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发表于 2013-7-23 07:07:40 | 只看该作者 回帖奖励 |正序浏览 |阅读模式
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63#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-25 17:37:28 | 只看该作者
AN AMERICANpresident’s most important power is not the veto pen or the ability to launchmissiles. It is the bully pulpit. When a president speaks, the world listens.That is why Barack Obama’s credibility matters. If people do not believe whathe says, his power to shape events withers. And recent events have seriouslyshaken people’s belief in Mr Obama. At home, the chaos of his health reform hasmade it harder for him to get anything else done. Abroad, he is seen as weakand disengaged, to the frustration of America’s allies.
Not all the barbsaimed at Mr Obama are fair. Our specialreport this week on American foreign policy notes that he inherited twomiserable wars. He began his first term during the worst recession in 80 years.And the Republicans who shut down parts of the federal government last monthand flirted recklessly with default bear much of the blame for Washington’sdisarray. But the excuse that it is all someone else’s fault is wearing thin.Under Mr Obama, America seems rudderless and its power is being squandered. Amore engaged president would handle the Republicans—and the rest of the world—withmore skill.
An exchangeyou can believe in
The debacle ofObamacare has gravely weakened the president (see article).In the days before October 1st, when the online health-insurance exchangeopened, he seemed blithely unaware that anything was amiss. Using it would be“real simple”, he told voters in Maryland on September 26th; it would work the“same way you shop for a TV on Amazon”. Alas, it did not. Millions tried to logon; few succeeded. The website was never properly tested, it transpires.Although this was Mr Obama’s most important domestic reform, no one was reallyin charge. Crucial specifications were changed at the last moment. Contractorswarned that the website was not ready, but the message never reached the OvalOffice. Big government IT projects often go awry, but rarely as spectacularlyas this.
The Economist supported Obamacare when it passed Congressin 2010. We worried that the law was too complex (see article)and did too little to curb medical inflation, but it extended health insuranceto the millions of Americans who lack it. The basic idea is sound: everyonemust have insurance or pay a penalty. The cash-strapped receive big subsidies,and insurers are barred from charging more to those who are already sick. Amore modest version of this reform works quite well in Massachusetts. A manwith little interest in details and a disdain for business, Mr Obama tried toimpose a gigantic change on the whole country all at once and far too casually.
The longer ittakes to fix the website, the greater the chance that Obamacare will fail.Insurers have set their premiums on the assumption that lots of young, healthypeople would be compelled to buy their policies. But if it takes dozens ofattempts to sign up, the people who do so will be disproportionately the sickand desperate. Insurers could be stuck with a far more expensive pool ofcustomers than they were expecting, and could have no choice but to raiseprices next year. That would make Obamacare even less attractive to the young “invincibles”it needs to stay afloat.
To make mattersworse, this sorry saga has caused American voters to doubt Mr Obama’s honesty.Time after time, when selling his reform, he told voters that if they likedtheir health insurance, they could “keep that insurance. Period. End of story.”Policy wonks knew this was untrue. Mr Obama’s number-crunchers quietlypredicted that up to two-thirds of people with individual policies would beforced to change them, since the law would make many bare-bones plans illegal.But ordinary Americans took their president at his word; many were furious tolearn last month that their old policies would be cancelled.
The poisonouspolitics of health care point to another common complaint about Mr Obama: thathe gives great speeches but fails to build relationships. Abroad, he has coolrelations with foreign heads of government. The leaders of allies such asIsrael and Saudi Arabia scorn him. Europeans grumble that they are ignored whenthey want to be heard and spied on when they want to be left alone. LatinAmericans feel neglected. Mr Obama’s “pivot” to Asia has made China feelthreatened, without reassuring other Asians that America will be there in acrisis. Many doubt Mr Obama’s word—remember his “red line” over the use of chemicalweapons in Syria?—and lament his inability to get things done.
At home, heseldom schmoozes with his political opponents—or even with his own side. Pastpresidents put in far more effort to charm and bully lawmakers, business mogulsand anyone who could help them. Lyndon Johnson was famous for blackmailingcongressmen to do the right thing, which is a hard art to practise if youbarely know them. Mr Obama remains aloof—he has no regular breakfast or luncheven with the main Democrats in Congress. You cannot slap backs and twist armsif you are not in the same room.
Forget theNobel halo—and roll up your sleeves
There is apersonal tragedy in this: a talented man who too often does not follow through.As Bill Clinton is reputed to have said, Mr Obama got all the hard stuff right,“but didn’t do the easy stuff at all”. Assuming that he still has the stomachfor the fight, what can Mr Obama do to win back that lost credibility?
At home, thepriority is simply to get his health exchange fixed. His announcement last weekthat people who have lost their old insurance will be allowed to get it back isa sham: he has given insurers neither the time nor the incentive to recreatethe policies he previously ordered them to ditch. He should stop making emptypromises, get rid of the aides who filter out bad news and roll up his sleeves.
Can he get anymore done? Immigration reform is still just possible. He now says he is open totackling it piecemeal, rather than in a comprehensive bill, which raises thechance that it will happen. An even bigger prize would be a long-term fix forAmerica’s finances, with Republicans accepting some tax rises and Democratstolerating cuts to entitlements. He has little to lose: at present he will godown in history, alongside George W. Bush, as a skipper who ignored the loomingfiscal iceberg.
Fixing thoseproblems would require Mr Obama to discover both Clintonian skills oftriangulation and some Republicans who don’t hate him. As with othersecond-term presidents, foreign policy may offer more opportunity. The Obamabrand is less tarnished abroad. And American power is sold short by a lot ofpeople—including, sometimes, Mr Obama. With its matchless armed forces, a webof alliances and omnipresent soft power, the United States is still the world’sindispensable nation—as it has shown in the rescue efforts in the Philippines(see Banyan).When Mr Obama ordered a strike against Osama bin Laden, he proved that he canbe decisive; when he patiently built the case with China and Russia forimposing sanctions on Iran, he was persuasive.
So Mr Obama canget things done when he puts the effort in. Our special report lays out theopportunities that a more committed and confident president could seize. Inmany regions, such as Latin America, just a little bit of attention could yieldimpressive results. Free-trade deals could tie in allies across the Atlanticand the Pacific. Having over-reached in Asia and with a string of domesticproblems, China needs Mr Obama to keep the world stable. If Mr Obama can builda better relationship with China, he will advance both countries’ interests. Animmediate test is Iran: an interim agreement to halt its nuclear programmewould be a first step towards re-engaging America in the Middle East. But onlyif Mr Obama works at it and sells a deal to Israel and his Arab allies.
Mr Obama may notbe able to walk on water. That is now painfully clear, perhaps even to him. ButAmerica’s first black president still has it in his power to leave the OvalOffice famous for what he did, not just what he was.
1.disengaged adj.: not involved with or interested in some thing or someone, andfeeling separate from them
2. disarrary n: the state of being untidy or not organized.
3. wear thin: decrease, grow less or less interests thing.
     The excuses that it is allsomeone else’s fault is wearing thin.
4. rudderless adj: without someone to lead you or give you an aim ordirection.
5. debacle n: an event or situation about how a car, building, piece ofequipment should be made.
6. specification n: a detailed instruction about how a car, building, pieceof equipment should be made.
7.disdain n.: a complete lack of respect you show for someone or somethingbecause you think they are not important or good enough.
8. saga n: along and complicated series of events, or a description ofthis.
9. lament n.: to express feelings of great sadness about something.
10. wonk n.: someone who works hard and is serious /书呆子
11.schmooze v: to talk in a friendly way about unimportant things at asocial event, especially because you want to gain an advantage for yourselflater.
      Politicians spent much of theirtime schmoozing with contributors.
12. follow through: the things that someone does in order to complete aplan.
13.tarnish v: if an event or fact tarnished someone’s reputation, record,image, etc, it makes it worse.
14 omnipresent adj: present everywhere at all times.
1. Recent events have seriously shaken people’s belief in Mr. Obama. Athome, the chaos of his health reform has made it harder for him to get anythingelse done. Abroad, he is seen as week and disengaged, to the frustration ofAmericans allies.
2. Under Mr. Obama, America seem rudderless and its power is beingsquandered. A more engaged president would handle the Republicans-and the restof the world-with more skill.
3. The Economist supportedObamacare when it passed Congress in 2010. We worried that the law was toocomplex and did too little to curb medical inflation, but it extended  health insurance to the millions of Americanswho lacked it. The basic idea is sound: everyone must have insurance or pay apenalty. The cash-strapped receive big subsidies, and insurers are barred fromcharging more to those who are already sick. A more modest version of thisreform works quite well in Massachusetts. A man with little interest in detailsand distain for business, Mr. Obama tried to impose a gigantic change on thewhole country all at once and far too casually.
4. Abroad, he has cool relations with foreign heads of government. Theleaders of allies such as Israel and Saudi Arabian scorned him. Europeansgrumble that they are ignored when they do want to be heard and spied when theywant to left alone. Latin Americas feel neglected. Mr. Obama’s “pivot” to Asiahas made China feel threatened, without reassuring other Asians that Americawill be there in a crisis. Many doubt Mr. Obama’s word-remember his “red line”over the use of chemical weapons in syrian?-and lament his inability to getthins done.
5.There is a personal tragedy in this: a talented man who too often do notallow follow through . As Bill Clinton is reputed to have said, Mr. Obama gotall the hard stuff right, “but did not do the easy stuff at all.”
6. Immigration reform is still just possible. He says he is often totackling piece meal, rather than in a comprehensive bill, which raises thechance that it will happen.
7. Fixing those problems would require Mr. Obama to discover bothClintonian skills of triangulation and some Republicans who do not hate him.
Summary:
It seems that President Obama is a very good person and lack some hardskills to solve the urgent political stuff.
62#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-10 19:13:23 | 只看该作者
Credibility, Chutzpah and Debt
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: August 7, 2011
To understand the furor over the decision by Standard &Poor’s, the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt, you have to holdin your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictory ideas. The first isthat America is indeed no longer the stable, reliable country it once was. Thesecond is that S.& P. itself has even lower credibility; it’s the last place anyoneshould turn for judgments about our nation’s prospects.
Let’s start with S.& P.’s lack of credibility.If there’s a single word that best describes the rating agency’s decision todowngrade America, it’s chutzpah— traditionally defined by the example of the young man who kills his parents,then pleads for mercy because he’s an orphan.
America’s large budget deficit is, after all,primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financialcrisis. And S.& P., along with its sister rating agencies, played a majorrole in causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assetsthat have since turned into toxic waste.
Nor did the bad judgment stop there. Notoriously,S.& P. gave Lehman Brothers, whose collapse triggered a global panic, an Arating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the rating agency reactafter this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denying that it haddone anything wrong.
So these people are now pronouncing on thecreditworthiness of the United States of America?
Wait, it gets better. Before downgrading U.S. debt,S.& P. sent a preliminary draft of its press release to the U.S. Treasury.Officials there quickly spotted a $2 trillion error in S.& P.’scalculations. And the error was the kind of thing any budget expert should havegotten right. After discussion, S.& P. conceded that it was wrong — anddowngraded America anyway, after removing some of the economic analysis fromits report.
As I’ll explain in a minute, such budget estimatesshouldn’t be given much weight in any case. But the episode hardly inspiresconfidence in S.& P.’s judgment.
