Paul Krugman likes LOLcats

January 3, 2012 • 6:56 pm

I’m not kitten: if a Nobel Laureate in economics uses a thin excuse to put up a LOLcat picture, then the practice can’t be all bad.

Krugman and his wife also have two cats in the yard: Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein.

And he’s also a liberal and a fan of evolution. What’s not to like?

h/t: John W.

25 thoughts on “Paul Krugman likes LOLcats”

  2. I like the writing and thinking of Paul Krugman, especially his clear writing on the current economic problems. (ie: it is not a debt crisis) and use of real data to explain a bit of economic reality.

    I would not use him as an example of the field of economics though, as he is regarded as an outsider by the “Very Serious People” of economics, despite being right most of the time, and using *gasp* evidence to show it.

    1. BTW: His latest post is good advice for handling accomodationalists too.

      So Alex Tabarrok thinks I treat everyone who disagrees with me as mendacious idiots, and Tyler Cowen says that I always demonize my opponents.

      I plead innocent. I only treat people as mendacious idiots if they are mendacious idiots.

      Gold 🙂

    2. Krugman’s views might seem a bit off-consensus from an American perspective, but they are not that at all from a European perspective. Market failure, imperfect competition, imperfect information and Keynesian monetary policy effects are recognised as valuable concepts in almost all the European economics institutions that I know, though I admit that I haven’t done or read a study about it.

  3. Krugman’s first sentence, “Math is a friend of mine,” opens up the possibility of all kinds of friendships:

    Science is a friend of mine.

    Literature is a friend of mine.

  4. Yesterday he penned a column in Spain’s El País, titled “Keynes was right”. It was about the disastrous effects of spending cuts in the middle of a crisis.
    Unfortunately it seems that no one is listening. The crisis is far from over…

  5. If you want to really understand Krugman, you need to read The Age of Diminished Expectations. It was published in the early 90’s, but is still relevant today.

    I also highly recommend Pop Internationalism. It really gets down to the basics. Read it and you will cringe every time you hear the word “competativeness”.

  7. Well, the fine folks at Fox News can’t stand Krugman, so he must be doing something right (or left).

  9. Ah sweet cultural differences! In India, naming your pet cat or dog after a person would be considered a childish attempt at insulting the person (though naming your children, or even your “pet” cow won’t be).

    1. There are shades of that here in Sweden too, but that general feeling has been dis-empowered by late.

      “Time is change”, or something like that. (At least in linear time cultures.)

      1. Hinduism, the majority religion in India, is a “circular time” culture. Apparently the ancient philosopgers were so impressed by the cyclic nature of astronomical events that they decided that everything, including the history of humanity in partuclar and that of the universe in general, is “cyclical” in nature. In other others, “what is happenning now has happened before, and will happen again.”

  10. Wow, thanks for linking to that article by Paul Krugman on evolutionary theory (and its parallels to economic theory). He has obviously tried to go beyond popularizations and read the literature of evolutionary biology.

    However he is overly hard on Stephen Jay Gould — he takes too seriously John Maynard Smith’s outburst about Gould being confused and not understanding evolutionary theory. When Gould disagreed with more gradualist views, that didn’t always mean he was confused or misunderstood. He just disagreed.

  11. “In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language.”
    As usual, Krugman is right.
    As usual, reality is a bit more complex. Ideas and attitudes evolve.

    The quotation above is vintage John Kenneth Galbraith, 1978. Galbraith, the other great liberal economist of an earlier era, and a decidedly non-mathematical one. His noted economist son, James K. , has time and again been on the receiving end of Krugman’s barbs for pursuing the same approach as his father. Despite the fact that he and Krugman are in broad agreement on policy.
    From Krugman 1996 in Slate:

    Unfortunately, Maynard Smith is right, both about evolution and about economics. There are important ideas in both fields that can be expressed in plain English, and there are plenty of fools doing fancy mathematical models. But there are also important ideas that are crystal clear if you can stand algebra, and very difficult to grasp if you can’t. […]

