Despite his impressive pedigree, Paul Krugman is more of a political mouthpiece than an economist. His regular opinion pieces in the New York times or frequently abrasive and wrong.
This article is posted here to embarrass Krugman, but if you look at GDP growth over time, you'd think there should be a kink in the graph /somewhere/ to account for the economic benefits of the internet.
It's possible that growth would have been even more anaemic without the internet, but that's hard to argue from the data.
Well, you could say that the internet was not a totally unique thing in itself, but just another (big) forward step in the ever-improving telecommunications sector, which had already seen the expansion of telegraphs, radio, telephones, and so on, and would also have represented big improvements in communication capacity.
My general sense is that academic superstars who decide to opine on world events generally do slightly better than their Hollywood counterparts ... but not much
On team academia, Linus Pauling, Edward Teller, Bertrand Russell, Paul Krugman, etc. On team Hollywood, Jane Fonda, Clint Eastwood, Al Franken, Madonna, etc. Being tremendously prominent in one domain has only a loose correlation with expertise in something else quite different.
It's possible that growth would have been even more anaemic without the internet, but that's hard to argue from the data.