More broadly, the rating agencies have never givenus any reason to take their judgments about national solvency seriously. It’strue that defaulting nations were generally downgraded before the event. But insuch cases the rating agencies were just following the markets, which hadalready turned onthese problem debtors.
And in those rare cases where rating agencies havedowngraded countries that, like America now, still had the confidence ofinvestors, they have consistently been wrong. Consider, in particular, the caseof Japan, which S.& P. downgraded back in 2002. Well, nine years laterJapan is still able to borrow freely and cheaply. As of Friday, in fact, theinterest rate on Japanese 10-year bonds was just 1 percent.
So there is no reason to take Friday’s downgrade ofAmerica seriously. These are the last people whose judgment we should trust.
And yet America does have big problems.
These problems have very little to do withshort-term or even medium-term budget arithmetic. The U.S. government is having notrouble borrowing to cover its current deficit. It’s true that we’re buildingup debt, on which we’ll eventually have to pay interest. But if you actually dothe math, instead ofintoning big numbers in your best Dr. Evil voice, you discover that evenvery large deficits over the next few years will have remarkably little impacton U.S. fiscal sustainability.
No, what makes America look unreliable isn’t budgetmath, it’s politics. And please, let’s not have the usual declarations thatboth sides are at fault.Our problems are almost entirely one-sided — specifically, they’re caused by the rise ofan extremist right that is prepared to create repeated crises rather than givean inch on its demands.
The truth is that as far as the straight economicsgoes, America’s long-run fiscal problems shouldn’t be all that hard to fix.It’s true that an aging population and rising health care costs will, undercurrent policies, push spending up faster than tax receipts. But the UnitedStates has far higher health costs than any other advanced country, and verylow taxes by international standards. If we could move even part way towardinternational norms on both these fronts, our budget problems would be solved.
So why can’t we do that? Because we have a powerfulpolitical movement in this country that screamed “death panels” in the face of modest efforts to useMedicare funds more effectively, and preferred to risk financial catastrophe rather than agree to even apenny in additional revenues.
The real question facing America, even in purelyfiscal terms, isn’t whether we’ll trim a trillion here or a trillion there fromdeficits. It is whether the extremists now blocking any kind of responsiblepolicy can be defeated and marginalized.
1.slump : to fall or lean against something becauseyou are not strong enough to stand /(of prices, trade, business activity) fallsuddenly or greatly.
              The economic slump
2. notorious famous or well known for something bad
3. turn on: to suddenly attack someone, usingphysical violence or unpleasant words.
4. intone v: to say something slowly and clearlywithout making your voice rise and fall much as you speak
5. arithmetic n: the science of numbers involvingadding, multiplying
6. at fault: in the wrong
Let us not have the usualdeclarations that both sides are at fault.
7. orphan
8. demise n. the end or failureof an enterprise.
 This loss led to the demise of thebusiness.
1.To understand the furor overthe decision by S&P’s the rating agency, to downgrade U.S. government debt,you have to hold in your mind two seemingly (but not actually) contradictoryideas. The first is that American is indeed no longer the stable, reliable  country it once was. The second is thatS&P itself has even lower credibility; it is the last place anyone shouldturn for judgment about our nation’s prospects.
2. Let us begin with S&P’slack of credibility. If there is a single word that best describes the ratingagency’s decision to downgrade America. It is chutzpah-traditionally defined bythe example of the young man who kills his parents, then pleads for mercybecause he is an orphan.
America’s huge budget deficit is,after all, primarily the result of the economic slump that followed the 2008 financialcrisis. And S&P, along with its sister rating agencies, played major rolein causing that crisis, by giving AAA ratings to mortgage-backed assets thathave since turned into toxic waste.
Nor did bad judgment stop there.Notoriously, S&P gave Lehmann Brothers, whose collapse triggered a globalpanic, an A rating right up to the month of its demise. And how did the ratingagency react after this A-rated firm went bankrupt? By issuing a report denyingthat it had done anything wrong.
3. The United States has farhigher health costs than any other advanced country, and very low taxes byinternational standards. If we could move even part toward international normson both these fonts, our budget problems would be solved.
Summary:
The main topic in this article isthat S&P downgraded the American nation rating. Author analyzed in twoways. On one hand, using his language skill , author condemned rating agencyS&P bitterly and thoroughly. On the other hand, when talking about theAmerican national deficit. Author expressed his confidence toward nationalsolvency. He think if American can lower health cost and rise tax, make boththese parts toward to the international norm, his nation was a still a stableand reliable country and his country still can borrow money from internationalfinancial market. But the main problem blocking on the road of Americaneconomic recovery is a powerful political movement. These extremists preferredto risk financial catastrophe rather than agreed to even penny in additionalrevenues.
61#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-8 18:38:16 | 只看该作者
Confronting the Malefactors
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: October 6, 2011
There’s something happening here. What it is ain’texactly clear, but we may, at long last, be seeing the rise of a popularmovement that, unlike the Tea Party, is angry at the right people.
When the Occupy Wall Street protests began threeweeks ago, most news organizations were derisive if they deigned to mention theevents at all. For example, nine days into the protests, National Public Radiohad provided no coverage whatsoever.
It is, therefore, a testament to the passion ofthose involved that the protests not only continued but grew, eventuallybecoming too big to ignore. With unions and a growing number of Democrats nowexpressing at least qualified support for the protesters, Occupy Wall Street isstarting to look like an important event that might even eventually be seen asa turning point.
What can we say about the protests? First thingsfirst: The protesters’ indictment of Wall Street as a destructive force,economically and politically, is completely right.
A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will neverget served, has taken over much of our political debate — and, yes, I myselfhave sometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just howoutrageous the story of our economic woes really is. So, in case you’veforgotten, it was a play in three acts.
In the first act, bankers took advantage ofderegulation to run wild (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating hugebubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubbles burst — butbankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few strings attached,even as ordinary workers continued to suffer the consequences of the bankers’sins. And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning on thepeople who had saved them, throwing their support — and the wealth they stillpossessed thanks to the bailouts — behind politicians who promised to keeptheir taxes low and dismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath ofthe crisis.
Given this history, how can you not applaud theprotesters for finally taking a stand?
Now, it’s true that some of the protesters are oddlydressed or have silly-sounding slogans, which is inevitable given the opencharacter of the events. But so what? I, at least, am a lot more offended by thesight of exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth togovernment guarantees, whining that President Obama has said mean things aboutthem than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncing consumerism.
Bear in mind, too, that experience has made itpainfully clear that men in suits not only don’t have any monopoly on wisdom,they have very little wisdom to offer. When talking heads on, say, CNBC mockthe protesters as unserious, remember how many serious people assured us thatthere was no housing bubble, that Alan Greenspan was an oracle and that budgetdeficits would send interest rates soaring.
A better critique of the protests is the absence ofspecific policy demands. It would probably be helpful if protesters could agreeon at least a few main policy changes they would like to see enacted. But weshouldn’t make too much of the lack of specifics. It’s clear what kinds ofthings the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators want, and it’s really the job ofpolicy intellectuals and politicians to fill in the details.
Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historian ofsocial movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americans become acentral plank of the protests. I’ll second that, because such relief, inaddition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help the economyrecover. I’d suggest that protesters also demand infrastructure investment —not more tax cuts — to help create jobs. Neither proposal is going to becomelaw in the current political climate, but the whole point of the protests is tochange that political climate.
And there are real political opportunities here.Not, of course, for today’s Republicans, who instinctively side with thoseTheodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, forexample — who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than manymiddle-class Americans — was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare.”
But Democrats are being given what amounts to asecond chance. The Obama administration squandered a lot of potential good willearly on by adopting banker-friendly policies that failed to deliver economicrecovery even as bankers repaid the favor by turning on the president. Now,however, Mr. Obama’s party has a chance for a do-over. All it has to do is takethese protests as seriously as they deserve to be taken.
And if the protests goad some politicians into doingwhat they should have been doing all along, Occupy Wall Street will have been asmashing success.
1.devisive adj: showing that you think someone orsomething is stupid or silly.
2.testament n: proving or showing very clearly thatsomething exists or is true
3.qualified adj: limited in some way=partial.
4. indictment n law especially on official writtenstatement charging someone with criminal offence.
5.woe n: the problems and troubles affectingsomeone.
6.succumb v:to stop opposing someone or somethingthat is stronger than you, and allow them to take control.
7.plutocrat n: someone who has power because theyare rich-used to show disapproval
8.whine v: to complain in sad, annoying voice aboutsomething
9.ragtag adj: a ragtag group is not tidy or properlyorganized/底层社会
10 oracle n. a person of book that gives advice andinformation /智者
11 plank n. one of the main features or principlesof an argument
12 second v. to formally support a suggestion madeby another person in a meeting.
13 malefactor n: someone who does bad or illegalthing. /作恶者
14 dub v,: make a man a knight by touching him onthe shoulder with a sword
                Give someone a nickname
15 squander v to careless waste money, time, oropportunities.
16 smash v to break into pieces violently ornoisily, or to make something do this by dropping
               Smashing success=very good success.
17 goad v to make someone to do something byannoying or encouraging them until they do it
             Kathy goaded him into telling her what he had done.
1 The protestors’ indictment of Wall Street as adestructive force, economically and politically, is completely right.
2 A weary cynicism, a belief that justice will neverget served, has taken over much of our political debate-and, yes, I myself havesometimes succumbed. In the process, it has been easy to forget just howoutrageous the story of our economic woes really it. So, in case you haveforgotten, it was a play in three acts.
In the first act, bankers took advantage ofderegulation to run wildly (and pay themselves princely sums), inflating hugebubbles through reckless lending. In the second act, the bubble burst-butbankers were bailed out by taxpayers, with remarkably few string attached, evenas ordinary people continued to suffer the consequence of the bankers’ sins.And, in the third act, bankers showed their gratitude by turning to the peoplewho saved them, throwing their support-and the wealth they still possessed thanksto the bailouts-behind politicians who promised to keep their taxes law anddismantle the mild regulations erected in the aftermath of the crisis.
3. I, at least, am a lot more offended by the sightof exquisitely tailored plutocrats, who owe their continued wealth togovernment guarantee, whining that President Obama has said mean thing meanthings about them than I am by the sight of ragtag young people denouncingconsumerism.
4. Rich Yeselson, a veteran organizer and historianof social movements, has suggested that debt relief for working Americansbecome a central plank of the protests. I will second that, because suchrelief, in addition to serving economic justice, could do a lot to help theeconomy recovery.
5. Today’s Republicans, who instinctively side withthose Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of great wealth.” Mitt Romney, forexample- who, by the way, probably pays less of his income in taxes than manymiddle-class-was quick to condemn the protests as “class warfare!”
Summary:
Occupy Wall Street is not success. This action didnot get the real benefits for the protestors because they do not explicitlypointed their policy demands, such as debt relief of working Americans. Authorsecond this requirement and he also suggested that protestors may askgovernment to make infrastructure investment. These demands would not only getthe economic justice, but they will also do a lot in American economyrecovery.  Republicans, on the other sideof the debate, take the Theodore Roosevelt-dubbed “malefactors of greatwealth.” Some Mitt Romney even say Occupy Wall Street is one “class warfare.”
60#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-5 07:52:04 | 只看该作者
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59#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-5 07:46:37 | 只看该作者
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58#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-11-1 20:08:31 | 只看该作者
Block Those Metaphors
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Publishedecember 12, 2010
Like it or not — and I don’t — the Obama-McConnell tax-cutdeal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, islikely to pass Congress. Then what?
The deal will, without question, give the economy ashort-term boost. The prevailing view, as far as I can tell — and that includeswithin the Obama administration — is that this short-term boost is all we need.The deal, we’re told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragilerecovery time to strengthen.
I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy isn’t astalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets abit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies.
And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that theeconomic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any daynow encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when theeconomy really needs well-designed, sustained support.
The root of our current troubles lies in the debt Americanfamilies ran up during the Bush-era housing bubble. Twenty years ago, theaverage American household’s debt was 83 percent of its income; by a decadeago, that had crept up to 92 percent; but by late 2007, debts were 130 percentof income.
All this borrowing took place both because banks had abandonedany notion of sound lending and because everyone assumed that house priceswould never fall. And then the bubble burst.
What we’ve been dealing with eversince is a painful process of “deleveraging”: highly indebted Americans notonly can’t spend the way they used to, they’re having to pay down the debtsthey ran up in the bubble years. This would be fine if someone else were takingup the slack. But what’s actually happening is that some people are spendingmuch less while nobody is spending more — and this translates into a depressedeconomy and high unemployment.
What the government should be doing in this situation isspending more while the private sector is spending less, supporting employmentwhile those debts are paid down. And this government spending needs to besustained: we’re not talking about a brief burst of aid; we’re talking aboutspending that lasts long enough for households to get their debts back undercontrol. The original Obama stimulus wasn’t just too small; it was also much tooshort-lived, with much of the positive effect already gone.
It’s true that we’re making progress on deleveraging.Household debt is down to 118 percent of income, and a strong recovery wouldbring that number down further. But we’re still at least several years from thepoint at which households will be in good enough shape that the economy nolonger needs government support.
But wouldn’t it be expensive to have the governmentsupport the economy for years to come? Yes, it would — which is why the stimulusshould be done well, getting as much bang for the buck as possible.
Which brings me back to the Obama-McConnell deal. I’moften asked how I can oppose that deal given my consistent position in favor ofmore stimulus. The answer is that yes, I believe that stimulus can have majorbenefits in our current situation — but these benefits have to be weighedagainst the costs. And the tax-cut deal is likely to deliver relatively smallbenefits in return for very large costs.
The point is that while the deal will cost a lot — addingmore to federal debt than the original Obama stimulus — it’s likely to get verylittle bang for the buck. Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all;even middle-class tax cuts won’t add much to spending. And the business taxbreak will, I believe, do hardly anything to spur investment given the excesscapacity businesses already have.
The actual stimulus in the plan comes from the othermeasures, mainly unemployment benefits and the payroll tax break. And thesemeasures (a) won’t make more than a modest dent in unemployment and (b) willfade out quickly, with the good stuff going away at the end of 2011.
The question, then, is whether a year of modestly betterperformance is worth $850 billion in additional debt, plus a significantlyraised probability that those tax cuts for the rich will become permanent. AndI say no.
The Obama team obviously disagrees. As I understand it,the administration believes that all it needs is a little more time and money,that any day now the economic engine will catch and we’ll be on the road backto prosperity. I hope it’s right, but I don’t think it is.
What I expect, instead, is that we’ll be having this sameconversation all over again in 2012, with unemployment still high and the economysuffering as the good parts of the current deal go away. The White House maythink it has struck a good bargain, but I believe it’s in for a rude shock.
1. stall v. if an engine or vehicle stalls, or if youstall it, it stops  because there is notenough power or speed to keep it again.
2. sloppy adj. (of a person) careless and untidy in dress,on in the way he does things.
The sloppy repair. 马虎的修理工作
2)foolishly sentimental
I hate sloppy romantic films. 我讨厌那些庸俗伤感的电影
3. creep up: if a plant creeps, it grows or climbs up oralong a particular place.
4. slack adj.: with less business activity than usual.
5. get a bigger bang for your buck: something that gives you a good effect or a lot of valuefor the effect or many you spend on it.
6. rent in: reduction in the amount of something.
7. rude shock: a situation in which you suddenly reducesomething unpleasant.
1. I say, block those metaphors. America’s economy is nota stalled car, or is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets abit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than any metaphor implies.
   And bad metaphorsmake for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or thepatient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages police makers to settlefor sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designedsustained support.
2.The root of our current troubles lies in the debtAmerican families ran up during the Bush-Era housing bubble. Twenty years ago,the average American household’s debt was 83 percent of its income; buy adecade ago, that had crept up to 92 percent; but by late 2007, debts were 130percent of income.
All this borrowing took place both because banks hadabandoned any notion of sound lending and because everyone assumed that houseprices would never fall.
3. What we have been dealing with ever since is a painfulprocess of “delevarationing”: highly indebted Americans not only can not spendthe way they used to, they are having to pay down the debts they ran up in thebubble years. This would be fine if someone else were taking up the slack. Butwhat is actually happening is that someone are spending much less while nobodyis spending more-and this translate into a depressed economy and highunemployment.
What the government should be doing in this situation isspending more while the private sector is spending less, supporting employmentwhile those debts are paid down. And this government spending needs to besustained: we are not talking about a brief burst of aid; we are talking about spendingthat lasts long enough for households to get their debts back under control.The original Obama stimulus was not just too small; it was also much tooshort-lived, with much of the positive effect already gone.
4. A strong recovery would bring the debt down further.
5. The point is that while the deal will cost a lot-addingmore to federal debt than the original Obama stimulus-it is likely to give verylittle bang for the buck. Tax cuts for the wealthy will barely be spent at all;even middle-class tax cuts was not add much to spending. And the business taxbreak will, I believe,  do hardlyanything to spur investment given the excess capacity business already have.
The actual stimulus in the plan comes from the othermeasures, mainly unemployment benefits and the payroll tax break. And thesemeasures A won’t make more than a modest dent in unemployment and B will fadeabout quickly, with the good staff going away at the end of roll.
Summary:
Krug think the economic depression this time would last alonger period. And he reaffirmed his point of more stimulus. The reason he usedto support the claim of the sustained economy is that in 2007 average Americanhousehold’s debt is 130 percent of their income.  They not only can’t consume as they used to,but they also need to pay they ran on debt during the house bubble period.
57#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-10-31 10:05:53 | 只看该作者
Axis of Depression
ByPAUL KRUGMAN
Published:November 18, 2010
What do the government of China, the government ofGermany and the Republican Party have in common? They’re all trying to bullythe Federal Reserve into calling off its efforts to create jobs. And themotives of all three are highly suspect.
It’s not as if the Fed is doing anything radical. It’strue that the Fed normally conducts monetary policy by buying short-term U.S.government debt, whereas now, under the unhelpful name of “quantitativeeasing,” it’s buying longer-term debt. (Buying more short-term debt ispointless because the interest rate on that debt is near zero.) But BenBernanke, the Fed chairman, had it right when he protested that this is “justmonetary policy.” The Fed is trying to reduce interest rates, as it always doeswhen unemployment is high and inflation is low.
And inflation is indeed low. Core inflation — ameasure that excludes volatile food and energy prices, and is widely considereda better gauge of underlying trends than the headline number — is running atjust 0.6 percent, the lowest level ever recorded. Meanwhile, unemployment isalmost 10 percent, and long-term unemployment is worse than it has been sincethe Great Depression.
So the case for Fed action is overwhelming. In fact,the main concern reasonable people have about the Fed’s plans — a concern thatI share — is that they are likely to prove too weak, too ineffective.
But there are reasonable people — and then there’s theChina-Germany-G.O.P. axis of depression.
It’s no mystery why China and Germany are on thewarpath against the Fed. Both nations are accustomed to running huge tradesurpluses. But for some countries to run trade surpluses, others must run tradedeficits — and, for years, that has meant us. The Fed’s expansionary policies,however, have the side effect of somewhat weakening the dollar, making U.S.goods more competitive, and paving the way for a smaller U.S. deficit. And theChinese and Germans don’t want to see that happen.
For the Chinese government, by the way, attacking theFed has the additional benefit of shifting attention away from its own currencymanipulation, which keeps China’s currency artificially weak — precisely thesin China falsely accuses America of committing.
But why are Republicans joining in thisattack?
Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues seem stunned to findthemselves in the cross hairs. They thought they were acting in the spirit ofnone other than Milton Friedman, who blamed the Fed for not acting moreforcefully during the Great Depression — and who, in 1998, called on the Bankof Japan to “buy government bonds on the open market,” exactly what the Fed isnow doing.
Republicans, however, will have none of it, raisingobjections that range from the odd to the incoherent.
The odd: on Monday, a somewhat strange group ofRepublican figures — who knew that William Kristol was an expert on monetarypolicy? — released an open letter to the Fed warning that its policies “riskcurrency debasement and inflation.” These concerns were echoed in a letter thetop four Republicans in Congress sent Mr. Bernanke on Wednesday. Neither letterexplained why we should fear inflation when the reality is that inflation keepshitting record lows.
And about dollar debasement: leaving aside the factthat a weaker dollar actually helps U.S. manufacturing, where were these peopleduring the previous administration? The dollar slid steadily through most ofthe Bush years, a decline that dwarfs the recent downtick. Why weren’t theresimilar letters demanding that Alan Greenspan, the Fed chairman at the time,tighten policy?
Meanwhile, the incoherent: Two Republicans, Mike Pencein the House and Bob Corker in the Senate, have called on the Fed to abandonall efforts to achieve full employment and focus solely on price stability.Why? Because unemployment remains so high. No, I don’t understand the logiceither.
So what’s really motivating the G.O.P. attack on theFed? Mr. Bernanke and his colleagues were clearly caught by surprise, but thebudget expert Stan Collender predicted it all. Back in August, he warned Mr.Bernanke that “with Republican policy makers seeing economic hardship as thepath to election glory,” they would be “opposed to any actions taken by theFederal Reserve that would make the economy better.” In short, their real fearis not that Fed actions will be harmful, it is that they might succeed.
Hence the axis of depression. No doubtsome of Mr. Bernanke’s critics are motivated by sincere intellectualconviction, but the core reason for the attack on the Fed is self-interest,pure and simple. China and Germany want America to stay uncompetitive;Republicans want the economy to stay weak as long as there’s a Democrat in theWhite House.
And if Mr.Bernanke gives in to their bullying, they may all get their wish.
Incoherent adj: notexpressed or organized clearly, and therefore difficult to understand.
1.  It is true that the Fed normally conductsmonetary police by buying short-term U.S government debt, whereas now , underthe unhelpful name of “quantitative easing,” it is buying longer-term debt. (Buyingmore short-term debt is pointless because the interest rate on that debt isnear zero.) The Fed is trying to reduce interest rates as it always does whenunemployment is high and inflation is low.
2.It is no mysterywhy China and Germany are on the warpath against the Fed. Both nations areaccustomed to running huge trade surpluses. But for some countries to run tradesurpluses, other must run trade deficit-and, for years, that has meant U.S. TheFed ‘s expansionary policies, however, have the side effect of somewhatweakening the dollar, making U.S. goods more competitive, and paving the wayfor a smaller U.S. deficit. And the Chinese and Germans don’t want to see thathappen.
For the Chinesegovernment, by the way, attacking the Fed has the additional benefit ofshifting attention away from its own currency manipulation, which keeps china’scurrency artificially weak-precisely the sin china falsely accuses America ofcommitting.
