Chortling

I'm not sure if I'm one of the liberal bloggers Megan McArdle's writing about here but I'll proceed as if I am. Distracted as I was by my out of control gloating yesterday, I never really made a point about Paul Krugman's predictive powers, but if I had, it would have been this: For literally years, Paul Krugman warned that we'd be in for some serious economic hard times when the housing bubble burst. This wasn't something he did as a game, but rather in the hope that rightly positioned people would address the problem. They didn't.

Time passed, and eventually conservative and libertarian writers--who either didn't understand what was happening, or didn't think all that highly of Krugman's liberalism, or both--began to mock him for getting his economic forecast wrong. Now, lo and behold, he wasn't wrong at all. And even if we presume that he thought a recession would come sooner than it did, the worst we can say about his economic punditry is that it took longer for him to be proven correct than he and others like him imagined it would.

Which is quite a bit different than a monkey throwing darts. Or, if you prefer, an economics blogger writing post after post after post trashing a Nobel-caliber economist, hoping that someday a bigger blogger might happen upon one of them someday and link to it.