Paul Krugman is an Idiot #6,376

Paul Krugman likes to remind us about how often he is right when he says things. If it were anyone else it would be called unseemly bragging, but coming from a liberal economist it is merely reminding us. Anyway, yesterday he reminded us that he was right in saying the interest rates were not going to rise, and that, “The longer high unemployment drags on, the greater the odds that crazy people will win big in the midterm elections — dooming us to economic policy failure on a truly grand scale.”

Because high unemployment is not, itself, an economic policy failure. And what have the “crazy people”  done in terms of economic policy that is significantly different than what the Democrats did when they were in the majority?

Today he ponders on “Inequality and Urbanism,”  or what happens when rich people move into poor neighborhoods. He uses an example of when “a bank branch takes over the space formerly occupied by a beloved neighborhood shop.”  Everyone is “maximizing returns,”  he says, except, of course, the shop owner who is out of business, but Paul Krugman is a Princeton man so we have to give him some room to forget the little guy.

He opines that “the disappearance of that shop may lead to a decline in foot traffic,”  but that on a more positive note “an influx of well-paid yuppies can help support the essential infrastructure of hipster coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, and dry cleaners,"  all of which are populated by people who pop into and out of them by teleportation, apparently, since the foot traffic declined when the “beloved neighborhood shop”  left.

He sort of waffles on whether any of this is good or bad, but he considers “hipster coffee shops, ethnic restaurants, and dry cleaners”  to be “essential infrastructure.”  Why do we keep listening to this idiot?