{"id":47947,"date":"2019-08-24T13:33:06","date_gmt":"2019-08-24T18:33:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47947"},"modified":"2019-08-24T13:33:11","modified_gmt":"2019-08-24T18:33:11","slug":"krugman-and-the-goldbugs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=47947","title":{"rendered":"Krugman and the Goldbugs"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<h3 class=\"wp-block-heading\" id=\"page-title\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.aier.org\/article\/sound-money-project\/krugman-and-goldbugs\">Krugman and the Goldbugs<\/a><\/h3>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image\"><img decoding=\"async\" src=\"https:\/\/www.aier.org\/sites\/default\/files\/Files\/WYSIWYG\/blog\/10281\/goldenbricks.jpg\" alt=\"\"\/><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p>The announcement that President Trump would nominate Judy Shelton, a long-time advocate of the gold standard, for a seat on the Federal Reserve\u2019s Board of Governors got&nbsp;<a href=\"https:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2019\/07\/13\/opinion\/goldbugs-for-trump.html\">Paul Krugman thinking<\/a>: why do some economic commentators become goldbugs?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Krugman offers a rather cynical view. It is difficult \u201cto build a successful career as a mainstream economist,\u201d he writes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Parroting orthodox views definitely won\u2019t do it; you have to be technically proficient, and to have a really good career you must be seen as making important new contributions \u2014 innovative ways to think about economic issues and\/or innovative ways to bring data to bear on those issues. And the truth is that not many people can pull this off: it requires a combination of deep knowledge of previous research and the ability to think differently.&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>So what\u2019s an aspiring if not so smart or creative economist to do?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>\u201cHeterodoxy,\u201d Krugman writes, \u201ccan itself be a careerist move.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Everyone loves the idea of brave, independent thinkers whose brilliant insights are rejected by a hidebound establishment, only to be vindicated in the end. And such people do exist, in economics as in other fields.\u2026 But the sad truth is that the great majority of people who reject mainstream economics do so because they don\u2019t understand it; and a fair number of these people don\u2019t understand it because their salary depends on their not understanding it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>In other words, Krugman suggests most gold standard advocates are either ignorant or disingenuous \u2014 and, in some cases, both.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>According to Krugman, \u201cevents of the past dozen years have only reinforced that consensus\u201d view that \u201ca return to the gold standard would be a bad idea.\u201d&nbsp;<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>&nbsp;\u2026click on the above link to read the rest of the article\u2026<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Krugman and the Goldbugs The announcement that President Trump would nominate Judy Shelton, a long-time advocate of the gold standard, for a seat on the Federal Reserve\u2019s Board of Governors got&nbsp;Paul Krugman thinking: why do some economic commentators become goldbugs? Krugman offers a rather cynical view. It is difficult \u201cto build a successful career as [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[23346,23347,7844,374,7654,26426,26584,614,26585],"class_list":["post-47947","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-aier","tag-american-institute-for-economic-research","tag-donald-trump","tag-gold","tag-goldbugs","tag-judy-shelton","tag-nicolas-cachanosky","tag-paul-krugman","tag-william-j-luther"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47947","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=47947"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47947\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":47948,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/47947\/revisions\/47948"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=47947"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=47947"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=47947"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}