(I freely admit I’m not a technophile, unlike many of the people working in creative media. My question is always “what is it useful for”)

Krugman always gets these little details wrong.

And the people I worked with who did weren’t exactly producing a compelling argument. At the time, there was one company you could actually order anything from on the web, a pizza place in Santa Cruz. But of course, you couldn’t PAY for your pizza on the web, you paid the delivery person. Also, you STILL had to call and confirm your order after you made it. It was the most uselessly gratuitous use of a technology “Just because it’s there.” you could imagine. As a marketing ploy, it was great… but as an actual way to buy a pizza, not so much.

He did enormously underestimate the importance of the internet as you point out though. I guess the real lesson here is never underestimate the power of porn on the internet economy. People might not use the internet if “they have nothing to say to one another,” but you don’t need to say anything to one another to enjoy what the billion dollar+ porn industry is putting on the ‘nets.

We’re working on it!

But if you combined those two you can have a great and useful two minutes.

If you wanted to kill a promising industry and bankrupt a nation, you’d have a hard time doing better than the last 20 years of policies from Washington D.C.

That’s just my opinion. Others think better times are juuuuust around the corner if the USG can only spend 30 trillion more dollars this year.

Masturbation is a waste of time?? ;-)

Credit where credit’s due, however, he did predict an oil price and agricultural price spike within 20 years of 1997, which we did see in 2008.

I think I speak for everyone here when I say it takes a real psychic to predict that two markets which are simultaneously practically owned by government and subject to heavy speculator trading will have wild price fluctuation…

(English starts ~9:10)

plus, if I remember right, inflation did go up at the end of the 90s

Inflation always goes up by definition; deflation goes down.
Do you mean to say the rate of inflation decreased?

Inflation always increases, as that is what printing more money does by definition. Existing dollars are devalued because there are more of them in supply, thus it costs you more of those dollars to buy the same item. The cost of raw materials, labor, shipping, etc. isn’t necessarily the cause of increased prices.

That statement is shocking in the scope of what it reveals about Kurgman.

You’ve got the casual scorn of the elitist, who never doubts that people outside of his own class are just a mass of quiescent proles.

You’ve got the dismissive confidence of a man who controls some of what was then the scarce capital used to produce information, and who cannot believe that capital might be rendered obsolete by a new instrument he doesn’t like.

You’ve got an “economist” who cannot even imagine how people might react when the transaction costs of social interaction is reduced near to zero.

Being wrong was the least of his crimes!

Credit where credit’s due, however, he did predict an oil price and agricultural price spike within 20 years of 1997, which we did see in 2008.

That’s like predicting that sometime in the future, another hurricane will hit the United States. The thing is, Krugnuts was wrong about its severity and the reaction to it; the internet did not cease to be an economic powerhouse because of the oil crunch. In fact, it may be argued that its economic importance increased as more people reacted to higher gas prices by telecommuting to work and shopping online rather than getting in their car and driving to work or the mall.

(Interestingly, at the time Krugman wrote that article, “team red” would have meant “communism” for most readers. Who could have predicted that change?)

I wouldn’t, and I’m the sort of annoying asshole who pretty much wears a perpetual smirk.