3. Republicans,however, will have none of it, raising objections that range from the odd tothe incoherent.
The odd: a somewhatstrange group of republican figures warned that its policies “risk currencydebasement and inflation.”
The incoherent: twoRepublicans have called on the Fed to abandon all efforts to achieve fullemployment and focus solely on price stability. Why? Because unemploymentremain so high.
4. No doubt thatsome of Mr. Bernanke’s critics are motived by sincere intellectual conviction,but the core reason for the attack on the Fed is self-interest, pure andsimple. China and Germany want America to stay uncompetitive; Republicans wantthe economy to stay weak as long as there’s Democrat in the White House.
Summary:
Wow, the Axis ofDepression. In this article, I think Mr. Krug is inspired by Skepticism. Manycritics toward the fed is solely motivated by the intellectual conviction.
56#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-10-31 09:05:30 | 只看该作者
ProfilesThe DeflationistHow Paul Krugman found politics.by Larissa MacFarquhar                                                                                                                                                                                                                     March 1, 2010                                                               





                                                                                                         

                 
      
When it is cold at home, or he has a couple of weeks with nothing to do but write his Times column, or when something unexpectedly stressful happens, like winning the Nobel Prize, the Princeton economist Paul Krugman and his wife, Robin Wells, go to St. Croix. Here it is warm, and the days are longer, and the phone doesn’t ring much. Here they live in a one-bedroom condo they bought a few years ago, nothing fancy but right on the beach. The condo’s walls are yellow and blue, the furniture is made of wicker, there are pillows and seashells. There are tall, sprawling bougainvillea bushes along the side of the road.
“We first fell in love with St. John,” Krugman says. “It was New York lawyers who’d decided to give up on the whole thing and live on a houseboat and wear their gray ponytails.”
“But St. John went too upscale,” Wells says.
“Our complex is more Midwesterners. Retired car dealers and so on.”
The east end of St. Croix is something of a tourist spot, but the west end, where they decided to settle, is where the Crucians live, and it has a Jimmy Buffett feel to it that they like. In Frederiksted, the west end’s tiny town, there are a couple of coffee shops, a KFC, a Wendy’s, a few churches, a post office, and a promenade by the sea with concrete picnic tables. Not many people about. Farther out along the coast, there are beach bars with plastic chairs and Christmas lights, men with beards and very tanned middle-aged women sitting and smoking in the afternoon.
“The west end is where the whites who’ve gone native live,” Wells says. “They have a couple of beach bars with not very good blues and jazz bands. They were playing Neil Young as we went by the other night, and Paul said, ‘Boy, that was an awful rendition.’ ”
“It was Buffalo Springfield.”
“Yes, Springfield, O.K. I said, ‘Aging boomers, they love any rendition, no matter how bad.’ ”
Here Krugman wears the same shirt for days, a short-sleeved plaid cotton shirt, and bathing trunks. He sits in the room where they eat their breakfast, which has a long window open to the sea. He types at a tiny table that folds out of a closet, which requires him to sit more or less inside the closet, but this is helpful, because the light can be so bright in the room that it becomes blinding. If he turns his head, he can see the sky.
First thing when he wakes up, he checks out a few Web sites, and if he’s not writing his column that day he and Wells will go for a walk on the beach, or they will stroll into Frederiksted and have breakfast at Polly’s, a little coffee shop that serves iced lattes and pretty good egg burritos. If he is writing his column, he will start it on the morning of the day it’s due, and, if the spirit is with him, he will be done soon after lunch. When he has a draft, he gives it to Wells to edit. Early on, she edited a lot—she had, they felt, a better sense than he did of how to communicate economics to the layperson. (She is also an economist—they met when she was a postdoc at M.I.T. and he was teaching there.) But he’s much better at that now, and these days she focusses on making him less dry, less abstract, angrier. Recently, he gave her a draft of an article he’d done for Rolling Stone. He had written, “As Obama tries to deal with the crisis, he will get no help from Republican leaders,” and after this she inserted the sentence “Worse yet, he’ll get obstruction and lies.” Where he had written that the stimulus bill would at best “mitigate the slump, not cure it,” she crossed out that phrase and substituted “somewhat soften the economic hardship that we face for the next few years.” Here and there, she suggested things for him to add. “This would be a good place to flesh out the vehement objections from the G.O.P. and bankers to nationalization,” she wrote on page 9. “Show us all their huffing and puffing before you dismiss it as nonsense in the following graf.”

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On the rare occasion when they disagree about something, she will be the one urging him to be more outraged or recalcitrant. She pushed him to denounce the filibuster. She wanted him to be more stubborn in holding out for the public option in the health-care bill. He spent a few sleepless nights wrestling with his conscience about that but ultimately decided that a flawed bill was so much better than no bill at all that he had to support it. “You can get beaten down,” he says. “When Robin and I started writing about health care, single payer was clearly the way to go. And then bit by bit you start saying, ‘O.K., you take what you can get.’ There’s a trap I’ve seen some people fall into—you let your vision of what should be get completely taken over by what appears possible right now—and that’s something I’m trying to avoid.”
In the late afternoon, they lie on beach loungers underneath a clump of sea-grape trees, facing the ocean. Krugman sips a piña colada through a straw and reads the galleys of a book about the financial crisis. They were thinking of having dinner at a place in town, but then they discovered that there was to be an Elvis impersonator singing there, so they decided to go to the Sunset Grill, where the stereo is playing Wings. It’s getting buggy on the beach, and Wells hands Krugman a can of Off. The tide is coming in. Krugman puts his book down, eases himself out of his lounger, and, still wearing his hat and sunglasses, wades cautiously into the sea.
In his columns, Krugman is belligerently, obsessively political, but this aspect of his personality is actually a recent development. His parents were New Deal liberals, but they weren’t especially interested in politics. In his academic work, Krugman focussed mostly on subjects with little political salience. During the eighties, he thought that supply-side economics was stupid, but he didn’t think that much about it. Unlike Wells, who was so upset when Reagan was elected that she moved to England, Krugman found Reagan comical rather than evil. “I had very little sense of what was at stake in the tax issues,” he says. “I was into career-building at that point and not that concerned.” He worked for Reagan on the staff of the Council of Economic Advisers for a year, but even that didn’t get him thinking about politics. “I feel now like I was sleepwalking through the twenty years before 2000,” he says. “I knew that there was a right-left division, I had a pretty good sense that people like Dick Armey were not good to have rational discussion with, but I didn’t really have a sense of how deep the divide went.”
For the first twenty years of Krugman’s adult life, his world was divided not into left and right but into smart and stupid. “The great lesson was the low level of discussion,” he says of his time in Washington. “The then Secretary of the Treasury”—Donald Regan—“was not that bright, and you could have angry exchanges where neither side understood the policy.” Krugman was buoyed and protected in his youth by an intellectual snobbery so robust that distractions or snobberies of other sorts didn’t stand a chance. “When I was twenty-eight, I wouldn’t have had the time of day for some senator or other,” he says.
Krugman’s tribe was academic economists, and insofar as he paid any attention to people outside that tribe, his enemy was stupid pseudo-economists who didn’t understand what they were talking about but who, with attention-grabbing titles and simplistic ideas, persuaded lots of powerful people to listen to them. He called these types “policy entrepreneurs”—a term that, by differentiating them from the academic economists he respected, was meant to be horribly biting. He was driven mad by Lester Thurow and Robert Reich in particular, both of whom had written books touting a theory that he believed to be nonsense: that America was competing in a global marketplace with other countries in much the same way that corporations competed with one another. In fact, Krugman argued, in a series of contemptuous articles in Foreign Affairs and elsewhere, countries were not at all like corporations. While another country’s success might injure our pride, it would not likely injure our wallets. Quite the opposite: it would be more likely to provide us with a bigger market for our products and send our consumers cheaper, better-made goods to buy. A trade surplus might be a sign of weakness, a trade deficit a sign of strength. And, anyway, a nation’s standard of living was determined almost entirely by its productivity—trade was just not that important.
When Krugman first began writing articles for popular publications, in the mid-nineties, Bill Clinton was in office, and Krugman thought of the left and the right as more or less equal in power. Thus, there was no pressing need for him to take sides—he would shoot down idiocy wherever it presented itself, which was, in his opinion, all over the place. He thought of himself as a liberal, but he was a liberal economist, which wasn’t quite the same thing as a regular liberal. Until the late nineties, when he became absorbed by what was going wrong with Japan, he believed that monetary policy, rather than government spending, was all that was needed to avoid recessions: he agreed with Milton Friedman that if only the Fed had done its job better the Great Depression would never have happened. He thought that people who wanted to boycott Nike and other companies that ran sweatshops abroad were sentimental and stupid. Yes, of course, those foreign workers weren’t earning American wages and didn’t have American protections, but working in a sweatshop was still much better than their alternatives—that’s why they chose to work there. Moreover, sweatshops really weren’t the threat to American workers that the left claimed they were. “A back-of-the-envelope calculation . . . suggests that capital flows to the Third World since 1990 . . . have reduced real wages in the advanced world by about 0.15%,” he wrote in 1994. That was not nothing, but it certainly wasn’t anything to get paranoid about. The world needed more sweatshops, not fewer. Free trade was good for everyone. He felt that there was a market hatred on the left that was as dogmatic and irrational as government hatred on the right.
In writing his first popular book, “The Age of Diminished Expectations,” he became preoccupied by the way that inequality had vastly increased in the Reagan years. (Interestingly for an economist, Krugman believes that the political often determines the economic, rather than the other way around; he believes that the increase in inequality in the U.S. since the sixties is a product less of economic factors—the development of technology, say, leading to the greater importance of skills and education—than of political decisions about taxation and unions.) After the book was published, in 1990, various people denied that inequality had increased, and this really annoyed him. He began to get into fights. He was taken aback by the 1994 midterm elections, and during the impeachment hearings he began to think that the Republicans were getting pretty radical, but he still wasn’t angry about it. “Some of my friends tell me that I should spend more time attacking right-wingers,” he wrote in 1998. “The problem is finding things to say. Supply-siders never tire of proclaiming that taxes are the root of all evil, but reasonable people do get tired of explaining, over and over again, that they aren’t.”
Certainly until the Enron scandal, Krugman had no sense that there was any kind of problem in American corporate governance. (He consulted briefly for Enron before he went to the Times.) Occasionally, he received letters from people claiming that corporations were cooking the books, but he thought this sounded so implausible that he dismissed them. “I believed that the market was enforcing,” he says. “I believed in the S.E.C. I just never really thought about it. It seemed like a pretty sunny world in 1999, and, for all of my cynicism, I shared a lot of that. The extent of corporate fraud, the financial malfeasance, the sheer viciousness of the political scene—those are all things that, ten years ago, I didn’t see.”
When the Times approached him about writing a column, he was torn. “His friends said, ‘This is a waste of your time,’ ” Wells says. “We economists thought that we were doing substantive work and the rest of the world was dross.” Krugman cared about his academic reputation more than anything else. If he started writing for a newspaper, would his colleagues think he’d become a pseudo-economist, a former economist, a vapid policy entrepreneur like Lester Thurow? Lester Thurow had become known in certain circles as Less Than Thorough. It was hard to imagine what mean nickname could be made out of Paul Krugman, but what if someone came up with one? Could he take it?
It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.
