| HN Mirror

Are there specific things that Krugman has been wrong about that you have in mind, because he has made a number of notable good calls: he predicted that the 2009 stimulus would be too small:

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/0...

A bunch of folks predicted that QE would cause all sorts of bad things:

> We believe the Federal Reserve’s large-scale asset purchase plan (so-called “quantitative easing”) should be reconsidered and discontinued. We do not believe such a plan is necessary or advisable under current circumstances. The planned asset purchases risk currency debasement and inflation, and we do not think they will achieve the Fed’s objective of promoting employment.

* https://www.hoover.org/research/open-letter-ben-bernanke

He took the other side of that and was right. When QE2 came around, Pimco—the famous bond trading folks—predicted certain things would happen and put large amounts of money on those predictions, and again he said it was all wrong, and Pimco turned out wrong:

* https://archive.nytimes.com/krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/0...

This isn't to say he's always right. He has been wrong, but more importantly he admits when he's wrong and tries to figure out why:

> The first thing I want to say, I think most of our audience here, at least the economists, remember the big debates over QE early in the last decade, and all of the economists who predicted dangerous inflation and then refuse to admit that they've been wrong. And I don't want to be one of those guys, so I need to start out by saying that when we had our last discussion I was relaxed about the inflationary outlook and I was wrong, it turns out that inflation is coming way higher than I expected and I think the important thing on stuff like that is to try and figure out why you were wrong and learn from it. It's when you get to the why I was wrong, what's odd is it's not the simple script that I might have expected. For those who remember our earlier debate, that was centered mostly on fiscal policy, which I think is not going to be the case now and it was centered around the American rescue plan, which was a very big slug of money. And Larry was arguing, like a lot of people, that it was just way too big, that it was too much stimulus and that the economy would massively overheat. I was, I agreed that it was a lot of money, but argued that it wasn't designed as stimulus and, in fact, you know that had other purposes, and that it was likely to have low multipliers, so that there wouldn't be that much overheating. […]

* https://bcf.princeton.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/Webinar...

More generally, if you look at the people Krugman has been arguing against, they've been more wrong, more often, more longer than he probably has, pushing garbage for decades:

* https://wwnorton.com/books/9781324005018

Is there someone(s) else that should be listened to more? (Certainly not Austrians or (Friedman) Monetarists, or anyone putting forward trickle down non-sense (that's basically most folks on the political right).)