“I want to say something to a very special group of people, our Jewish friends and neighbors. You have had to live in fear for months now with concerns we will have a prime minister who trafficked in anti-Jewish rhetoric and embraced anti-Jewish terrorists. You should never have to live in fear again. Today we celebrate a victory for the British people. They comprehensively rejected Jeremy Corbyn’s politics.” – said Leading Conservative Party minister Michael Gove on Friday morning following Boris Johnson’s Conservative Party’s outstanding victory over Jeremy Corbin’s Labour Party in the December 12th election.
Paul Robin Krugman, aka Paul Krugman, is an American economist, Professor of Economics and International Affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, Centenary Professor at the London School of Economics, and an op-ed columnist for The New York Times. – (Source: Flickr)
Donald Trump Is Bad for the Jews Paul Krugman New York Times, December 9, 2019
On Saturday, Donald Trump gave a speech to the Israeli American Council in which he asserted that many in his audience were “not nice people at all,” but that “you have to vote for me” because Democrats would raise their taxes. Was he peddling an anti-Semitic stereotype, portraying Jews as money-grubbing types who care only about their wealth? Of course, he was. You might possibly make excuses for his remarks if they were an isolated instance, but in fact Trump has done this sort of thing many times, for example asserting in 2015 that Jews weren’t supporting him because he wasn’t accepting their money and “you want to control your politicians.”Well, it’s not news that Trump’s bigotry isn’t restricted to blacks and immigrants. What is interesting, however, is that this particular anti-Semitic cliché — that Jews are greedy, and that their political behavior is especially driven by their financial interests — is empirically dead wrong. In fact, American Jews are much more liberal than you might expect given their economic situation.This is, by the way, a distinction they share with some other groups, especially Asian-Americans. More on that in a minute. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________New York Times (Mis-)Plays the “Antisemitism” Card Frederick Krantz CIJR, Dec. 13, 2019 Paul Krugman, “Donald Trump Is Bad for the Jews” [New York Times, Dec. 9,2019] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/12/09/opinion/donald-trump manages to distort and misrepresent the position and record of the most pro-Israel President in recent history. Trump’s nature—egocentric, blunt, spontaneous-, and his often-apposite tweets and sense of humor, unfortunately sometimes lend themselves to this kind of thing. Still, his remarkable pro-Israel policy record, emotional bond with Israel and the Jewish people, and pride in his Jewish son-in-law, daughter, and grandchildren, were plainly evident in his recent Israeli-American Council conference statement in Florida. Reading only Krugman’s distorted NYT article, one would have been wholly unaware of these facts. And this simple ignoring of facts confirms the point the Trump made, only half in jest, that despite his record, a large percentage of liberal American Jewry, unable to overcome their positive Democratic faith, will probably not vote for him in 2020. Krugman completely elides the fact of broad and deep support for Trump among Orthodox and Zionist American Jews, and the almost across-the-board enthusiasm about him in Israel. Similarly, and although he is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, Krugman—an early anti-Trumper who had predicted a stock-market crash were he to be elected President–also ignores the fact of the best American economy in fifty years, and record high stock-market indices. (Increasingly large percentages of American black and Hispanic voters, whose employment rates are setting all-time records, are now supporting Trump, a development which may yet affect the “Jewish vote” (recent polls indicate that support for him among Orthodox Jews has risen from 46 to 89%). Trump has of course been forthrightly pro-Israel, reversing prior American refusal to recognize Jerusalem as Israel’s undivided capital, and affirming the strategic Golan Heights as an integral part of Israel. Similarly, calling out Palestinian Arab intransigence, he has broken with the outworn, and unimplementable, “two-state solution” policy, recognized the legitimacy of Israeli settlements