After the election, he began to attack Bush’s policies in his column, and, as his outrage escalated, his attacks grew more venomous. Krugman felt that liberals were unwilling to confront or even to acknowledge the anger on the right with some of their own, so he was going to have to do it. “He saw that it had been very, very painful during the nineties to get American fiscal policy in order, and he saw all of that being thrown away callously and with very little thought,” Brad DeLong, a professor of economics at Berkeley, says. “And it turned out to be true that Alan Greenspan was going to meetings at the White House saying we’re going to regret this. Paul was simply six years behind those of us who had worked in the Clinton Administration, who found the collapse of reality-based Republicanism coming much earlier.” Krugman attacked Bush for trying to bankrupt Social Security, for promoting an economically and environmentally disastrous energy policy, for increasing inequality by cutting taxes for the rich and corporations, for using the war on terrorism to conceal his fiscal misdeeds, and for insider trading before he became President. He wrote a brave column on September 16, 2001, arguing that the catastrophe of September 11th was partly self-inflicted, because the government had abandoned airport security—which should be a public service—to be paid for by the airlines, who naturally did it on the cheap.
In return, he received great piles of hate mail. “He’d get threats,” Wells says. “The Times was constantly barraged with complaints. One time on book tour, he was filmed by this crazy right-winger with a video camera. They were getting hold of his student evaluations to find out if he was indoctrinating Princeton’s youth. At one point, I wanted them to put a panic button in Paul’s office. Our garage doors were egged.” Even some people who agreed with him felt that he was too relentlessly partisan for a columnist in a mainstream paper. But on the left he was revered. “The book tour for ‘The Great Unravelling’ was like revival meetings, because so few people were speaking out then,” Krugman says. “There was a great event—it was in Berkeley, which devalues it a bit—but there was this event with a joint appearance by Al Franken, Kevin Phillips, and me, with three thousand people in the audience, and when we walked onstage we got a standing ovation. That would have been 2004.” “I remember one woman saying, ‘I thought I was going crazy until I read you,’ ” Wells says. “He gave a talk for a small bookstore in Marin County, and the town was so small they didn’t have a place big enough to hold it, so they held it in a local church, and they had to open the windows, because people were outside listening.” All of this—the hate and the love—was exciting, and made Krugman realize that what he was doing was important, even though it was only journalism. Wells tried to prevent it from going to his head. “I said to him, ‘You know, life after Bush is going to be different; you won’t be everybody’s darling, because it will be a more sane time.’ ”
In fact, the change came faster than either of them had anticipated, because during the primary campaign Krugman was very critical of Barack Obama. He was critical chiefly because, of the three main candidates, Obama seemed to him the most conservative (his health plan, for instance, didn’t mandate universal coverage), but it wasn’t just his policies that Krugman objected to. He couldn’t stand all the feel-good stuff about hope and dialogue and reconciliation. He hated that Obama was out there saying nice things about Reagan when what Democrats needed to do most was debunk the persistent myth that Reaganomics had been good for America. He thought Obama was completely wrong to believe that the country’s problems were due largely to partisan nastiness, and ridiculously naïve to imagine that he could bring together Republicans and insurance companies to reform health care. “Anyone who thinks that the next president can achieve real change without bitter confrontation is living in a fantasy world,” he wrote in 2007. Krugman supported John Edwards, for his emphasis on poverty, for his ambitious health-care plan, and for his rough talk about attacking the interests of the wealthy. After Edwards dropped out, he supported Hillary Clinton. She wasn’t as left as Edwards was, but at least she was a fighter, and she obviously had no illusions about bipartisan harmony.
But most people didn’t see Obama the way Krugman did; they thought he was the savior of the left, and the passions of the campaign were such that when Krugman wrote columns deriding Obama he was lacerated—scathing comments on the progressive blogs, more hate mail, and not the fun kind. “I won’t try for fake evenhandedness here,” Krugman wrote. “The Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality.” “OK, you did it,” one commenter wrote in response. “You lost me. I’ve defended you on local blogs but you’ve sunk into low territory.” “You’re devolving into a caricature with your gross misrepresentations and strident, ignorant defense of the Clinton campaign,” another wrote. “Paul, you’re killing a little bit of your readers’ souls,” a third wrote, “or at least those of us who used to love your column.” “The primary was terrible, it was awful,” Krugman says.
“Paul was getting attacked by people we thought of as on our side,” Wells says. “I thought to myself, Well, I knew things were going to change, but this is quick and hard enough to give you whiplash. One of our friends said, ‘You’d better be careful, because Obama supporters might put rattlesnakes in your mailbox.’ People said, ‘Oh, Paul’s son works in Hillary’s campaign.’ ” (Krugman has no children.) “People were so upset and angry after Bush, they had taken leave of their senses. They wanted to give themselves over, and they resented people like Paul who said, ‘No, don’t give yourselves over, think about what’s going on.’ They wanted to feel that they were being redeemed, and this is what Obama was offering, but he doesn’t have the right or the ability to redeem people; that’s not appropriate.”
Once Obama won the primary, Krugman supported him. Obviously, any Democrat was better than John McCain.
“I was nervous until they finally called it on Election Night,” Krugman says. “We had an Election Night party at our house, thirty or forty people.”
“The econ department, the finance department, the Woodrow Wilson school,” Wells says. “They were all very nervous, so they were grateful we were having the party, because they didn’t want to be alone. We had two or three TVs set up and we had a little portable outside fire pit and we let people throw in an effigy or whatever they wanted to get rid of for the past eight years.”
“One of our Italian colleagues threw in an effigy of Berlusconi.”
“I put out some coloring paper and markers so that people could write stuff on it and throw it into the fire. People really felt like there was stuff they wanted to shed! I had little hats and party whistles.”
In the first few months of the new Administration, Krugman tried to be sympathetic. It was not in his nature to be hopeful or understanding of human frailty, but he tried to be both. Finally, he had a chance to sway people in power. All over Washington, people read his columns and brought up his arguments in meetings. He met the President. He spoke on the phone to Lawrence Summers, the director of the National Economic Council, every month or so. Peter Orszag, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, read his blog every morning. Senators phoned him, to thank him for a column, or to discuss a policy.
People in the Administration were sometimes frustrated by his criticisms. “Paul’s great strength is his pellucid clarity,” Summers says delicately. “The other side of it is that there’s a degree of complexity in the world that a President has to deal with that he sometimes misses in his search for clarity.” But Krugman could also be useful: if he supported something that the left was dubious about—the Senate health-care bill, for instance—he could bring a lot of people around. On the other hand, when, as was more often the case, it was conservatives who were holding out, he had no influence at all. “I was actually in the room when many of the final negotiations”—over the stimulus package—“were done, and there was no way that a larger package would have gotten sixty votes,” an Administration official says. “Regardless of whether he is academically correct, it just wasn’t in the cards.”
“Now that we have people whose goals I share in power, I’ve seen what it actually takes to make policy change happen,” Krugman says. “It’s pretty revelatory. It’s one thing to do opinion pieces about the way things ought to be; it’s another thing to think about, O.K., given the makeup of the U.S. Senate, given the difficulties of getting people on board and of communicating stuff to the public, what can you actually do?”
But by the anniversary of Obama’s Inauguration Krugman felt unhappily vindicated. Obama’s hands-off, conciliatory style drove him crazy, especially when it became clear that his attempts to win over the Republicans had failed. Why wasn’t he more aggressive, more of a leader on health care, rather than leaving the details to endless committees? Krugman wondered. How could he be so passive about it? Why didn’t he fight? “I have to say,” he wrote on his blog a year after the Inauguration, “I’m pretty close to giving up on Mr. Obama.”
These days when Krugman criticizes Obama, commenters on his blog tend to agree with him. He has regained his credibility with the left. There are even some songs about him on YouTube. “Hey, Paul Krugman,” a young guy with closed eyes and an ironically furrowed brow sings, “why aren’t you in the Administration? Is it some kind of politicking that I don’t understand? I mean, Timothy Geithner is like some little weasel. . . . Hey, Paul Krugman, where the hell are you, man?”
Last August, Krugman decided that before he and Wells departed for a bicycle tour of Scotland he would take a couple of days to speak at the sixty-seventh world science-fiction convention, to be held in Montreal. (Krugman has been a science-fiction fan since he was a boy.) At the convention, there was a lot of extremely long hair, a lot of blue hair, and a lot of capes. There was a woman dressed as a cat, there was a woman with a green brain attached to her head with wire, there was a person in a green face mask, there was a young woman spinning wool. There was a Jedi and a Storm Trooper. Those participants who were not dressed as cats were wearing T-shirts with something written on them: “I don’t understand—and I’m a rocket scientist,” “I see dead pixels,” “Math is delicious.” Krugman has always had a nerdy obsession with puns. (He is very proud of a line in one of his textbooks: “Efforts to negotiate a resolution to Europe’s banana split had proved fruitless.”) He also likes costumes. Once, he and Wells gave a Halloween party where the theme was economics topics—two guests came as Asian tigers, several came as hedge funds, one woman came as capital, dressed as a column. Sitting up onstage at the science-fiction convention, Krugman looked happy to be there. It seemed that these were, in some worrying sense, his people.
“Hi, everyone!” he called out.
“Hi!” everyone called back.
Krugman explained that he’d become an economist because of science fiction. When he was a boy, he’d read Isaac Asimov’s “Foundation” trilogy and become obsessed with the central character, Hari Seldon. Seldon was a “psychohistorian”—a scientist with such a precise understanding of the mechanics of society that he could predict the course of events thousands of years into the future and save mankind from centuries of barbarism. He couldn’t predict individual behavior—that was too hard—but it didn’t matter, because history was determined not by individuals but by laws and hidden forces. “If you read other genres of fiction, you can learn about the way people are and the way society is,” Krugman said to the audience, “but you don’t get very much thinking about why are things the way they are, or what might make them different. What would happen if ?”
With Hari Seldon in mind, Krugman went to Yale, in 1970, intending to study history, but he felt that history was too much about what and not enough about why, so he ended up in economics. Economics, he found, examined the same infinitely complicated social reality that history did but, instead of elucidating its complexity, looked for patterns and rules that made the complexity seem simple. Why did some societies have serfs or slaves and others not? You could talk about culture and national character and climate and changing mores and heroes and revolts and the history of agriculture and the Romans and the Christians and the Middle Ages and all the rest of it; or, like Krugman’s economics teacher Evsey Domar, you could argue that if peasants are barely surviving there’s no point in enslaving them, because they have nothing to give you, but if good new land becomes available it makes sense to enslave them, because you can skim off the difference between their output and what it takes to keep them alive. Suddenly, a simple story made sense of a huge and baffling swath of reality, and Krugman found that enormously satisfying.
This was, he discovered later, a development that Keynes had helped to bring about. In the nineteen-twenties and thirties, economics had been more like history: institutional economics was dominant, and, in opposition to neoclassical economics, emphasized the complicated interactions between political, social, and economic institutions and the complicated motives that drove human economic behavior. Then came the Depression, and the one question that people wanted economists to answer was “What should we do?” “The institutionalists said, ‘Well, it’s very deep, it’s complex, I mean, you just talk about what happened in 1890,’ ” Krugman says. “Keynesian economics, which was coming out of the model-based tradition, even if it was pretty loose-jointed by modern standards, basically said, ‘Push this button.’ ” Push this button—print more money, spend more money—and the button-pushing worked. Push-button economics was not only satisfying to someone of Krugman’s intellectual temperament; it was also, he realized later, politically important. Thinking about economic situations as infinitely complex, with any number of causes going back into the distant past, tended to induce a kind of fatalism: if the origins of a crisis were deeply entangled in a country’s culture, then maybe the crisis was inevitable, perhaps insoluble—even deserved.
