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
Quoting kcurie, "je, je, je, je."
Then I would have felt sorry for the dear Lord. The theory is correct. — Albert Einstein — When asked by a student what he would have done if Sir Arthur Eddington's famous 1919 gravitational lensing experiment, which confirmed relativity, had instead disproved it.
Double jejejeje guaranteed to evoke a violent reaction from police is to challenge their right to "define the situation." --- David Graeber citing Marc Cooper
But a mountain doesn't decide it is bored being a mountain and will be a llano for a while.
(I've got to get to work. ... To Be Continued ...)
Take inflaation's most convenient measure -- the US Consumer Price Index. How many economists agree this is a good measure? What does it include? What does it leave out? Non-experimental physical sciences can advance at a faster rate because it is clear the things they measure are fairly easily measured constants.
I have yet to touch or measure 'utility'. No raindrop believes itself responsible for the flood that follows.
I think there's a question that economists are taught not to ask, which is 'In whose experience?'
Inflation is supposedly an objective measure of - something. But it will be experienced differently on Wall St, by the middle classes, and by a poor person in New Orleans.
Which of these different experiences is considered the most relevant and important 'on aggregate, and why?
Some personal rants at Bernard Salanie's blog
Exactly.
