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« Star Wars is not a crime | Main | Negotiating options »

I hope Krugman is wearing his Ring of Mixed Metaphor Resistance

New York Times columnists aren't supposed to pick fights with each other but it seems like Thomas Friedman has rubbed Paul Krugman the wrong way recently:

[M}any, many people (I'd guess an especially large fraction of those at Davos) are eager to get away from all this deflation stuff and talk about how what they imagine to be, or wish were, the really important issues like Big Data and a world that's even flatter.

There were people like that during the Great Depression too -- dismissing as naive any notion that you could put the unemployed back to work just by spending more, and surely technological unemployment was the real story, and anyway we should be looking at the broad sweep of history and institutions, right?

A very feisty concluding paragraph too:

Finally, I know that people who airily dismiss the austerity debate and all that and demand that we focus on the long run think they're taking a brave stand; but you know, they aren't. In fact, they're ducking the truly hard issues -- because let's face it, stimulus and austerity, QE or not, are politically charged issues where taking any kind of stand will get you attacked. And since they are also important issues, pretending that they aren't is a form of moral cowardice.

By fnord12 | January 31, 2015, 12:02 AM | Liberal Outrage