“What does it mean to do economics?” Krugman asked on the stage in Montreal. “Economics is really about two stories. One is the story of the old economist and younger economist walking down the street, and the younger economist says, ‘Look, there’s a hundred-dollar bill,’ and the older one says, ‘Nonsense, if it was there somebody would have picked it up already.’ So sometimes you do find hundred-dollar bills lying on the street, but not often—generally people respond to opportunities. The other is the Yogi Berra line ‘Nobody goes to Coney Island anymore; it’s too crowded.’ That’s the idea that things tend to settle into some kind of equilibrium where what people expect is in line with what they actually encounter.”
After Yale, Krugman went to graduate school at M.I.T. “M.I.T. in the mid-seventies was a sort of Athens of economics—everybody was there,” he says. “And it was a golden age for clever little models.” Krugman took a class with Rudiger Dornbusch and became interested in international macroeconomics. Bretton Woods—the international system of monetary control established by the Allies during the Second World War—had just collapsed a few years earlier, floating exchange rates had turned out to be much more volatile than anybody expected, and figuring out why turned out to be a fantastically interesting puzzle.
Krugman wrote his thesis on exchange rates, but another class, on international trade, inspired him. “There was this kind of platonic beauty to the whole thing,” he says. “I remember going through the two-by-two-by-two model—two goods, two countries, two factors of production. The way all these pieces fitted together into a Swiss-watch-like mechanism was beautiful. I loved it.” The traditional theory of international trade, first formulated by the British economist David Ricardo, two hundred years ago, explained trade by comparative advantage: a country exported the goods that it could produce most cheaply, owing to whatever advantages it possessed—cheap labor, climate, technological expertise, and so on. It followed from this theory that countries that were the most dissimilar should do the most trade—countries in the Third World dispatching labor-intensive goods to the First World, the First World selling technology- or capital-intensive goods in return. In the years following the Second World War, however, economists had noticed that much international trade didn’t follow this pattern at all. There was a large amount of trade between countries whose economies were extremely similar, and these countries traded goods that were virtually identical: Germany sold BMWs to Sweden and Sweden sold Volvos to Germany. People had speculated about why this should be so, but nobody had come up with a model that explained it in a rigorous manner.
Krugman realized that trade took place not only because countries were different but also because there were advantages to specialization. If one country was the first to begin manufacturing airplanes, say, it might accumulate an advantage in economies of scale so large that it would be difficult for another country to break into the industry later on, even though there might not be anything about the first country that made it particularly well suited to airplane-making. But why would countries trade goods that were almost the same? Because consumers like to have a choice, and, as Avinash Dixit and Joseph Stiglitz had pointed out a few years earlier, the same logic of increasing returns to scale that Krugman had identified as an essential dynamic in trade could apply to a single brand as well as to a whole industry. Krugman presented his theory to the world in the form of a paper at the National Bureau of Economic Research in July, 1979. “The hour and a half in which I presented that paper was the best ninety minutes of my life,” he wrote later. “There’s a corny scene in the movie ‘Coal Miner’s Daughter,’ in which the young Loretta Lynn performs for the first time in a noisy bar, and little by little everyone gets quiet and starts to listen to her singing. Well, that’s what it felt like: I had, all at once, made it.”
One implication of Krugman’s theory was that, contrary to economic orthodoxy, industrial policy might have its benefits. If the location of a new industry was essentially arbitrary, then a government, by subsidizing and protecting its emergence, could enable it to gain such a lasting advantage that other countries would find it difficult to catch up. But Krugman tried to discourage industrial strategists who cited him. For, while in principle industrial policy could be helpful, in practice, he believed, it was so difficult to determine which industry should receive government help, at the expense of all the others—so difficult to predict an industry’s future, and so difficult to determine merit when powerful interests would be trying to influence that determination—that in the end industrial policy would be likely to benefit mostly the owners of a few businesses and hurt everybody else. (Industrial strategists were not convinced. “You have the cases of Japan, Korea, Brazil, China, and, to some extent, France, and the counterfactual—let’s imagine that they didn’t have an industrial policy, would they have produced the same amount of growth?—is unimaginable,” Robert Kuttner, the co-founder and co-editor of The American Prospect, says. “But to be a conventional academic economist you almost have to swear an oath that governments can’t outguess markets in the allocation of capital.”)
Later on, Krugman became interested in economic geography, in the related question of why there were regional specialties—why, in the United States, for instance, were cars produced in Detroit, carpets in Dalton, Georgia, jewelry in Providence, and chips in Silicon Valley? Again, the answer turned out to be history and accident. Once an industry started up in one place, for whatever reason (the carpet industry in Dalton appears to have its origin in a local teen-ager who in 1895 made a tufted bedspread as a wedding present), local workers became trained in its methods, skilled workers from elsewhere moved there, and related businesses sprang up close by. Then, as more skilled labor became available, the industry could grow and benefit from economies of scale. Soon, as long as it didn’t cost too much to transport the industry’s products, the advantages of the place would be such that it would be impractical for someone to open up a similar business anywhere else. Many economists found the idea that economic geography could be so arbitrary “deeply disturbing and troubling,” Krugman wrote, but he found it exciting.
Again, as in his trade theory, it was not so much his idea that was significant as the translation of the idea into mathematical language. “I explained this basic idea”—of economic geography—“to a non-economist friend,” Krugman wrote, “who replied in some dismay, ‘Isn’t that pretty obvious?’ And of course it is.” Yet, because it had not been well modelled, the idea had been disregarded by economists for years. Krugman began to realize that in the previous few decades economic knowledge that had not been translated into models had been effectively lost, because economists didn’t know what to do with it. His friend Craig Murphy, a political scientist at Wellesley, had a collection of antique maps of Africa, and he told Krugman that a similar thing had happened in cartography. Sixteenth-century maps of Africa were misleading in all kinds of ways, but they contained quite a bit of information about the continent’s interior—the River Niger, Timbuktu. Two centuries later, mapmaking had become much more accurate, but the interior of Africa had become a blank. As standards for what counted as a mappable fact rose, knowledge that didn’t meet those standards—secondhand travellers’ reports, guesses hazarded without compasses or sextants—was discarded and lost. Eventually, the higher standards paid off—by the nineteenth century the maps were filled in again—but for a while the sharpening of technique caused loss as well as gain.
Translating unmappable facts into economic discourse, it turned out, was what Krugman was better at than anyone else: he could take an intriguing notion that had come up in real-world discussions, pare away the details (knowing just what to take out and what was essential), and refine what was left into a clean, clever, “cute” (as he liked to put it), and simple model. “It’s poetry,” Kenneth Rogoff, an economist at Harvard, says. “I mean, you go back to his first book and there was this beautiful chart about what the Volcker contraction did to output that swept aside so much—he just drew this little graph which really cleared the air. I’ve heard economists use the word ‘poet’ in describing him for decades.”
Krugman’s theories of trade and economic geography are still taught everywhere. “I think there’s a pretty good case to be made that the stuff that I stressed in the models is a less important story than the things that I left out because I couldn’t model them, like spillovers of information and social networks,” he says. But failure to represent reality accurately is rarely a fatal flaw in an economics model—what’s valued is the model’s usefulness as an analytic tool. The most successful paper Krugman ever wrote was about target zones, and it was completely wrong. In the years before Europe adopted the euro, it was thought that establishing something between floating exchange rates and fixed ones—a “target zone” within which a currency would be allowed to float—might reap some of the advantages of each. He estimates that by the time the paper was officially published, in 1991, some hundred and fifty derivative papers had already appeared. “Empirically, it doesn’t work at all,” Krugman says. “People loved it as an academic thing, but it had some very strong predictions about interest rates inside target zones. Those predictions all turned out to be wrong. But nobody attacked me for that. I was showing that if target zones worked the way that people say they’re supposed to work, then this is how it would play out.”
When they’re not in St. Croix, Krugman and Wells live in a large house on a quiet country road in Princeton with their two cats, Doris Lessing and Albert Einstein. They built the house a few years ago, in a kind of Japanese modern style, with pale wood and horizontal lines and few walls. Next to the living-room area, there is a large empty space where Wells teaches yoga. On Saturday mornings, she teaches a class for, Krugman says, alter kakers (old farts), which he attends; he avoids the classes for somewhat younger and mostly female people that she teaches during the week. In the front of the house is an orderly garden, and in the back the land slopes downhill toward a stream and woods.
“We have a resident fox, and from my office while working I can look out and see the fox trotting across behind the house,” Krugman says.
“We have—what do we call him? Wally? What did we name the blue heron?”
Krugman’s office is a smallish room on the top floor which is usually extremely messy. On the wall over his desk, he has hung a few framed photographs: F.D.R. when young; his parents when young; himself at the White House at a table with Obama, Larry Summers, Timothy Geithner, Jeffrey Sachs, and Joseph Stiglitz; two photographs of himself with congressmen whose identities he has forgotten; Joe Trippi, Howard Dean’s campaign manager, speaking on the phone with a copy of “The Great Unravelling” visible behind his left ear.
Krugman and Wells moved to Princeton from M.I.T. a few years ago, mostly to be closer to their parents. Krugman’s parents were born into families from Belarus and grew up in Brooklyn, pretty poor. Krugman’s father worked at Equitable Life Insurance on Long Island. “I still get a frisson in Penn Station when I hear them announcing the Babylon-line trains,” Krugman says. “It’s like ad jingles from your childhood, you remember it always.” Krugman’s parents now live in a retirement community in New Jersey, Exit 8A.
“Obviously, they’re kvelling, as they would say,” Krugman says. “Somebody from the retirement community actually accosted my father in the supermarket, bitterly saying, ‘Why has your son turned out the way he has and my son turned out the way he has?’ ”
“Your mother used to complain that every time she’d go to the doctor the doctor wanted to talk about you instead of her,” Wells says.
“I think I have actually been getting faster doctor appointments because of this. On the other hand, it’s not always working. My E.N.T. person is actually—I’m gathering, just from stray remarks—pretty conservative.”
Wells’s mother lives even closer than Krugman’s parents, five minutes away. Wells grew up in Dallas. She is African-American, and her older sister went to a segregated school; Wells, who was born in 1959, did not, but her school was bad enough so that college at the University of Chicago was a shock. Thinking about their parents’ old age and their own, Krugman and Wells have also bought an apartment in New York.
“We figured eventually we’ll retire there,” Wells says. “My hairdresser said she’s lost three clients in the past couple of years; they get older and sell everything and move into the city. Maybe that’s what I’ll have to do when my mother finally can’t drive.”
“Oh, gosh.”
“My mother is very independent.”
“Very independent.”
Their apartment in New York is in the same neighborhood as both Jeffrey Sachs’s and Joseph Stiglitz’s, but since they bought it, a few years ago, they haven’t seen either of them. Krugman doesn’t get out much, socially. But he travels constantly, speaking at conferences, speaking for pay, promoting his books. “I’m not a very easygoing person one on one, but put me in front of five hundred people and I get very relaxed and conversational,” he says. Years ago, when he was just an economist, he did a lot of speaking at corporate events. “I wasn’t enjoying those so much,” he says. “One of them was held at a golf course, and I gave the luncheon talk and I was thinking to myself, I could just as well have been a magician. And then, at dinner, they did have a magician!” These days, the Times forbids him to do gigs like that, to avoid conflicts of interest, but his book publisher sends him all over the place. “I don’t sell as many books as Tom Friedman does,” Krugman says. “That’s O.K. Tom gives you this, you know, ‘I was talking to somebody in Bangalore and this is what I saw.’ That’s a skill I don’t have.” Perhaps this is fortunate, because he finds book tours exhausting.
