CONVERGENCES FERGUSON KRUGMAN POSTS

Friday, April 27, 2018

RE KRUGMAN FERGUSON TRUMP AND THE CONVERGENT GLOBAL HOBBESIAN POOR

It is easy to criticize Trump's war on the poor, when you can then, later, doff your populist cap, and don your liberal globalist fedora, criticizing free trade critics as flatly wrong, again.

Krugman's economists' 99% ideal world is based on the same globalist free trade logic he uses to criticize Trump's 1% tax cuts, a world that ends up, either way, being solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. 

Krugman left out Hobbes' adjectives 'poor' and 'solitary', although he uses the term poor as a noun for only the Western poor, thereby begging the larger global poor convergence question, which Piketty, whom he has lauded, also begs. 

Which really makes the poor here more poor, tax cuts for the rich, which you detest, or rising (albeit pathetic) wages for the Rest, which you applaud?

You can't help some poor without hurting other poor. 

The poor here are rich by global standards. But that is really what is changing most now. 

The economist has to call it a move toward global equilibrium. Those are the requirements and constraints of his discipline.

Keynesianism had presupposed a robust domestic economy, which is now dead. 

The feud between Krugman and Ferguson some years ago was an exercise in passe economists' intramural joint shadowboxing. They are both fine with convergence. 

See my recent post re Ferguson's article in The Guardian, 2006:

Tuesday, April 24, 2018

FERGUSON'S EXPLANATION 2006 GUARDIAN FOR WHAT I HAD DESCRIBED REALLY IS CONVERGENCE

If America hasn't always, or even usually, been governed by the best and the brightest, it hasn't been so advised by economists, or journalistic pundits, ever.

This post is dedicated to David Brooks, who has claimed that we became a meritocracy around 1980!