Arguing with Zombies Quotes

“And I’m with Alan Greenspan, who—surprisingly, given his libertarian roots—has repeatedly warned that growing inequality poses a threat to “democratic society.” It may take some time before we muster the political will to counter that threat. But the first step toward doing something about inequality is to abandon the 80–20 fallacy. It’s time to face up to the fact that rising inequality is driven by the giant income gains of a tiny elite, not the modest gains of college graduates.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Now that Eastern Europe is free from the alien ideology of Communism, it can return to its true historical path—fascism.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“What you need to know when talking about economics and politics is that there are three kinds of economist in modern America: liberal professional economists, conservative professional economists and professional conservative economists.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“I’m not talking about straight political bias, either liberal or conservative. Instead, I’m talking about things like false equivalence—giving two sides of a dispute equal treatment even when one is clearly telling lies. A fair number of people now refer to this as “views differ on shape of planet,” after the first column in this section, which was written during the 2000 campaign. On the rare occasions when the media don’t engage in bothsidesism, it tends to be because the Very Serious People all agree on something—which happens to be wrong.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“The answer to these questions, I’d argue, is that there are actually three major motives behind Trumpist policy, which we can label Manhood, McConnell, and Moola.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“What’s remarkable about this prospect is that the wall is an utterly stupid idea. Even if you’re bitterly opposed to immigration, legal or otherwise, spending tens of billions of dollars on an ostentatious physical barrier is neither a necessary nor an effective way to stop immigrants from coming.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“So how do people who think and behave this way respond when the public rejects their agenda? They attempt to use their power to overrule the democratic process. When Democrats threaten to win elections, they rig the voting process, as they did in Georgia. When Democrats win despite election rigging, they strip the offices Democrats win of power, as they did in Wisconsin. When Democratic policies prevail despite all of that, they use apparatchik-stuffed courts to strike down legislation on the flimsiest of grounds. As David Frum, the author of Trumpocracy, warned a year ago: “If conservatives become convinced that they cannot win democratically, they will not abandon conservatism. They will reject democracy.” That’s happening as we speak. So”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“the modern Republican Party is dominated by “movement conservatism,” a monolithic structure held together by big money—often deployed stealthily—and the closed intellectual ecosystem of Fox News and other partisan media. And the people who rise within this movement are, to a far greater degree than those on the other side, apparatchiks, political loyalists who can be counted on not to stray from the party line.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“The answer, I submit, is that the G.O.P. is an authoritarian regime in waiting. Trump himself clearly has the same instincts as the foreign dictators he so openly admires. He demands that public officials be loyal to him personally, not to the American people. He threatens political opponents with retribution—two years after the last election, he’s still leading chants of “Lock her up.” He attacks the news media as enemies of the people.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“First, if we fail to meet the challenge of climate change, with catastrophic results—which seems all too likely—it won’t be the result of an innocent failure to understand what was at stake. It will, instead, be a disaster brought on by corruption, willful ignorance, conspiracy theorizing, and intimidation.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Republicans don’t just have bad ideas; at this point, they are, necessarily, bad people.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“But climate change isn’t just killing people; it may well kill civilization.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“we’re now ruled by people who are willing to endanger civilization for the sake of political expediency, not to mention increased profits for their fossil-fuel friends. About”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“In practice, you can’t be a modern Republican in good standing unless you deny the reality of global warming, assert that it has natural causes, or insist that nothing can be done about it without destroying the economy. You also have to either accept or acquiesce in wild claims that the overwhelming evidence for climate change is a hoax, that it has been fabricated by a vast global conspiracy of scientists. Why”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“It’s increasingly clear, for example, that monopsony power is depressing wages; but that’s not all it does. Concentration of hiring among a few firms, plus things like noncompete clauses and tacit collusion that reinforce their market power, don’t just reduce your wage if you’re hired. They also reduce or eliminate your options if you’re mistreated: quit because you have an abusive boss or have problems with company policy, and you may have real trouble getting a new job.