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

“Yeah, because people look and say, well, those are tough columns, but they are. He's angry. Yeah, but I'm not angry. I'm just realistic. I mean, sometimes I'm angry, but it's a...”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And an obvious one, and actually a pretty clumsy one. So I returned to him as an example both of where the GOP has gone and how the media can go wrong.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, it wasn't really with him. I mean, I'm not a... You know me personally. I'm not a person that's particularly into grudges, personal feuds, whatever. But Paul Ryan was a symbol both of where the Republican Party has gone, but also of what's wrong with media coverage. I mean, the media equivalence required that there be serious, honest conservatives, the people who are really earnest had interesting ideas. So there was a role that someone had to fill, except there actually is nobody like that. So they promoted Paul Ryan into that role because he pretended to be that kind of person, not actually very good imitation. It was pretty obvious if you took even a few minutes reading his stuff that he was a phoney, but that wasn't what people wanted to hear. So I was out there, you know, years ahead of almost anybody else saying, hey, this guy that you're claiming it to be the intellectual leader of the Republican Party is a flat out.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, I believe that there is a Lafher curve and there is a sum tax rate beyond which you actually lose revenue, but I suspect that that tax rate is on the order of 80%. I suspect I actually estimate that the Laffer curve is not relevant for the U.S. economy. And yeah, so... Between the fact that you have a very powerful right wing which is committed to things that are not true, and the fact that the very serious people Tend to go for things that are serious but not actually serious”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, unfortunate as well. But right from the times, I only got really political during the 2000 election because it was obvious to me that then candidate George W. Bush was lying through his teeth about his policies. But it was our period of Republican ascendancy, and the Republican Party already then, although not as much now, was dominated by zombie ideas, by beliefs and the magical power of tax cuts and so on. So I was on the losing side of most of the political stuff.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, if good arguments won, then the world will be a very different place from the way it is. And look, I started writing during the 2000 election. For the times. Yes.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. And then, so if you go back to around 2005, it was shown as like flip this house. So it was the same kind of feel to it. So it just looked way out of whack. And I had an inkling, but only a partial inkling that the financial sector was out of control, that we didn't know what we were doing, that things had gotten complicated. It was only when the crisis was in full swing that it became clear that we were in much worse shape than I'd realized that more than half of the banking sector was things that weren't cold banks and therefore weren't regulated like banks. So shadow banking was a huge vulnerability. But that was one of the few times when it really seemed obvious that something was majorly out of whack and that something bad was going to happen.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just clear that on the normal metrics, things like the prices to rents that housing had gone way out of sight. And you just said, is there a good reason for this? And then if you were, there were the kind of a telltale informal signs. The dot-com bubble, I thought I had an inkling that things were going to be bad when I realized that when you went into a bar, they tended to have CNBC on in the bar instead of sports. I have a very...”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure whether that was over Trump kicking and screaming, or whether he just didn't even know that he'd done that. But anyway, that's quite the policy.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“In the US. Really? In Mexico, too. But it was kind of a pro-labor union change in policy, not big deal, but enough so that Richard Trunka of the AFL-CIO said, you know, vote for this and the Democratic Caucus voted it through because there was something in it for organized labor, which I'm sure was not.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's 95% of it is just the same thing as before. And there's a few other things. The one place where there's some significant difference is it actually gives a little bit more protection clout to labor unions, which is why Democrats voted for it.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Right. So people I know have been calling USMCA the village people who agreed. And it's... USMCA is basically NAFTA with Trump's name stuck on it. Is it?”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which means that we exaggerate, you know, compare. We spend about the same share of our income on imports and on health care. As a nation. Trade, even with the Trump tariffs, trade is sort of only, it's mostly actually pretty clean. Healthcare is a howling mess. So healthcare policy is much, much more important than trade policy. But that's not reflected in the way we talk about the world.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People love to go on about international trade because for a variety of reasons, but among other things, it sounds important. It's international. It's global. My parents once gave me a sweatshirt that said global schmoble on it. I said, what? And they said, every time you go off to a conference, we ask you what it's about, you say global schmobile. You know, people love to talk global.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Is at least the federal tax system is fairly progressive. We actually end up providing a lot of de facto aid to distressed regions. You take Kentucky, it's receiving net aid from the federal government to the tune of about 20% of GDP. So we actually do do a lot. Now it's not clear that we have anything that we can replace a fair bit of the income that's lost. We can't replace the dignity. But it's not clear that anyone knows how to do that.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now you can't have a policy to, or it's hard to have a policy to deal with every shock. What you really want is a strong safety net so that at least some basics or supplies, so at least people have the resources, among other things, the resources to move or seek different jobs, whatever. The little secret of American policy is that we actually have a lot of that. We actually have because the major social programs, Social Security Medicare, Medicaid are paid for at the federal level mostly because the tax system”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So all of a sudden, instead of employing thousands of workers to mine coal, you just blow the tops off mountains and use some shit. There it is.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, we try, and actually we've had trade adjustment assistance at various points in our history. It's never been tremendously successful. And by the way, trade is not unique. Technology does it. If you actually want to ask what happened to West Virginia, international trade, it turns out, is not an important thing for West Virginia. It's changes in the technology. Fracking and even before fracking it was mountain top removal.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Published in 2013, I think, on the China shock, that among other things written by one of my students, and to point out how much we were missing that effect.