“Twenty-five cities in forty days,” he says. “The mechanics of washing up in hotel sinks because you’re not in any hotel long enough to use their laundry.”
It’s not so much the washing as the drying that presents a problem. Years of experiments have failed to yield a satisfactory solution. Krugman has discovered that it is slow and quite risky to use a hair dryer with any item that involves elastic. Long ago, in Tel Aviv, his roommates found him attempting to dry his underwear in a frying pan.
“The trick with underwear is to wring it out and then press down—”
“I learned this from yoga workshops,” Wells says. “You get out as much excess water as you can, then you lay a dry towel flat on the floor, you lay the article of clothing on the towel, and roll it up like this—”
“And then it’s only slightly damp in the morning when you have to put it on.”
“No, it’s usually dry. We also do that on bike trips.”
“Because you can’t take forty pairs of underwear.”
“Not in carry-on.”
Krugman is not a keen traveller. After the fall of the Berlin Wall, many of his contemporaries set off for Eastern Europe—every economist wanted his own personal country to transition. Jeffrey Sachs, in particular, was all over the place, but Krugman was never tempted. “I know what Jeff does and I couldn’t do it,” he says. “Taking transport planes, living on yak meat for days—no. But I do write faster than anybody. You’ve got to figure out what you should be doing.”
“Paul is very good at protecting his sense of who and what he is,” Wells says. “I think that’s why he married me. He has a sense of what he’s good at and he sticks with that.” For this reason, even in the unlikely event that he were to be offered Larry Summers’s job, Krugman says he would turn it down. “I mean, I’d have to think really, really hard, because you don’t turn something like that down lightly, but I think I’m actually more effective doing what I’m doing,” he says. “You have to be an inside fighter, all of the negotiations, making sure you’re keeping the ear of the guy in charge. I don’t think I’m very good at that. Larry maybe has his shirttails hanging out, but he gets stuff done in an orderly fashion. I can organize my thoughts, but I can’t organize my office and I certainly can’t organize other people.”
Unlike most well-known academics, Krugman has never had many graduate students. He is unsure why this is so. Is it that his style of thinking, intuitive rather than methodological, is too difficult to imitate? he wonders. Is he too distracted? Too busy? Too short? Whatever the reason, it has become clear that his legacy will not be perpetuated in the usual way by a diaspora of little Krugmans, so, if his name is to survive, it is up to him. His papers and books, of course, are the main thing, but in recent years Krugman has also spent a great deal of time distilling his views into an undergraduate textbook. When he first signed the contract to write it, in 1994, he did it mostly for the money. Then he did no work on it for years. Finally, his publisher told him that he had to get moving, that he should work with a co-author who was better organized and more highly motivated than he was, and suggested his wife. It took them five years of intense work to write the first edition.
“It’s excruciatingly hard,” Wells says.
“You have to put yourself back in the mind of an eighteen-year-old,” Krugman says. “And it has to be impeccable. If you’re writing an academic paper, if you have some stuff that’s blurrily written, that won’t do too much harm. If you write a newspaper article and a third of the readers don’t get it, that’s a success. But a textbook has to be perfect.”
Even though they were doing it mostly for the money, they knew that, for the students who read it, their textbook might be the only time in their lives that they were exposed to proper economic thinking, which of course would have an influence on their political thinking.
“The books we’re competing with tend to be much more rah-rah about the market,” Wells says. “That’s partly because that reflects the views of the author, but also because it’s easy to do it that way—you just find where the lines cross and everybody’s happy. It’s more difficult to talk about how markets fail.”
“The trend when we were putting the latest edition together was to have less and less about the business cycle, and we said, ‘No, this is wrong, the business-cycle sections are still important,’ ” Krugman says. “That turns out to have been a really good bet.”
“We were the only textbook that incorporated the financial crisis, as we were chronically late. We were supposed to have the manuscript delivered in August or September, and by October we were still working, and we just said, ‘We can’t send it out like this, too much is going on.’ We were really in nail-biting territory, because you have to get it to the printers by a certain date or you miss the academic year.”
“We were right in the middle of that when the Nobel Prize committee called, and Robin’s reaction was ‘We don’t have time for this!’ The stress of the week or so after the announcement was crazy, so we actually went off to St. Croix. We were working frantically.”
“Even in Sweden, I was working on pages.”
When they wrote the first edition, they divided the labor according to their specialties, Krugman writing all the macro chapters, Wells writing some of the micro material.
“I’m more micro,” Wells says. “Micro people tend to be wannabe mathematicians, whereas macroeconomists tend to be more policy and real-world oriented. You have to be tolerant of a lot more ambiguity in macro than in micro.”
“In micro, the rules of the game are clear,” Krugman says. “Of course, you can do stuff that involves people not being fully rational, but the bulk of it is the full neoclassical thing, rational individuals interacting with markets that are either perfectly competitive or imperfectly competitive in well-defined ways, whereas macro tends to be a lot of ad-hoc stuff. You say, ‘I have to make this assumption about what’s going on, which I can’t fully justify in terms of the micro foundations, but I’ll make it anyway, because it seems to fit what happens.’ ”
To some extent, this difference also maps onto the divide between the “freshwater” and “saltwater” schools of thought in macroeconomics. Freshwater economists—who live near lakes, particularly at the University of Chicago, but also in Rochester and Minneapolis—are more likely to insist that macroeconomics be based on microeconomic foundations, which is to say that one should study large phenomena like recessions and inflation as functions of the behavior of many perfectly rational individuals. A freshwater economist might argue, for instance, that debt-financed government spending to stimulate the economy won’t have a significant effect, because people will realize that they will have to pay off that debt with higher taxes in the future, and so will save more in anticipation, leaving net spending essentially unchanged. Saltwater economists—who are to be found in coastal areas, especially at M.I.T., Harvard, and Berkeley—are more likely to allow that, at this stage of our understanding, it is excusable to study some macro phenomena without giving a complete account of their causal logic. Saltwater types are also more likely to include irrationality or other market imperfections in their models: they believe, for instance, that since it is clearly the case that prices do not fall immediately following a decline in demand but tend to be “sticky,” you should incorporate this fact, even if you haven’t yet got an account of why it should be so. It isn’t that freshwater types believe that actual people are perfectly rational—they just believe that making that assumption enables a more rigorous economics than is possible without it. After all, while there is only one way to be perfectly rational, there are an infinite number of ways to be irrational, and how do you choose? It all begins to look awfully arbitrary.
Last fall, Krugman wrote an article for the Times Magazine, “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?,” about the profession’s failure to anticipate the financial crisis, and what that revealed about its failings in general. He accused his colleagues of mistaking beauty for truth. They were so enamored of the elegance of their models and the consistency of their logic, he wrote, that they had come to believe that assumptions that were originally adopted merely as tools (perfectly rational individuals, efficient markets) by Milton Friedman’s generation were so sacrosanct that economics wasn’t economics without them. Freshwater types, in particular, had forgotten the Depression, forgotten what Keynes had said about the resemblance of financial markets to casinos. So attached were they to the idea that markets always got things right that some actually suggested that unemployment must be a consequence of workers’ choosing not to work. Saltwater economists were less blinkered in their view of markets and the rationality of investors, Krugman wrote (Larry Summers, a saltwater type, once began a paper on finance by declaring “THERE ARE IDIOTS. Look around”), and had retained a Keynesian view of recessions as crises of insufficient demand. But even saltwater models had no room for such wild imperfections as bubbles and banking-system collapse. “Economists will have to learn to live with messiness,” Krugman concluded.
Reactions to his article were quick and outraged. “Who are these economists who got it so wrong?” a Washington University economist, David Levine, wrote. “Speak for yourself kemo sabe. . . . It makes me feel physically ill that a distinguished economist could be so ignorant of his own profession.” “How sad,” John Cochrane, of the University of Chicago, wrote. “Don’t argue with them, swift-boat them. Find some embarrassing quote from an old interview. Well, good luck, Paul. Let’s just not pretend that this has anything to do with economics.” Levine and Cochrane maintained that the fact that freshwater economists had failed to predict the financial crisis was not an embarrassment to their theories but a confirmation of them: “The central empirical prediction of the efficient markets hypothesis is precisely that nobody can tell where markets are going—neither benevolent government bureaucrats, nor crafty hedge-fund managers, nor ivory-tower academics,” Cochrane wrote. If professional economists failed to predict or understand the crisis, how could it make sense for Krugman to argue that bureaucrats would do a good job of curing it?
Krugman was bemused by the reactions. True, he had accused Chicago economists of espousing ridiculous ideas in part because of financial incentives—sabbaticals at the Hoover Institution, job opportunities on Wall Street. But when those economists responded with anger he was surprised. “There was no personal invective in what I wrote,” he says. “I never insulted anybody’s personality. It was always at the level of ideas.” Krugman has a peculiar blind spot when it comes to scorn. Even as he delights in the scorn of others (a recent blog post was titled “Today in Exquisite Insults”), he imagines himself to be a rather dry, abstract writer who takes little interest in individuals. There is, it’s true, an understanding in some parts of academia that calling a colleague’s ideas stupid is not supposed to be taken personally, but Krugman goes well beyond this.
Insults may have done some damage to his career over the years. Shortly after Clinton was elected President, Krugman attended an economic summit in Little Rock and then went on “Larry King Live” and called it “useless.” This, along with his relentless criticisms of Robert Reich, may have been what kept him from the chairmanship of Clinton’s Council of Economic Advisers. Although Krugman doesn’t always appreciate the effects of his mockery, he does realize that he is not a sugar-tongued, diplomatic sort of guy, and he has incorporated this fact into his self-image. “Paul is really averse to being drawn into a social network, to being groomed,” Wells says. “He doesn’t go to Washington because he doesn’t want to fall into that. As a spouse, you have your little list of things that you jokingly won’t forgive your spouse for. Right after he started writing for the Times and attacking George Bush, we got an invitation to have dinner with Paul Newman and his wife, but he wouldn’t go. And now he’s dead.”
“It was inconvenient,” Krugman says. “I just don’t get any joy out of thinking, Oh, here I am with the movers and shakers. It would have required really discombobulating my schedule just to be able to say I’d had dinner with Paul Newman, and it’s not worth it.”
“Dimon was really stupid this morning,” Krugman said. He was thinking about writing his column the next day about the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission. He had read an account of the congressional hearings in the newspaper which quoted Jamie Dimon, the C.E.O. of JPMorgan Chase, and Lloyd Blankfein, the C.E.O. of Goldman Sachs, saying things so clueless, so insensitive, and so comprehensively boneheaded that even he, not inclined to think well of them, could hardly believe it, and so he had spent that morning vainly hunting for the transcript to see if there was something mitigating about the context that the article had missed. Dimon had commented that financial crises were just things that happened every few years; Blankfein had compared the crisis to an act of God, like a hurricane. Krugman was curious to know whether these giants of Wall Street understood what they’d done wrong. There was a callousness coming through, he felt. Still, in the end, the spectacle wasn’t that satisfying, because this wasn’t the Pecora Commission, of the thirties, which led to the passing of the Glass-Steagall Act. It was probably just a bit of Kabuki that would end in not much.