    Alas, there is probably no way to resolve this conflict peacefully. It is possible for a very skillful writer to convey in plain English a sense of what serious economics is about, to hide the algebraic skeleton behind a more appealing façade. But that won’t appease the critics; they don’t want economics with a literary façade, they want economics with a literary core. […] The literati truly cannot be satisfied unless they get economics back from the nerds. But they can’t have it, because we nerds have the better claim.

    http://www.slate.com/articles/business/the_dismal_science/1996/10/economic_culture_wars.single.html

    Again in 2009:

    Math in economics can be extremely useful. I should know! Most of my own work over the years has relied on sometimes finicky math — I spent quite a few years of my life doing tricks with constant-elasticity-of-substitution utility functions. And the mathematical grinding served an essential function — that of clarifying thought. In the economic geography stuff, for example, I started with some vague ideas; it wasn’t until I’d managed to write down full models that the ideas came clear. After the math I was able to express most of those ideas in plain English, but it really took the math to get there, and you still can’t quite get it all without the equations.

    Nonetheless:

    And conversely, you can have great work in economics with little or no math. I can’t pull up papers now, but as I recall, Akerlof’s market for lemons had virtually no explicit math in its main exposition; yet it was transformative in its insight.
    So by all means let’s have math in economics — but as our servant, not our master.

    http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/11/mathematics-and-economics/

    And so back to John Kenneth Galbraith 1978:

    In the case of economics there are no important propositions that cannot be stated in plain language. Qualifications and refinements are numerous and of great technical complexity. These are important for separating the good students from the dolts. But in economics the refinements rarely, if ever, modify the essential and practical point. The writer who seeks to be intelligible needs to be right; he must be challenged if his argument leads to an erroneous conclusion and especially if it leads to the wrong action. But he can safely dismiss the charge that he has made the subject too easy. The truth is not difficult.
    Complexity and obscurity have professional value—they are the academic equivalents of apprenticeship rules in the building trades. They exclude the outsiders, keep down the competition, preserve the image of a privileged or priestly class. The man who makes things clear is a scab. He is criticized less for his clarity than for his treachery.
    Additionally, and especially in the social sciences, much unclear writing is based on unclear or incomplete thought. It is possible with safety to be technically obscure about something you haven’t thought out. It is impossible to be wholly clear on something you do not understand. Clarity thus exposes flaws in the thought.

    http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1978/03/writing-typing-and-economics/5165/?single_page=true

    Incidentally, he above piece, from The Atlantic, is derived from a Harvard speech with a priceless title:

    Writing, Typing, Alcohol and Coca Cola.

    1. Re the fun title, you are triggering the Hitchens-formed hole in my brain again. Sigh.

  13. I love Paul Krugman. And he was good enoug to call out those Freakonomics idiots, calling their articles on global warming “unforgivably wrong”.

    *Sigh*.

  14. Krugman also makes a comment about economics that also applies to the New Atheists:

    “Second, there are people writing about economic issues who are a lot less confrontational than I am; how often do you hear about them? This is not a game, and it is also not a dinner party; you have to be clear and forceful to get heard at all.”

  15. I guess the only difference between Coyne and Krugman is the admiration of Stephen Jay Gould. Coyne thinks that two of Gould’s books are in the top five best books on evolution, whereas Krugman says that those who think that “Gould’s ideas represent the cutting edge of evolutionary theory…have an almost completely misguided view of where the field is and even of what the issues are.”

    See here:
    http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/evolute.html

    1. I think I’ve made it clear on this website that I greatly admired most of Gould’s popular writing, but am (and always was) a huge critic of punctuated equilibrium. Gould and I crossed swords in print about that several times, and I’ve highlighted some in earlier posts. I wouldn’t go so far as Krugman in imputing Gould’s missteps to an aversion to math, but I think Gould had an aversion to thinking hard about evolutionary genetics.

  16. I love how her face is hiding an extra term in Einstein’s equation. Is it a cosmological constant? Or something more exotic?

    Dark energy is indeed a mystery… perhaps polinominalz are the soluzion!

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