YouSaid · the spoken record

Paul Krugman

lines on the record: 134
first: 2020-02-14
most recent: 2020-02-14
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Well, so the subsidies don't cut off so that we have. That Medicare for all ain't going to happen not for a few years anyway. And so what we're actually going to get is something that is just a greatly enhanced version of what we managed to achieve in 2010, which is fine with me.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, that's an interesting question because the I mean, they're all workable proposals on the technicalities. Medicare for all would work. Elizabeth Warren has laid out a lot more detail about how it would be paid for than Bernie Sanders has, but something like that would work. Enhanced massively enhanced Obamacare, which is basically what Joe Biden means.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On top of it. Plus death panels, and it probably will be better, in fact, but that's a really heavy political lift. If you can start with a tabula raza. I dedicate this book to the argument with zombies to the memory of Uva Reinhardt, a healthcare economist at Princeton who helped me a lot. And Uva and his wife Mae Chung, they actually put together Taiwan's healthcare system, which is single payer. It's basically Medicare for all. And how's it working? It's working fine. But UVA himself said, look, we're not going to be able to do that in the United States. If you wanted to get there, I wouldn't start from here.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People under sixty five many of them do have private health insurance, which both means that you have a lobby interest group, but I think even more important means that you're telling people we're going to take away the insurance you now have and we're going to replace it with something different. Trust us, it'll be better.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Was that when Medicare came in? Why was it possible to go and provide government health insurance to everybody over 65? Why didn't people complain that this was taking away private insurance? The answer was that private insurers weren't interested in covering people over 65. There was never an expensive. Yeah, they're expensive and unpredictably expensive. So you are basically moving into a blank space. And the trouble, the reason that it's not so easy to just have Medicare for all is that”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, there is a, yeah, I mean, it is a peculiar thing that when people say, oh, America will never stand for government health insurance, every American sixty-five and older has government health insurance. When they say Americans won't stand for large government guarantees of income, Social Security. So we actually do have, in fact, the U.S. welfare state. It's smaller than that of other advanced countries, but not that much smaller because, in fact, we do provide healthcare and retirement income to people under 65. It's probably the people who vote, but I think the other thing that happened”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that's a big change. The top 0.01%, nobody ever thought that was important. How much money could there be up there? But the answer is now a lot. And so, yeah, so this is not, there shouldn't be any real question about that. But again, It's difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, there's a good salary to be made from the ability to say that with a straight face, and that's really what drives it. But yeah, it's quite amazing. I mean, the numbers, the official numbers show it, although we actually have a problem with many of the standard measures because they don't actually keep track of gigantic incomes because we didn't think we needed to, but now we do. Yeah, there are people out there still trying to claim that inequality hasn't gone up much. And then just say, among other things, just walk around. Look at New York City. Look at the way we live now. It just is not the same middle class country it used to be. And then we do have pretty sophisticated ways of between tax data, surveys and so on, which is... Federal Reserve's new data series? Federal Reserve.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's amazing actually to think that money matters. Monetary incentives matter, but people do good work for lots of reasons. And we've lost the notion that people might do good work because they take some pride in their work.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's the point. It turns out back in the America I grew up in again, and I'm an old conjurer here, we had, think about photos of, I always think of photos of NASA and all of these guys in short-sleeved white shirts with the pocket protector. Yeah, with the pocket protectors, all of whom are being paid not all that well, none of whom have incentive pay doing incredible things. It wasn't if we think of NASA, but the same thing was going on at the great technology companies at the time. So it's not it.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and whether that's the result of the policies enacted during the Clinton years, I don't know. It certainly is part of the issue. And there was a period when economists, some of them said, you know, good, we should pay people in stock because that gives them an incentive to perform well. But it turns out it doesn't actually work that well, partly because you get stock options, but they reset the price if the company does badly.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, 25 million, that's more than that. Anyway, but yes, so this is one of the key pieces of evidence that says that if you think that technology and globalization explains why we've gotten so unequal, explain to me how that has means that incompetent CEOs get paid as much money as they get paid.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What changed? There was a big shift in power relations. Used to be that if you paid an extravagant sum, your union would kick up. And of course the death of private sector unions has meant that that's gone away. It used to be that if you got yourself paid an enormous salary, the federal government would take a lot of it away in higher taxes. So at some level, if there was a question of shall I piss off my entire workforce in order to be able to take home in order to get paid an extra million dollars, well, if I'm only going to be able to take home $150,000 of that, I might not want to do it. If I can get take home a much larger share of it than maybe I will. So that changed. And then just a general set of norms, expectations. One thing that's clear, it's not because we have better CEOs, right? For sure. It's the same pool.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's actually quite an interesting story. It's Now CEOs have always pretty much appointed the people who decide how much that they'll be paid. So in some sense it was always a game where CEO appoints some people who have every incentive to say this guy is great, he needs to be paid in this amount. But they didn't used to exercise that power to anything like the extent that they do now.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And it colors everything. I mean, the fact that we have a society where a few people have so much money, so much influence, and also where people aren't living in the same universe. So we're socially divided, partly because we don't live at all in the same material universe, which is not the America I grew up in.