Paul Krugman disappointed

I've always had this kind of discussion on reddit. I was creating posts, but I wasn't getting much feedback, so I decided to just buy reddit upvotes to make myself more popular and promote my business as much as possible using this site. I think you should think about it a little at a time, as it's a great tool for good marketing policy.

Looks like my original response to Krugman didn't post.

Anyways, Krugman is as much of a hack as the Imperial lead statistician. So yes, that part is true, he's projecting.

Krugman's total belief that aggregate demand is all that's needed carried him for ages, whereas in the past few years, he finally admitted that some of his ideas have led to asset bubbles in real estate, equities, and the sense of hyper-capitalism in general where capital movement trumps the net effect of labor. And this is after a decade of gaslighting others who didn't believe in him.

So no, I don't take his opinion of Foundation that seriously, however, I'm still convinced that it's not anything more than an 'Expanse' wannabe but with poorer character, cultural, and political development.

I suppose there must be somebody somewhere surprised by this. I shouldn't be too jaded. I mean, on the face of it, if Paul Krugman is as big a fan of Foundation as he claimed to be, and he really believes economics is the closest thing there is to psychohistory, and since he loves pontificating about economics... If you thought he behaves like a normal human being, you'd expect him to jump at the chance of using the Foundation series to give some sort of economics lesson, either while praising or damning it.

And if you think that there isn't any economic lesson to be extracted from the series, the layperson may need something obvious to classify something as "economics" or "maths", but an expert can find something to say relevant to his expertise while pointing at a cup of coffee. I have no doubt that, if he chose to, Mr Krugman could speculate on whether interstellar trade has increased or decreased during the time we've seen pass in the series. I certainly have an opinion and arguments to back it.

But Mr Krugman isn't a normal man, he's a celebrity. So he's reviewing science fiction because... because... well, professors of economics are the obvious choice for film critics, aren't they? There surely is no way that he has any financial interest in the success or failure of any movie.

If Mr Krugman has an issue with indispensable heroes or mystical powers, he forgets it in the next paragraph, where he starts praising Dune and his indispensable hero with mystical powers called Paul Atreides. Asimov himself didn't have an issue with mystical powers (the Second Foundation and the Mule have them) and the series doesn't happen to have any indispensable heroes, because it's a bunch of different characters, and none of them are given the largest chunk of screen time. Given the lack of precision in his criticism, it's a safe bet that Mr Krugman didn't watch very far at all, if he watched anything.

It's possible that his actual problem is that he watched as far as ep. 4 and he recognized himself in the imperial statisticians, saying that the Empire was doing well because it's still expanding. That sounds a little too reminiscent to mainstream economists saying that a country is doing well as long as its GDP is growing.

Then, his issue might be a little more subconscious. He seems to have an issue with Death Stars. Mainstream economics has a lot of trouble explaining what happens to an economy during a highly destructive war. There are two troublesome inconvenient facts: One, that the economy, whatever it was before, tends to become command-and-control once the situation is dire enough. Two, that wealth inequality often becomes lower after a major war. Which begs the question: if the advice of mainstream economics is so great, how come that a war can improve the situation in measurable ways?

Or he may have realised, at some level, that comparing the fictional "psychohistory" to mainstream economics wasn't such a good idea after all. If there are people in the world that come anywhere near Hari Seldon's ability to predict the future of a society, they should know how to prevent war and ecological catastrophe. So, to the extent that something like psychohistory exists in the real world, it's either not believed or used for evil. Mainstream economics has been widely believed for a long time, so that would leave Mr Krugman in a very unfavorable light, somewhere between an idiot and an instrument of evil.

Happy late Halloween roast, Mr Krugman!