Krugmanism

Yeah, it's David v Goliath, me taking on Krugman.  After all, who the hell am I?  But an Army of Davids can take on the Krugmans of this world.

I'll coin a label for a phenomenon which I see from Paul Krugman who happens to be a Nobel Prize winner.  The problem I have with Krugman is not the general idea, nor the concept in general.  No, it is the indiscriminate application of that idea.  To be more specific, Krugman wanted the stimulus to be much bigger and bolder.  But I think it needed to more bold than big.  I am not against stimulus per se.  I am against abuse of it.

The stimulus was already very, very big.  It was also very, very ineffective for the amount of money spent in relation to results.  For that money, we should have gotten a boom out of it.  But we still have a bust.  The stimulus was not well thought out.  Just throwing a lot of money at a problem doesn't fix it.  We now have the biggest possible example of that: 800 billion dollars and what is there to show for all this?  Hence, the term Krugmanism.   I define it as the advocacy of spending money indiscriminately on the vain hopes that by spending very large sums in such a manner, one should expect great results from it.  But such hope is vain, because such spending will not be effective if it is not well thought out.

I am creating a new label, so anyone reading this blog can see all the posts in that category just by one click.   I have used that labeling technique already.  If you see an interesting label, like "Politics Schmolitics", then click on it.  You will see all the posts with that label attached to it.  The label is visible just below the end of the post.