Um premio Nobel tambem pode ser desonesto intelectualmente

Eu comecei a ler Paul Krugman pelos seus livros de economia, e o achava um economista razoável, mesmo inventivo.
Logo em seguida ele começou a escrever para o New York Times, em algum momento do final dos anos 1990. Achei seus artigos mais políticos do que econômicos, mas ainda assim continuei a ler.
Desde o começo da era Bush -- que, reconheçamos, não é exatamente uma sumidade em economia -- passei a constatar que os artigos de Krugman no NYT eram inacreditavelmente politizados para um economista digno desse nome.
Ele nunca retrocedeu, mesmo depois de ter ganho o prêmio Nobel.
Seus artigos mais recentes são inacreditavelmente desonestos, no plano intelectual.
Não sou o único a achar isso, como prova este blogueiro e um ex-economista chefe do FMI.

Krugman criticism from Rajan
Super-Economy
Kurdish-Swedish perspectives on the American Economy
September 20, 2010

Paul Krugman is very smart, tremendously well-informed and a skilled writer. But he lacks wisdom, judgment and character. Thus he has become not only partisan, but also exceptionally dishonest as a debater.

There is a professional ethic among economists to be intellectually honest in debates. Krugman keeps violating this rule, with articles heavy on ad-hominem personal attacks, straw-man misrepresentations of the claims of his opponent, a refusal to ever admit that he is wrong, and ignoring fact and logic whenever it suits him just to appear stronger in the debate.

Everything is about maximizing the short run argument in favor of the policies that Krugman favors, rather than finding out the truth, which is what economists are supposedly supposed to do.

For example Krugman pretends that European policies do not harm economic performance by looking at growth rates, despite the fact that he knows perfectly well that established economic theory predicts that the costs of policies that dampen economic activity appear as different levels of output, not growth paths.

Krugman's audience are unsophisticated non-trained economists, which makes all his violations of the academic rule of conduct worse.

When the policies pushed by Krugman did worse than he promised, he does not update his views. He just becomes even louder, claiming that the lack of success of Krugmaonomics just proves we need more of the exact same Krugman-style economics.

Imagine Krugman's reaction if the Bush administration people argued that the failure of their foreign policy and economic policy just proves we need more of the exact same recipe.

One of Krugman's dubious and partisan claims is that government policies to increase home ownership among poor americans and minorities had nothing to do with the sub prime-mortgage bubble. Here star Raghuram Rajan, a University of Chicago professor takes Krugman to task. Read it carefully.

If I understand the history involved correctly, the government sponsored enterprises that we have all come to know and love in the last few years invented sub-prime mortgage backed securities (MBS), which gives them a part of the blame of the crisis even if they had done nothing after this (which they did).

So, go read it all. It´s good for you.

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Transcrevo apenas o início e o final do artigo de Rajan.
Leiam a integralidade neste link.

Reviewing Krugman
Fault Lines Official Blog, September 16

Paul Krugman and Robin Wells caricature my recent book Fault Lines[i] in an article in the New York Review of Books.[ii] The article, and their criticism, however, do have a lot to say about Krugman’s policy views (for simplicity, I will say “Krugman” and “he” instead of “Krugman and Wells” and “they”) which I have disagreed with in the past. Rather than focus on the innuendo about my motives and beliefs in the review, let me focus on differences of substance. I will return to why I believe Krugman writes the way he does only at the end.

First, Krugman starts with a diatribe on why so many economists are “asking how we got into this mess rather than telling us how to get out of it.” Krugman apparently believes that his standard response of more stimulus applies regardless of the reasons why we are in the economic downturn. Yet it is precisely because I think the policy response to the last crisis contributed to getting us into this one that it is worthwhile examining how we got into this mess, and to resist the unreflective policies that Krugman advocates.
(...)
There is also a matter of detail suggesting why we cannot only blame the foreigners. The housing bubble, as Monika Piazzesi and Martin Schneider of Stanford University have argued, was focused in the lower income segments of the market, unlike in the typical U.S. housing boom. Why did foreign money gravitate to the low income segment of the housing market? Why did past episodes when the U.S. ran large current account deficits not result in similar housing booms and busts? Could the explanation lie in U.S. policies?

My book suggests that many – bankers, regulators, governments, households, and economists among others – share the blame for the crisis. Because there are so many, the blame game is not useful. Let us try and understand what happened in order to avoid repeating it. I detail the hard choices we face in the book. While it is important to alleviate the miserable conditions of the long-term unemployed today, we also need to offer them incentives and a pathway to building the skills that are required by the jobs that are being created. Simplistic mantras like “more stimulus” are the surest way to detract us from policies that generate sustainable growth.

Finally, a note on method. Perhaps Krugman believes that by labeling other economists as politically extreme, he can undercut their credibility. In criticizing my argument that politicians pushed easy housing credit in the years leading up to the crisis, he writes, “Although Rajan is careful not to name names and attributes the blame to generic “politicians,” it is clear that Democrats are largely to blame in his worldview.” Yet if he read the book carefully, he would have seen that I do name names, arguing both President Clinton with his “Affordable Housing Mandate” (see Fault Lines, page 35) as well as President Bush with his attempt to foster an “Ownership Society” (see Fault Lines, page 37) pushed very hard to expand housing credit to the less-well-off. Indeed, I do not fault the intent of that policy, only the unintended consequences of its execution. My criticism is bipartisan throughout the book, including on the fiscal policies followed by successive administrations. Errors of this kind by an economist of Krugman’s stature are disappointing.