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CronoDAS comments on Rationality Quotes: February 2011 - Less Wrong
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-- Paul Krugman
Speaking of peculiarly boring sub-genres of science fiction, I am told that Paul Krugman was once the best and most promising of the Jedi Masters of Economics. But somehow, the forces of the Sith seduced him to the dark side, and he has since become Darth Pundit the Mindkillingly Political.
In any case, if economic statistics are bad, let them be made better. For that matter, if they're very, very good, let them be made better still, and even then nobody should treat them as the absolute truth.
He has certainly become political. It might be worth asking: Has he become any less accurate in the process? Another possibility would be that the positions taken up by the major political parties in the US at present are such that it's impossible to tell the truth about some subjects without being (perceived as) highly political.
(That's certainly happened often before. For extreme examples, consider cases where an important political movement is based on badly broken racial theories or on a specific religion.)
According to this study, he does okay, but I'm not impressed with their methodology. For some reason I can't copy/paste the relevant section of the PDF, but they discuss him explicitly on page 15. They looked at "a random sample" of his columns and television appearances (whatever that means) and found 17 predictions, of which 14 were right, 1 was wrong, and 1 was hedged.
Only 17 predictions? I thought we did science.
"He is, after all, a Nobel-prize winning economist."
I agree that that study is unimpressive, in a number of ways. (And it's comparing his accuracy with that of other pundits, rather than with that of past-Krugman.)