Paul Krugman's Blog, page 627

O'Reilly predicted this

Memories, memories:
It also quotes O'Reilly as threatening "any woman" who complained about his advances, and as suggesting that Fox News chief Roger Ailes would "go after" enemies of the channel.
"Look at Al Franken - one day he's going to get a knock on his door and life as he's known it will change forever," the [...:]

Antidote du jour

(If Yves Smith can do it, why can't I?)

Taken 5 minutes ago at the vet's, while Doris has her liver checked ...

The Malthusian insult

So I've received a fair bit of correspondence denouncing me for saying that we have to do something about climate change. Among the various insults is the claim that I'm just another Malthus - which is interesting.
Leave aside the climate science issues. What very few people realize is that Malthus was right about most of [...:]

Climate, trade, Obama

I think the president has this wrong:
President Obama on Sunday praised the energy bill passed by the House late last week as an "extraordinary first step," but he spoke out against a provision that would impose trade penalties on countries that do not accept limits on global warming pollution.
And I also think the report gives [...:]

Heads, talking

I debate economic policy with John Taylor.

Health care is not a bowl of cherries

Or a carton of milk, or a loaf of bread.
Both George Will and Greg Mankiw basically argue that we don't need a government role because we can trust the market to work - hey, we do it for groceries, right?
Um, economists have known for 45 years - ever since Kenneth Arrow's seminal paper - that [...:]

Scary picture

Source.

Another note on short-term pseudo-trends

As I noted in my previous post, a lot of climate-change denial rests on spurious short-term comparisons: you pick a warm recent year, say 1998, and say "well, the trend has been down since then."
If you want a simple analogy to see why that's wrong, consider daily temperatures over the course of a year. Here's [...:]

Temperature trends

One of the favorite arguments of climate-change deniers is "but it was warmer in the late 90s." In fact, the odds are good that I'll get that argument from George Will on This Weak tomorrow. I basically know the answer: temperature is a noisy time series, so if you pick and choose your dates over [...:]

A thought about macroeconomics

Brad DeLong and I have been sort of tag-teaming the Great Ignorance which seems to have overtaken much of the economics profession - the "rediscovery" of old fallacies about deficit spending and interest rates, presented as if they were deep insights, the bizarre arguments presented by economists with sterling reputations.
Now, no doubt this is partly [...:]