Why was it so politically difficult to reregulate the banks? he wondered. Why couldn’t the Administration harness the populist outrage? What good had Wall Street ever done for America? “There must be something useful in there, but it is really hard to see what,” he says. “That’s everybody’s challenge: come up with a clearly beneficial example of financial innovation without mentioning A.T.M.s, and no one can do it. If there are arbitrage opportunities and you’re able to spot them a few seconds before anybody else, you can make a lot of money, but there’s no actual social gain from doing that. We’ve tried talking to our friends in finance, and they say, ‘Liquidity, liquidity, liquidity.’ Well, there is some social loss if people are hanging on to a lot of idle cash, so the financial system, by providing liquid assets that provide a pretty good yield, is supposed to deal with that. But it turns out that, just when you need it most, that liquidity froze.”
Krugman and Wells pulled out of the stock market ten years ago and never went back.
“It just takes a lot of work to think about it,” Krugman says, “and at no point—except maybe early 2009, if I’d been really feeling daring, stocks really did look cheap—”
“We bought a couple of things,” Wells says. “We bought muni bonds and some Ford Motor bonds. The thing is, if you look at it on a historical basis, even back in the two-thousands, stocks are not cheap.”
“They were a good deal when the average price-earnings ratio for stocks was thirteen or fourteen, but now, except at the very bottoms of recent swings, it’s been over twenty, which means that historical rules probably don’t apply anymore. Stocks used to be undervalued.”
“I made some money and lost some in the Internet bubble,” Wells says. “You told me to sell and I didn’t sell, and I should have sold, and I never want to go through that feeling again.”
“Let’s put it this way. I can have fairly high confidence—it’s a personality thing—that a market is overvalued. Somehow I never have the same confidence in saying that it’s undervalued.”
The crisis should have been a lesson to people not to rush into investments that they didn’t understand, but Krugman suspects that it wasn’t. “It hasn’t been the searing experience,” he says. “A lot of people got burned, but I’m not sure that they’ll remember. You really have to have a Depression mentality to say, ‘I’d rather have cash or Treasury bills that yield almost nothing, rather than this product that my banker assures me is perfectly safe and yields two per cent.’ So, unless there’s a lot more regulation, we could do this again.” Krugman had been getting more and more pessimistic about the possibilities for recovery. Already, incredibly, people seemed to be forgetting that America’s economy had nearly collapsed, and the usual critics of deficit spending and those who did not share his sanguine attitude toward inflation were speaking up again. He’d been reading a book that amassed data from eight hundred years of economic history, and the lesson he took from it was that, in a financial crisis, being an advanced country was no protection. He’d thought that it was only in the Third World that crises dragged on and on, but it turned out that Finland and Sweden had suffered slumps as long as Indonesia’s.
“Did Blankfein say anything?” Wells asked.
“He was really guarded.”
“He probably figured the pitchforks were waiting for him.”
“I was reading his prepared testimony just now and it is mind-numbingly dull. I couldn’t find a thing to quote in it.”
“Well, that’s the point.”
“That’s the point, I know.”
Krugman doesn’t know how long he’ll be writing his column. Maybe he’ll get tired of it, maybe the Times will kick him out, who knows. But, after the column, then what? He’s checked off pretty much all the career boxes, he reckons. There are some big questions in development that he’d like to think seriously about. “How is it that most of the world remains so poor?” he says. “That was the old mystery. The new mystery is ‘Why is it that every once in a while it’s as if somebody turned on a switch and some previously hapless country suddenly goes soaring?’ ”
But it’s been a long time—years now—since he did any serious research. Could he, still? “I’d like to get back to it,” he says. “I’m craving the chance to do some deep thinking, and I haven’t been doing a lot of that. I guess doing the really creative academic work does require a state of mind that’s hard to maintain throughout your whole life. Even Paul Samuelson—the bulk of the stuff you read from him is before he was fifty. There was an intensity of focus that I had when I was twenty-six that I won’t be able to recapture at fifty-six. You develop your habits of mind, and to a point that’s a good thing, because you learn ways to work, but it does mean that you’re less likely to come up with something really innovative. Even if I weren’t doing all this other stuff, I don’t think I’d be producing a lot of breakthrough papers. There’s crude stuff: if I do have some brilliant academic insight, what are they going to do, give me a Nobel Prize? . . . When I was younger, when I figured something out there was this sense of the heavens parting and the choirs singing that I don’t get now. And that’s life.”
For someone else, this loss might be a devastation, but even though for thirty years thinking deeply about economics was all Krugman really cared about, he has let it pass out of his life without regret. “I think he’s happy,” his friend Craig Murphy says. “A much happier person now than when we first met him. He feels like he’s done good things, and they’re greater than what he expected when he was young. If there is sadness in him at all, I think it is a tiny core of profound sadness of the kind that the Buddha understood—that we probably can’t use human rationality to make the world all better, and it would be really nice if we were able to.” ♦


55#
 楼主| 发表于 2013-10-30 13:18:35 | 只看该作者
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AnImpeccable Disaster
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: September 11, 2011
On Thursday Jean-Claude Trichet, the president ofthe European Central Bank or E.C.B. — Europe’s equivalent to Ben Bernanke —lost his sang-froid.In response to a question about whether the E.C.B. is becoming a “bad bank”thanks to its purchases of troubled nations’ debt, Mr. Trichet, his voicerising, insisted that his institution has performed “impeccably,impeccably!” as a guardian of price stability. Indeed it has. And that’s whythe euro is now at risk of collapse.
Financial turmoil in Europe is no longer a problemof small, peripheral economies like Greece. What’s under way right now is afull-scale market run on the much larger economies of Spain and Italy. At thispoint countries in crisis account for about a third of the euro area’s G.D.P.,so the common European currency itself is under existential threat.
And all indications are that European leaders areunwilling even to acknowledge the nature of that threat, let alone deal with iteffectively.
I’ve complained a lot about the “fiscalization” ofeconomic discourse here in America, the way in which a premature focus onbudget deficits turned Washington’s attention away from the ongoing jobsdisaster. But we’re not unique in that respect, and in fact the Europeans havebeen much, much worse.
Listen to many European leaders — especially, but byno means only, the Germans — and you’d think that their continent’s troublesare a simple morality tale of debt and punishment: Governments borrowed toomuch, now they’re paying the price, and fiscal austerity is the only answer.
Yet this story applies, if at all, to Greece andnobody else. Spain in particular had a budget surplus and low debt before the2008 financial crisis; its fiscal record, one might say, was impeccable. Andwhile it was hit hard by the collapse of its housing boom, it’s still arelatively low-debt country, and it’s hard to make the case that the underlyingfiscal condition of Spain’s government is worse than that of, say, Britain’sgovernment.
So why is Spain — along with Italy, which has higherdebt but smaller deficits — in so much trouble? The answer is that thesecountries are facing something very much like a bank run, except that the runis on their governments rather than, or more accurately as well as, theirfinancial institutions.
Here’s how such a run works: Investors, for whateverreason, fear that a country will default on its debt. This makes them unwillingto buy the country’s bonds, or at least not unless offered a very high interestrate. And the fact that the country must roll its debt over at high interestrates worsens its fiscal prospects, making default more likely, so that thecrisis of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And as it does, itbecomes a banking crisis as well, since a country’s banks are normally heavilyinvested in government debt.
Now, a country with its own currency, like Britain,can short-circuit this process: if necessary, the Bank of England can step into buy government debt with newly created money. This might lead to inflation (althougheven that is doubtful when the economy is depressed), but inflation poses amuch smaller threat to investors than outright default. Spain and Italy,however, have adopted the euro and no longer have their own currencies. As aresult, the threat of a self-fulfilling crisis is very real — and interestrates on Spanish and Italian debt are more than twice the rate on British debt.
Which brings us back to the impeccable E.C.B.
What Mr. Trichet and his colleagues should be doingright now is buying up Spanish and Italian debt — that is, doing what thesecountries would be doing for themselves if they still had their own currencies.In fact, the E.C.B. started doing just that a few weeks ago, and produced atemporary respite for those nations. But the E.C.B. immediately found itselfunder severe pressure from the moralizers, who hate the idea of lettingcountries off the hook for their alleged fiscal sins. And the perception thatthe moralizers will block any further rescue actions has set off a renewedmarket panic.
Adding to the problem is the E.C.B.’s obsession withmaintaining its “impeccable” record on price stability: at a time when Europedesperately needs a strong recovery, and modest inflation would actually behelpful, the bank has instead been tightening money, trying to head offinflation risks that exist only in its imagination.
And now it’s all coming to a head. We’re not talkingabout a crisis that will unfold over a year or two; this thing could come apartin a matter of days. And if it does, the whole world will suffer.
So will the E.C.B. do what needs to be done — lendfreely and cut rates? Or will European leaders remain too focused on punishingdebtors to save themselves? The whole world is watching.
====
1.  sing-froidn. courage and the ability to keep calm in dangerous or difficult situations.
2. impeccable adj. without any faults and impossibleto criticize.
3. underlying adj. the cause, idea etc that is themost important, although it is not easily noticed.
4. let someone off the hook : let someone out ofdifficulty or trouble.
5. come to a head: if something comes to a head orsomeone brings something to a head, a situation, reaches a point wheresomething must be done about it.
6. a matter of days: only a few seconds.
1. Financial turmoil is no longer a problem ofsmall, peripheral economics like Greece. What is underway right now is a full-scale market run on the much largereconomies of Spain and Italy. At this point countries in crisis account forabout one third of the Euro area’s GDP. So the common European currency itselfis under existential threat.
2. Why is Spain-doing with Italy, which has higherdebt but smaller deficits- in so much trouble? The answer is that thesecountries are facing something very much like a bank run.
3. There is how such a run works: investors, forwhatever reason, fear that a country will default on its debt. This makes themunwilling to buy the country’s bonds, or at least not unless offered a veryhigh interest rate. And the fact that the country must roll its debt over at ahigh interest rates worsen its fiscal prospects, making default more likely, sothat the crisis of confidence becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. And as itdoes, it becomes a bank crisis as well, since a country’s banks are normallyheavily invested in government debt.
Now, a country with its own currency, like Britain canshort-circuit this process this process if necessary, the bank of England canstep in to buy government with newly created money. This might lead toinflation (although even that is doubtful when the economy is depressed), butinflation poses a much smaller threat to investors than outright default. Spainand Italy, however, have adopted the Euro and no longer have their owncurrencies. As a result, the threat of a self-fulfilling crisis is veryreal-and interest rates on Spain and Italian debt are more than twice the rateon British debt.
4. There are two objections for creating new euro torescue Spain and Italy: one is moralizers; one is that ECB is obsessing withmaintaining its impeccable record on price stability.
5. So will the E.C.B do what needs to be done- lendfreely and cut rates? Or will European leaders remain focused on punishingdebtors to save themselves? The whole world is watching.
Summary:
In this case, people can easily reach one conclusionthat the sovereignty on money let Britain out of the hook of debt crisisbecause Britain can create new ponds to buy its own debt and to lower theexpectation of its currency default.  Andit is Spain and Italy are short of, after they joined E.U. So these two E.U.countries can’t solve their own debt problem automatically and need to wait ECB’sproposal.  
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