in Judea and Samaria, and set aside the dangerous and damaging Iranian JCPOA nuclear treaty. Here Krugman is also disingenuous, not hesitating to slip into his “Trump is Bad for the Jews” mantra an anti-Netanyahu, anti-Likud, and implicitly pro-Palestinian Arab remark–“I think it was an Israeli friend who first told me that Judaism, unlike other faiths, has rarely been a religion of oppression—but that the reason was simply lack of opportunity, a diagnosis that recent Israeli governments seem determined to confirm [my italics].” This snide aside, with its evident ignorance about Judaism, and one-sided attribution of “oppression” to Israel, is redolent of the ubiquitous Holocaust propaganda “inversion”, which turns Jews into Nazi “occupiers”, and Palestinian Arabs into innocent and suffering “Jews”. Or again, concerning what he terms “Hate-laced identity politics”, he avers that “The Trump administration is, beyond any reasonable doubt. an anti-democratic, white nationalist regime. And while it is not (yet) explicitly anti-Semitic, many of its allies are: ‘Jews will not replace us’ chanted the ‘very fine people‘ carrying torches in Charlottesville, Va.”. Aside from the unsubstantiated innuendos here, Krugman repeats the old Charlottesville canard—but, as has now been clearly ascertained, Trump was referring there not to the rioters, whom he explicitly condemned, but to people who are neither racists nor white supremacists, but are genuinely concerned by the politically correct and ahistorical desecration of long-standing historical monuments. Like so much “progressive” social and political “commentary”, this piece—in its omissions, distortions, and half-truths—is a parody of itself. It expresses, in its evident obsessive dislike of and disdain for Trump, the very nastiness of the “antisemitism” it grotesquely attributes to him. (One wonders what Krugman might make of Trump’s recent Hannukah season ceremony in At the White House, adopting as Federal policy the International Holocaust Remembrance Association’s broad definition of antisemitism. Defining rejection of the legitimacy of Israel as a Jewish state as antisemitic, Israel advocacy is now protected as an expression of the human rights of Jewish students and pro-Israel speakers on campus) Finally, that Krugman’s disingenuous “defense” of “my ethnic group” [sic] from Trump’s presumed predations, appears in the New York Times, is especially distasteful. To publish such a piece in the “paper of record” calls up echoes of its past, when it was controlled editorially by classical Reform-assimilationist anti-Zionist Jewish publishers, and which today expresses a clearly left-liberal stance towards Israel, with its recent spate of literally antisemitic cartoons, and its all-out support for the absurd current anti-Trump impeachment charade Finally, perhaps the most disturbing aspect of what is surely a concrete example of “fake news” is Krugman’s crashing silence on the real source of current political antisemitism. This is the “progressive”–socialist gaggle of Democratic Presidential candidates and their “anti-Zionist” supporters. Indeed, expressions of the revived “longest hatred” are found today not in the White House, but in the halls of Congress, among the Democratic Presidential hopefuls who refused to attend the AIPAC convention, and who enthusiastically accept the support of known “anti-Zionists” (Tlaib, Omar, AOC). And they include a leading “Jewish” candidate and critic of Israel, Bernie Sanders, who actually employs an infamous antisemite, Linda Sarsour, as an “adviser”. What is finally really scary about Paul Krugman, Prize-winning economist and proudly liberal New York Times op ed writer, is that despite the mounting evidence, and danger, to the contrary, he continues resolutely to insist that “Only one brand of anti-Semitism scares me—and it’s not on the left”. (Prof. Krantz is Director of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, and Editor of its Daily Isranet Briefing.) ______________________________________________________Depressing Krugnorance Reuven Brenner International Economy, July/August 1999
What strikes one in this new, slim, book – The Return of Depression Economics – is the studio picture falling out of it. It shows the author, Mr. Paul Krugman, an MIT-based economist, resembling Mandy Patinkin of Yentl days, but with an insecure look. Maybe he is preparing himself for another career.
Judging by this book, he should.
