It really is remarkable - a hugely influential set of collective beliefs that can't pass even the most basic experimental test and seem to be held together with hand-waving, chewing gum, string, and the odd bit of self-assured disdainful academic snorting.
Why is no one calling these people out on their beliefs?
I suspect that Krugman is a little too smart to have missed a flaw the size of an aircraft carrier. That doesn't mean that I believe--or that I'm sure--that Comparative economic advantage is as suited and valid for these our times as it may have once seemed to others. But Krugman lives in these, our times, and he is typically a reliable defender of the interests of the average fellow against the wealthy elite--to whom he personally has much more objective resemblance. That means he has been able to consistently argue against his own personal and purely selfish pecuniary class interests.
So the upshot: whatever the real, valid faults of the theory of comparative economic advantage, they are probably not nearly so evident as it's being made out here.
One thing Krugman does not do is appeal to authority in an ultimate sense. His case is supported empirically (not to be confused with "infallably"), and he certainly knows that bailing-wire and chewing gum are not going to stand up to the review of his fellow economists who could and would dismantle it if it were so implausible as that, even if most of us here cannot.
I think that there is no question of the fact that the economic journals are full of contending arguments on every disputable point, including those held and defended by P. Krugman; so, we may rest assured that there are people "calling him out" as well as that he is answering them.
We can be sure of one other thing, too: there are no shortage of points on which the very best economists simply have to say, "We don't know the answer to that question; we haven't been able to solve that problem."
I'd add as others above have said or implied that there's a rather early point at which the economic problems become intimately political ones, as well. On that I've no doubt. But I really think that this fact is not lost on Drew who is also smarter than some may be giving him credit for being.
( I think) We should play more politely until Paul Krugman joins the discussion.
:^) "In such an environment it is not surprising that the ills of technology should seem curable only through the application of more technology..." John W Aldridge
