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Politics : Politics for Pros- moderated -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (109692)	4/16/2005 7:43:08 PM
From: JohnM	Respond to of 793670

I should back up a bit, Tim. I'm an adherent of the school that says hold your arguments lightly. It's the Karl Popper school of analysis. Arguments become less implausible as they are unsuccessfully bombarded by counter evidence/argument. They never become "true" because one can always imagine a counter argument, counter array of data that challenges them. If they survive that, they are less insecure. Thus, policy decisions, from this point of view, always entail some evidentiary risk; not to speak of the always present surprising unexpected consequences. So, this conversation convinced me to hold the Krugman thesis a bit more lightly. But I'm still holding it. If I read something by Krugman in which he addresses these arguments and successfully, I will hold them a bit more strongly. Or if I read some research papers that argue the points made here are not valid, I will also hold Krugman's arguments more seriously. As for whether Krugman actually used fact checking of any kind, you refer to his being highly partisan. That not only doesn't bother me; I welcome it. But he also has to treat the data honestly. And your best point was that he might not have done so. I expected your counter argument to be his well known reputation, not for partisanship, but for arrogance. A known trait of certain economists, perhaps Larry Summers as well. ;-)