In all fairness, Krugman himself admits by page three that he has “a private theory, based on no evidence whatsoever,” about the sudden fall of the Soviet Union. The rest of the booklet follows this same line of reasoning: Krugman presents his vague, short thoughts, and keeps them floating freely, unanchored even in simple, well-known facts.
The book pretends to provide insights into the financial crises of the last two years and suggests solutions. Krugman thinks that overvalued currencies and random, self-fulfilling panics brought about the crises. His solutions are lasting inflation (in the 3-4% percent range), devaluation, tariffs and capital controls. Briefly: Wise politicians and even wiser economists know, according to Krugman, how to compensate for the masses’ unpredictable mood swings, as well as how to price currencies.
Krugman starts his book summarizing a wonderful little article, published in 1978, by Joan and Richard Sweeney, titled “Monetary Theory and the Great Capitol Hill Babysitting Co-op Crisis.” Since Krugman derives his monetary philosophy from this piece, it must be summarized, because he misunderstands the story entirely. His mistakes then show up in the rest of the book whenever he deals with currency issues. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
Paul Krugman’s Pretense of Economic Knowledge Kevin D. Williamson National Review, May 12, 2015
It is wrong to call economics “the dismal science.” Dismal, yes; science, no.
Econometrics and mathematical modeling are enormously valuable, but they also contribute to the pretense of knowledge, which is a lethal intellectual epidemic to which the scientist manqués of the economics world are especially vulnerable. There are competing factions and schools of thought within the proper sciences, of course, but the outsize role played by economic schools — from New Keynesians to Austrians — is evidence of the corrupting influence of politics, which distorts economic analysis in both its weak form (simple political affiliation) and its strong form (servile political advocacy).
And as with the scientific case of freelancing gadflies such as Neil deGrasse Tyson, economists damage their individual and corporate credibility the farther they stray from their fields of genuine expertise. It is no surprise that, e.g., purported science guy Bill Nye until recently held foolish and ignorant views on genetically modified crops, views of which he has, to his credit, repented. Nye, who holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering, is more a science enthusiast than a scientist, much less a scientist with any particular expertise in agricultural genetics. There is no reason to suppose that he has particularly well-informed views on any given question, and the temptations of cultural affiliation — the people who are terrified of GMOs are many of the same people who care deeply about climate change and the contents of Texas high-school biology curricula — often lead us astray.
Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist who used to be a famous economist, is on his way to becoming the Bill Nye of the economics world — minus the admirable frankness about changing his mind. Niall Ferguson, a Harvard history professor affiliated with the Hoover Institution, took to the pages of the Financial Times to woodshed Krugman over his relentlessly hostile account of the United Kingdom’s economic situation under the Conservatives. Krugman has a bug up his parietal lobe about so-called austerity policies and insisted that the United Kingdom was hobbling itself by failing to follow his own pump-priming preferences. Ferguson sets the record straight… [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.] ______________________________________________________
Paul Krugman’s Predictions about “Austerity” Aren’t Aging Well: John Phelan, Foundation for Economic Education, June 7, 2019 — In August 2008, economist Olivier J. Blanchard published a paper titled “The State of Macro.” In it, he wrote that “For a long while after the explosion of macroeconomics in the 1970s, the field looked like a battlefield. Over time however, largely because facts do not go away, a largely shared vision both of fluctuations and of methodology has emerged.”
The Conscience of a Liberal: Matthew Yglesias, The Atlantic, Oct. 21, 2007 — David Kennedy got the assignment to review Paul Krugman’s The Conscience of a Liberal and he didn’t like it very much.
Fact Checking Paul Krugman’s Claim To Be “Right About Everything”: Andrew Syrios, Mises Institute, June 10, 2015 — But can the debate really be as one-sided as I portray it? Well, look at the results: again and again, people on the opposite side prove to have used bad logic, bad data, the wrong historical analogies, or all of the above. I’m Krugtron the Invincible! ______________________________________________________ This week’s French-language Briefing is titled
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