Product Description
Surely the Great Depression could never happen again. Or could it? Today, the tragedy of the Great Depression looks gratuitous and unnecessary: Our economists and policy makers simply have gained too much experience since then. It could never happen again. Or could it? Over the course of the last two years, six Asian economies have experienced an economic slump that bears an eerie resemblance to the Great Depression. Russia defaulted on its debt in 1998--an event t... More >>
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The reviewer ahead of me convered almost everything as to why this guy is horrible. He basically promotes big government—-which fail every time——never forget that Bill Clinton did nothing but cause massive massive infaltion by raising taxes to historic levels. Look at home prices vs real income. Every “economist” that reccomends raising taxes is simply not an economist. Economics clearly reccomends lowering taxes to extreme lower elvels as well as the other hidden taxes such as regulation compliance, laws enforcing unions, and publci services from a to z such as tax paid educaiton which is failing and no one can “opt out of”.
The Perilous Rebirth of JM Keynes, June 23, 1999
Reviewer: A reader
For one reason or another, John Maynard Keynes is still revered as the economist par excellance of the twentieth century, even though his policies of interventionism have been thoroughly discredited. Krugman nevertheless carries Keynes’s interventionist torch (a bad metaphor, I know) and advocates a rational economic order. When will clearly smart people realize — not the least of which Krugman — that a centrally planned economy can only work during wartime? The benefits of spontaneous market economies, as espoused by Hayek and Von Mises (two of the most obscenely overlooked and underrated minds of the 20th century), have been empirically proven again and again. Krugman makes me believe that we are again, sadly, on the Road to Serfdom. –This text refers to the Hardcover edition
Rating: 1 / 5
Paul Krugman has his head so far up his fundament he mistakes his flatulence for flashes of brilliance. Sadly, he has an army of similarly misinformed acolytes who bring tapers of toilet paper to his bonfire of vanities, of which this book is the chief offender.
Krugman’s inadequacies are regularly chronicled in his innumerable “corrections” in The New York Times, and in various blogs and most notably Krugman Watch and various National Review Online criticisms. As numerous as Krugman’s critics are, he needs more, for his entire approximation of thinking out loud in the public sphere deserves the contempt he inspires. He isn’t even the last great Keynesian, he is the last great Johnsonian-small `d’-`democrat, who has never met a social ill that a command and control governmental response could not remedy, especially if it employs lots of bureaucrats in a Weberian utopia of human clerical ants.
But Krugman’s cretinous weltanschauung does not for a bad book make: his smug leaden prose, however, does. For this is a horribly unreadable book in which he panders to a reader he considers as stupid as, oh, say, the average New York Times subscriber, and proceeds to make it simple for even that left-of-the median audience of the standard normal curve for intelligence. There are appreciative reviews here for Krugman making complex issues simple. But Krugman doesn’t exactly do that. Instead, he glosses over important dimensions of difficult topics by not acknowledging that other possible solutions exist, and instead props up his smarmy policies with rhetorically comforting sticks from the standard normal response of a DNC press release. I’d laugh if I weren’t choking on my own vomit from how bad a book this is.
There is a picture in modern dictionaries of intellectual dishonesty and misrepresentation of ideology as science. The example photograph is Paul Krugman, `economist.’
Rating: 1 / 5
Krugman served on the advisory board at Enron in 1999 during the Clinton Administration. During that period, Enron was getting many Ex Im bank loans rubber stamped. Enron became a regular on the Ron Brown Commerce Department flights to drum up business overseas. The flights were obviously a pay for play deal. During this period, Enron was also shoveling $3 billion or more into the Dabhol power plant in India. Enron owned 65% of the plant but it became a black hole and was one of the straws that finally broke Enron’s back.
If we are headed towards a depression as Mr. Krugman opines then it may have a lot to due with corrupt crony capitalism and fraud. Mr. Krugman should have given us more information on what he actually did at Enron. He wrote a lot of articles about the Enron fraud but he always left out how he was on an advisory board at the company.
Rating: 1 / 5
I love Paul Krugman’s column in the NY Times, but this book is a bore.
Rating: 2 / 5
Just as the return of depression economics is announced, the economies in question are all booming again! Perhaps it marks a return from the return of depression economics. The book isn’t even entertaining; I could take him being wrong if he showed even an ounce of humility. His style is insufferable!
Rating: 1 / 5