Tuesday, December 27, 2011  Paul Krugman's Relentless Optimism
Hey, it's wishful thinking I would prefer to share, but I still
see it as wishful thinking. In something that's not quite a
reply to David Brooks' standard emission of "What our country
needs is a good, stiff dose of morality, which of course means
stiffing the middle class and working poor", Krugman argues,
That is a fair retort to those like Brooks who argue that human
nature has been somehow transformed and that the nation's
problems are of a moral and not an economic nature. It's not
only reasonable to say that human nature is pretty much the same
as it was back in the depression era, but that if you're going
to blame the present economy on a shift in morality (one that,
it would seem, pervades the entire developed world), you should
explain why our present degenerate nature nonetheless led to a
huge economic boom as recently as the 1990's, and what various
people on the right were trying to tell us was a boom up to the
point that the housing