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“social democracy”—a market economy, but with a strong public social safety net and regulations that limit the range of actions businesses can take in pursuit of profit.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“I don’t mean that conservatism in general is dying. But what I and others mean by “movement conservatism,” a term I think I learned from the historian Rick Perlstein, is something more specific: an interlocking set of institutions and alliances that won elections by stoking cultural and racial anxiety but used these victories mainly to push an elitist economic agenda, meanwhile providing a support network for political and ideological loyalists.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“There are, of course, leftist radicals in America, but they don’t control the Democratic Party; rightist radicals basically are the Republican Party. There are some politicians one might describe as centrists, in the sense that their policy views broadly match public opinion—although public opinion is actually much further to the left on economic issues than is widely acknowledged. In any case, however, at this point virtually every politician one might call a centrist is a Democrat; Republican centrists have been driven out of the G.O.P. And”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“bothsidesism. It’s the insistence that whatever excesses of partisanship you may see on the right have an equivalent on the left, that the way forward to solving America’s problems is for good centrists of both parties to come together and work things out. All of this is willfully naïve.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Or consider how some states, like Kansas and Oklahoma—both of which were relatively affluent in the 1970s, but have now fallen far behind—have gone in for radical tax cuts, and ended up savaging their education systems. External forces have put them in a hole, but they’re digging it deeper.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Many of the states that have refused to expand Medicaid, even though the federal government would foot the great bulk of the bill—and would create jobs in the process—are also among America’s poorest.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Things have been falling apart on multiple fronts since the 1970s: political polarization has marched side by side with economic polarization, as income inequality has soared. And both political and economic polarization have a strong geographic dimension. On the economic side, some parts of America, mainly big coastal cities, have been getting much richer, but other parts have been left behind. On the political side, the thriving regions by and large voted for Hillary Clinton, while the lagging regions voted for Donald Trump.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“The decline of unions, which covered a quarter of private-sector workers in 1973 but only 6 percent now, may not be as obviously political. But other countries haven’t seen the same kind of decline. Canada is as unionized now as the U.S. was in 1973; in the Nordic nations unions cover two-thirds of the work force. What made America exceptional was a political environment deeply hostile to labor organizing and friendly toward union-busting employers.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Most obviously, the federal minimum wage, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by a third over the past half century, even as worker productivity has risen 150 percent. That divergence was politics, pure and simple.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“So we should reject the attempt to divert the national conversation away from soaring inequality toward the alleged moral failings of those Americans being left behind. Traditional values aren’t as crucial as social conservatives would have you believe—and, in any case, the social changes taking place in America’s working class are overwhelmingly the consequence of sharply rising inequality, not its cause.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“The basic proposition that the “Krugman calculation” was meant to convey is that income inequality has been increasing so rapidly that most families have failed to get much benefit out of long-term growth. This proposition stands. One need not take seriously the efforts by supply-siders to chop the past fifteen years into little slices, and claim the good ones while disclaiming the bad ones.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“It is a bad thing to be in a recession, and a good thing to recover, but one should never confuse the rapid growth that takes place during a recovery with an improvement in the economy’s long-term performance: once the economy is near capacity, growth is bound to slow down. Moreover, recessions and recoveries depend far more on the Federal Reserve than on the administration in power, and happen to Republicans and Democrats alike.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“Krugman calculation” that 70 percent of the rise in average family income has gone to the top 1 percent of families.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“But public opinion surveys show overwhelming support for raising taxes on the rich. One recent poll even found that 45 percent of self-identified Republicans support Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s suggestion of a top rate of 70 percent.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future

“If reports about a candidate talk about how something “raises questions,” creates “shadows,” or anything similar, be aware that these are all too often weasel words used to create the impression of wrongdoing out of thin air.”
― Paul Krugman, Arguing with Zombies: Economics, Politics, and the Fight for a Better Future