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I was the first person to notice it, but it was already obvious. Yeah, a nineteen ninety two piece called The Rich, the Right and the Facts, which goes through a lot of the bad arguments that people were making against worrying about rising income inequality, all of which arguments, by the way, still being live because they're zombie ideas that won't go away. So, yeah, this was, now it's gotten substantially worse since then by modern standards. Gordon Gecko was a piker. But this is definitely...”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, they're moving to natural gas and to a lot of wind and solar. And natural gas, fracking is one of those things which turns out we're releasing a lot of greenhouse gases because of lax regulation. But if we did it right, fracking is a good transition technology because hydrocarbons, methane has a lot less carbon per BTU than coal does. And it's good for surge capacity. So we could in a rational world, we'd be using a natural gas to provide surge capacity, we'd be using renewables to provide base capacity. Some nuclear, I'm okay with that. We would be getting completely out of the coal business. We'd be shifting to electric vehicles. Fraction of a percent of GDP in terms of what it would actually do to growth, but of course not under current management.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh no, more so at this point. I mean, at the moment, Cole is losing the battle against solar and wind just on pure cost grounds. And you have the Trump administration trying desperately to force people to burn coal.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure if that's simple, but yeah, there's a lot, it's not linear, it's not just that every place gets two degrees warmer. It is that a lot of stuff happens in addition to that. And yeah, and it really, really, it's quite terrifying and really I talk in the book about zombie ideas. Fossil fuels is basically a zombie sector. We shouldn't be phasing out fossil fuels entirely quite quickly. And in fact, we have the technology to do that. So if we had any kind of realistic pricing, we wouldn't be digging coal, we wouldn't be doing a little bit of fuel. Is there every bit of salt?”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so yeah, if you really want to feel depressed, look at Australia, where on the one hand you can see what the shape of things to come in terms of disaster, and you can also see politically how hard it is to do the right thing.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's a place which is really on the, as it happens, they happen to be right at sort of the leading edge of disaster if the continent is burning, but they have, like us, they have people who have an ideological opposition to any form of government action. They have powerful fossil fuel interests.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, you know, that's the last resort. I'm not going to rule it out. But there's enormous problems if you start to think about that because anything you do that is actually geoengineering is it's going to have very uneven impacts. cause worsening of the climate in some places, it'll be very uneven. So if you're Upper Lower Slavistan, and turns out that the United States and the European Union are planning a project of geoengineering that just happens as a small side effect that's going to turn your country into a desert. Are we going to deal with the political fallout of that? I mean, it's better than total doom, but it's really not the route we want to go down.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. Yeah. So it's good science. It's real science and it's scary as hell. And the thing about it also as an issue is it happens to be something we know how to deal with. A mixture of public investment in new technologies plus putting a price on carbon, it would make an enormous difference and technology is our friend here. Renewable technology has made enormous advances, electricity. Electricity. So all the ingredients are in place for solving this existential threat, except that we have the need.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And that is, you know, we're on track to really catastrophic outcomes. It's the climate models have been surprisingly accurate so far.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's a big statement. Yeah. Because if you make the planet unlivable or large portions of the planet unlivable, that I was about to say trumps everything else.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, although I'm not entirely sure about the current governing party in Australia, but yes. But yes, this is really, those are enough to go on. There are other zombies out there, but those are the two really big ones.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's right. The belief that it's a hoax, or at least that it's not really serious, or anyway, there's nothing we can do about it, that's as the evidence keeps on piling in and as the consequences start to show, the fact that that is still, I mean, 60% of Republicans in Congress are climate deniers. They deny that climate change is happening at all.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, turns out we've had an erroneous napkin, and it has never once happened. So that's the one in terms of our political life matter.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is really great. The climate is really weird. The climate feels like whales and they still take fiestas. But there's a lot of great stuff. I've been around a fair bit of Spain.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, but it's a very loose thing, but they advertise my books on the sides of buses in Spain for some reason. Really? Yeah. And Spanish language edition came out the same day as the English edition.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Too far to fly. Yeah. Although I'm actually doing London and Madrid because I'm big in Spain for some very peculiar reason. I'm big in Spain. Aren't you afraid?”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can't not laugh. No, we did that. That was fine. I'm not a spring chicken anymore, so I'm not doing the crazy change cities every day. I coast the country.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I'm just in the early stages, as we sit here, I've just done two events so far. Actually, Samantha B in New York. She's so funny, isn't she? Yeah. And then Mark Zandy in Philadelphia, who was not quite as funny, but was also really good. Right.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, the Hoover Institute is a peculiar thing within Stanford. It's an odd thing. It's not actually the, and Stanford is a mix ideologically, and Hoover is this independent entity really within it. So, yeah. So what can you say? No, definitely. I mean, Bernanke hired me at Princeton and then actually promptly left for the Fed, but still. But Princeton was a hotbed of people who worried about Japan because we thought that Japan's problems were a possible omen for the rest of us, and that turned out to be exactly right.