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Toys. I like furniture as a particular example because if you ask, all right, how many jobs were displaced by Chinese imports of Chinese furniture? The answer is maybe probably more than 100,000. Okay. Maybe even 200,000. But, you know, the other jobs were created, lower price to consumers, how big a deal is that. Well, if you happen to be in hickory North Carolina, which is a city that is built entirely around the furniture industry, all of a sudden for that community, it's a devastating impact. So we missed the extent to which the U.S. economy is gigantic and it's churning all the time. A million and a half people are fired every month. So you say, how much difference can this trade make? Well, the trouble is that the impacts of trade have tended to fall quite heavily on specific communities. And Maya Coppa, I didn't see that, and I really took a very good paper.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Now we tried to quantify that a little bit, and there's no question that it's a growing world trade has been some a source nowhere near the dominant source, but a source of rising inequality within the US. What we really missed, and which has been where a lot of the academic research has gotten, we missed how concentrated the negative effects are. So you take a look and you say, look, okay, we're importing a lot of stuff from China that we didn't used to import. One of the things is furniture. So we're importing lots of furniture from China.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Economists love free trade for some good reasons and some not so good reasons. Love free trade because in fact there's a lot to be set for it. It's particularly important really for smaller, poorer countries try and think about what would happen to Bangladesh without the ability to export clothing would probably literally be starving to death. So trade open markets doesn't have to be precisely free trade, but open markets are really important for a lot of the world. It's always been the case that if you did it right, you understood that while free trade generally makes all countries richer, it doesn't make everybody within the countries richer. possibly strong effects on the distribution of income.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To actually think hard. So it is a, you know, that's those are the places. Now it's gotten better, I have to say, the times now has several people writing who actually do understand some economics, don't uncritically accept stuff. We've got a whole section, the upshot, which tends to be analytical pieces from multiple disciplines. So it's better than it was, but still. So those are the biases. It's not liberal bias. It's not even actually conservative bias, although it does very serious people tend to be somewhat right of center, but it's mostly its seriousness and even-handedness on things which are in fact not serious and in fact where you shouldn't be treating equal both sides equally.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, yeah, they are impressed by think tanks, which is really a bad idea because there are think tanks and then there are think tanks and a lot of the think tanks don't actually think they're very impressed by Rich people, powerful people. So if Jamie Diamond says we have a skills gap. That must be serious, whereas Jamie Diamond is no doubt a great business person, but he doesn't know anything about macroeconomics. So it's really a real problem. On many issues, going to important people is actually the worst place to get information because they're people who have a stake in a particular point of view, or they're too busy.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The media drops its even handedness on this, so a lot of reporting on debt. It was uncritically Bulls and Simpson are great national heroes. Yeah, remember, but the whole, so it's funny that the one place where the news media really dropped the false equivalence and start saying one side is right is in fact...”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So very serious people. The phrase actually a lot of it comes from the build up to the Iraq War when all the serious people thought this was a good idea, which it wasn't, obviously. But very serious people are people who buy into what is a conventional wisdom of the time, something that important people say. And everybody thinks it's serious because all of the other serious people are saying it. And they will nod their head in no agreement. That's right. So the US debt levels are a major threat, even though it's not really true. We have a real problem of a skills gap in the workforce. So these are things. So I stalled it. I think I stole it from the blog or atreos, but it really works. These things that, and that's, by the way, where...”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Literally forbidden to use the word lie in my columns. And that's no longer true, but even so, there's a tremendous bias towards even-handedness even when the hands are not remotely even.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By and large, the media get facts right. The formal media. I mean, that's not obviously true of Breitbart or something like that, but the New York Times gets its facts right. What it doesn't do very well is it doesn't know how to handle things where there really aren't two sides to a debate. When there's a one of the very first columns I wrote back during the 2000 election said that if Bush had said that the earth was flat The headline would probably read Views differ on shape of the planet, the media are really terrible, and that's very hard to, that's a real problem when you have a Not just a highly polarized political environment, but an asymmetrically polarized political environment where”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I mean, I don't claim to be a great investor. In fact, Robin's got the better head for detail, which is important. We own a lot of selective real estate. Where we think we know something.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was true then. We have in fact gotten back in some, still, I think probably our portfolio is less equity heavy than probably the average.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That edition, that was second edition. And the financial crisis broke as we were going through pages. So we already were in galleys. And suddenly nothing in the money and banking chapter was true anymore. And so we were frantically working to revise that chapter in page of so every replacement passage had to exactly physically fill the space of the stuff it replaced. So yeah, I had a lot of stuff I had to do in Stockholm. Robin spent a large part of the time on the floor of our hotel room crawling from one set of papers to another doing the revisions. That was insane.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Thought that we could have a different kind of textbook, that people, most students come up thinking economics is this totally dry subject. And, you know, some of it is. I've got to admit that, but there's stories. So we thought we could try to write a textbook which was as much as possible story driven. It was about real-world things, and then we say, here's how economics helps you make sense of these things. And so we wrote a textbook that was different, and a lot of people like it.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Actually, yeah, so the first thing about it is that nobody writes one of those principles books except out of ignorance of how much work it's going to involve. The actual labor that's involved in producing, especially the first edition, but even the revisions is enormous, partly it's a reasonably honest way to make a living, since it is teaching.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Isaac Asimov wrote this book. I think it's 1940 or thereabouts, which are galactic empire and people use blasters and have spaceships. But actually, the science fiction-y part is the least of it. It's social science fiction. The core of the story is there's this group of mathematical social scientists, the psycho-historians who have figured out that galactic civilization is falling and have discovered that if they intervene in just the right way they can limit the period of barbarism. So it's basically social scientists save the universe. I wanted to be one of those guys. And economics was as close as I could get.”
2020-02-14 · Masters in Business · Paul Krugman on Challenging Zombie Ideas · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source