Krugmania

"The Defining Moment"

"Too Little of a Good Thing"

Deficit hawks like to complain that today’s young people will end up having to pay higher taxes to service the debt we’re running up right now. But anyone who really cared about the prospects of young Americans would be pushing for much more job creation, since the burden of high unemployment falls disproportionately on young workers - and those who enter the work force in years of high unemployment suffer permanent career damage, never catching up with those who graduated in better times.

The political question is whether you'd rather have the money going to the upper class young people or invest it in the rest of the younger generation.

Blog post about Barry Eichengreen and Doug Irwin's new paper challenging the conventional wisdom about protectionism in the 1930s.

It wasn’t about economic ignorance, or at least not about microeconomics; it was about the attempt to escape the "golden fetters" of the exchange rate. The most protectionist countries were those that tried to keep their peg to gold; and as they say,

This suggests that trade protection in the 1930s was less an instance of special interest politics run amok than second-best macroeconomic policy management when monetary and fiscal policies were constrained.