I stumbled on this today:
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically, as the flaw in ‘Metcalfe’s law’—which states that the number of potential connections in a network is proportional to the square of the number of participants—becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other! By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.”
Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman, 1998, via Zero Hedge
Hat tip to Maggie’s Farm.
Paul Krugman may be the most incompetent human being currently alive. His “advice” is dispatched with the lofty air of one expecting us sheep to follow his glowing wisdom but he is wrong every time! It’s uncanny. Everyone, all of us, are fallible mortals, but Krugman is never right. How is it that anyone listens to a goddamn word the man says? Why does he have a job?
I’ve come to believe it’s not humanly possible to be wrong enough to lose a job as an economist at the New York Times. I know this because in 1999, the year the Times hired Krugman, they closed the year selling at $49 ($72 adjusted for inflation). They’re selling at $23 today. So they’ve had a Nobel Prize winning economist on staff for 19 years and managed to lose 68% of their value. Dude’s a deluded rat on a sinking ship.
Think about your crazy Uncle Ralph who’s been married eight times and is underwater on the timeshare condominium next to a crack house. You know how he went short on silver the day Obama got elected ($10.22) and then decided to buy it back at in 2011 ($40.00) in order to “cut his losses”? You know how he drinks too much wine on Thanksgiving and starts dispensing advice? You know how he saves money by not changing the oil in his car and thinks Hot Pockets are health food? Yeah that guy! He’s right more often than Paul Krugman.
Here’s a clip I wrote last winter:
“Also, for the sake of humanity, would someone please take Paul Krugman behind the barn and beat him with a calculator. Why is he still employed? He said “the stock market will never recover from Donald Trump’s presidential victory“. It recovered immediately and then hit the afterburners into a 31% run which is still going. It’s almost mathematically impossible to make worse predictions than that flaming dipshit Krugman.”
When I wrote that post (last December) the DOW had soared 31% during the period when Krugman insisted things would “never recover”. I checked just now and it’s up 35% (6464.79 points) since Trump’s election.
That means that last winter Krugman was almost inhumanly wrong and now he’s even more wrong. You can set your clock by Krugman’s wrongness.
Here’s another reference:
“Ideally we should round up every employee of the mainstream media and tattoo “Pics or it didn’t happen” on their ass. The only drawback to my wise suggestion is Paul Krugman. Some poor soul would have to look at Paul Krugman’s ass and after all the economic bullshit pulled out of that orifice it’s going to look like the gateway to a deluded and incomprehensible hell. Nobody wants to see that!”
Last but not least, the fictional world of Lesbian Activist Squirrels has not been spared the wrongness of Krugman. I can imagine a world of disco based mind control but Krugman’s galactic incompetence crosses the barriers of time and space and reality itself. I simply can’t imagine this or any portion of the multi-verse where he’s not wrong. Nothing is so fanciful that it’s not grounded in the wrongness of Krugman. If I wrote a story with spacefaring orange Pandas playing poker at a table with death, David Lynch in a tutu, and a ham sandwich… there would still be a person named Krugman cavorting in the periphery… and he’d still be wrong: