2016 Postmortem
In reply to the discussion: What should the federal minimum wage be? [View all]MFrohike
(1,980 posts)After 5 years of droning about it, he has yet to read the first damn thing Keynes ever wrote about it. I get that everybody is high on him because of the kinda-Nobel, but Hayek and Friedman won it too. It's an award that has nothing, repeat nothing, to do with whether one is right or wrong. It is entirely about making economics look like a science, rather than the carnival sideshow it tends to be.
Krugman is also wrong for your quotation. Of course, economics is a morality play. It's nothing but the study of the moral choices made in the allocation of resources. It gets dressed up with faux math and nifty lingo, but the vast majority of it is nothing but explaining away bad choices as a result of impersonal forces (e.g., globalization, invisible appendages, etc.). The economy is very much the creature of our political choices. To pretend that it exists as some kind of natural force unto itself, as Krugman does, is simply stupid. It's a collection of social relationships shaped and driven by politics.