Paul Krugman fumed as he read audacious remarks the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs made in testimony before the United State’s Congress:
Dimon had commented that financial crises were just things that happened every few years; Blankfein had compared the crisis to an act of God, like a hurricane. Krugman was curious to know whether these giants of Wall Street understood what they’d done wrong.
But only gradually has Krugman himself come to understand what can go wrong when reductive economic thinking is applied to the real world — and even he has a way to go. An excellent profile by Larissa MacFarquhar in the March 1, 2010, issue of The New Yorker (citations to hardcopy pages follow), traces Krugman’s own consciousness of politically embedded economic knowledge in a way that reveals much about the epistemic stance of the discipline vis-à-vis practical action in the world. Read the rest of this entry »
