/economics-t...

We can stop the discussion, sure. Let's do that.

[argonaut]

I consider myself center-left and I like Krugman a lot, but you can't deny he's just as biased as Cato/AEI (on the right), and the Brookings Institute (on the left). They are all biased. That being said, they are all reputable enough not to outright lie or distort. At worst they selectively omit, or their opinions/editorializations/analysis are wrong or speculative.

[Futurebot]

No way. There is absolutely no symmetry in the positions; that's part of the false equivalence narrative. Is Krugman, Baker, DeLong, Thoma perfectly unbiased? Of course not. Do I trust their lack of bias more? I do.

If someone were to argue about the less biased nature of Cowen, Hanson, or Murray, or other RW intellectual, we might have a discussion. I don't agree with those people half or more of the time, but I definitely trust them to change their minds and look at the facts, rather than having an a priori position immune to facts. I don't expect the same from Cato, and certainly not from AEI or Heritage (whom I consider far more biased than Cato.)