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, Yeah, it's actually Bob Hull came up with that one, but it's, it turns out that the places that sort of kept the memory of Keynes alive tended to be places like MIT and Yale and Princeton, and the places that forgot all about it tended to be places like Chicago and Minnesota and Carnegie. And so it just so happens that places that I would say maintained a fairly realistic view of how macroeconomics works that were willing to actually look at the facts and not insist on the perfection of their models tended to be places that were on the coasts of the US as opposed to in the middle.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So there was something political about it, but also we have these beautiful models, the model of an efficient market, efficient financial market where asset prices are always right, is gorgeous. It's aesthetically pleasing. It feels great to play with it. Happens not to be true, but it's a huge lure for the profession. And then after the crisis, it turned out also that the years and years of railing against Keynesian economics as being too ad hoc and so on had led to a lot of people just not actually understanding. You know, if we'd had the financial crisis in 1970 instead of in 2008, we would have had a much better policy response because it was unfortunately the evolution of the economics profession in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s took us away from understanding what we needed to understand. In the aftermath of 2008.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and then post crisis, many of them were extremely critical of fiscal stimulus, even though they should have known better. And what happened there, so this is academic economics to a large extent, what happened there was that, look, partly its ideology. It was a kind of conservatism that the economics profession is kind of center-right on average.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Okay, so that actually at some level prediction predictions are hard, especially about the future. And failing to see the financial crisis, I think that people should have seen the housing bubble, because that seemed pretty obvious. But that's not the major sin. The major sin was that a substantial number. Of economists enthusiastically embraced financial deregulation before the crisis and at least”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. So that may change, but for now, still it's a place where you can have honest arguments. And of course, within the Democratic Party, there's serious discussion. There's no question that there were real debates about the shape of stimulus or the TPP or whatever where you were having. But it's true that half the political spectrum is just a complete dead zone for actual debate.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, across party lines, you can't. I mean, you can't. It's just off the now. Not everything is party politics. If we want to talk about monetary policy, the Federal Reserve is still a zone of actual discussion and relatively non-politicized, although Trump is trying to put some”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, two things happened. One is I changed jobs. So, what you want to write if you're writing working papers and publishing an academic journal is a very different from what you want to write if you're writing columns for the New York Times. But also The world changed, and in particular the Republican Party changed. So the Republican Party of the 1980s was still a fairly diverse group, and while there were some voodoo economics types, and we were still in some, to some degree, in a space where we were having real arguments about real issues, today it's a monolithic, it's been completely taken over by zombies that have eaten the party's brains. So actually just saying things that are true, just saying, you know, I'm not going to, I'm not going to give credence to stuff that's obviously false, is a partisan act. And since you're going to be doing that, you might as well try and make that case.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, no, Toma, they were a fair number of strange people, even in the Reagan administration. I mean, some of the people I dealt with, I mean, I dealt with people, economics people at the National Security Council who were crazy. And I thought, well, but this is not their real thing. I'm sure the actual security people are better. Then along came Iran-Contra, and it turned out, no, they were all crazy. One of the things about where we are now is that each successive Republican president is managing to make his predecessor look good by comparison.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Although he was a conservative, he was reasonable and on any internal debate within the Reagan administration. I always was happy to back Marty's side of that debate. But it was interesting. I mean, it was partially. I hope I did some good, but it was also a little bit of tourism. Got to see government from the inside.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, the senior domestic staffer was a guy, Larry Summers. Don't know what happened to him. So yeah, I mean, it was high-level but technical position. I mean, I was already, I was a registered Democrat, as was Larry, but willing to work, and my job did not require that I be in public defending positions. And, of course, being at the Reagan administration, although Marty”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, that was a sub political level just below. Your staffer. I was the senior international economic staffer at the Council of Economic Advisors. So no Senate approved.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I mean, Keynesians came in thinking that the multiplier, the impact on GDP of a $1 cut in government spending would be around $1.5. And after we had five years or so of hard evidence, it turns out that the multiplier is 1.5. I mean, it wasn't just the quality. Even the quantitative stuff was dead on.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't remember whether he used that. But anyway, and sure. Yeah, I think if you take it as a whole, in fact, look, the five years or so after the financial crisis were in a peculiar way. They were glory days because the models worked. People like me who had an updated, modernized, but still fundamentally Keynesian approach to things made predictions about what would happen to interest rates to inflation, what the effects of austerity policies would be that all came out right and all the very serious people who said something different turned out to be wrong.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, it's a bit of a compliment. And, you know, in terms of getting, now, if you never make a mistake, if you never get something wrong, then you're not taking enough risks. But of course, if you're in a position like mine where there are people, you know, I am paranoid, but there are, in fact, also people out to get me.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so, well, but that's part of why do zombie ideas persist? Well, because there's a network, there's money behind it. I mean, there used to be a guy at National Review whose full-time job was basically to stalk me, you know, he wrote more blog posts attacking my columns than I wrote columns. And so there's a whole industry. They go after lots of people, but I seem to be a particular favorite.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah. I retracted that call and said that Trump was going to run bigger deficits. That was probably going to provide some stimulus.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source