Yeah I’ve had a few low profile disagreements/disputes with krugman (used to be an economist) and I’ve even been right once. He can be fun to talk with
Comment on Paul Krugman. Former Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology
ItCantBeThatEasy@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
“The growth of the Internet will slow drastically … By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s.” - Paul Krugman
To be fair he has done a lot for economics, but he is far from infallible.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Just to be clear, you’re saying he was right more often than you?
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Yes
EightBitBlood@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Agreed.
Here’s a way to use crypto to buy from pretty much any major online merchant anonymously without them tracking your user data:
Its a card that acts as an intermediary for crypto.
It let’s you buy from these merchants without giving away your private data or buying habits.
This is a valuable use for crypto for many people. This is a site that let’s them use their crypto basically anywhere without getting spied on.
This fundamentally disproves his first core statments about crypto not having a use case and not being usable at most merchants.
Basically, he immediately reveals he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.
webadict@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
I mean… I doubt the veracity of these claims.
Like, you could pay with cash and get the same level of benefit. While the serial numbers are tracked, movement of money is pretty random once it hits a customer’s hands, and that level of randomness might as well make anonymous.
Additionally, good luck getting crypto through anything that isn’t centralized, which removes the supposed benefit of the technology. If you want to get crypto anonymously, you’ll have to buy it from people instead of exchanges.
Plus, crypto comes with the inherent downside of premiums to exchange currency. You might as well just tax yourself 5% extra, but that’s probably generous considering how awfully volatile crypto can be.
And the fact that this uses fucking VISA should be a huge red flag for privacy, lmao. Congrats on not amalgamating your customer profile by purchasing our VISA^TM^ brand prepaid credit cards. They still made money off you.
Overall, you’d be better off asking someone a city over to buy what you want off the internet and paying them cash.
Crypto is, at best, a stupid hobby that got out of control, and, at worst, a huge scam people are desperate to find a legitimate use for and still can’t.
BeMoreCareful@lemmy.world 16 hours ago
I saw him sort of maintain that message recently. His counterpoint was that it hasn’t made much material difference in average lives.
I’m not sure I followed, I mean, would the current level of globalization be possible with faxes?
On the other hand, the internet is for ads, so maybe.
bus_factor@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
So are fax machines. The bulk of the faxes received by corporate fax machines in the 90s were ads.
HeyThisIsntTheYMCA@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Oh dear gods, the faxes. I worked at a telemarketing company that handled legal documents, and I’d sent about 20 faxes a day to people we’d hired. We had five damn fax machines which would be running constantly 5am-8pm PST.
bus_factor@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
My family got ISDN, a slight upgrade from dialup where you got two lines, so your mom could talk on the phone while you were waiting for websites to load about 14% faster.
Problem was, the extra line also had a phone number, and both numbers reached both lines. Our new number apparently used to be the fax line of some business downtown, and we’d get phone calls from fax machines several times a day. The other end was a robot, so yelling that we’re not a fax did nothing.
We had to borrow a fax machine so we could receive the fax. It was an ad from Dell. Then we called the number on the ad and asked for our number to be deleted from their database. Thankfully they turned out to be the only vendor faxing that number.
count_dongulus@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
His head is so far up his own ass he can’t bear to consider admitting he was totally, absolutely, inconceiveably wrong.
driving_crooner@lemmy.eco.br 12 hours ago
Compared eith other technologies like the toilet or ehe washing machine, the Internet had not make the life of people materially better not even close to the same level.
logicbomb@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
I would suggest that in that example, he is predicting the future, while in the video, he is speaking about what can already be observed.
From my perspective, the idea that the internet growth would have slowed drastically by 2005 was obviously a shit prediction no matter when he made it. But it’s just a prediction about the future.
I think observations about things that can already be observed will always be more accurate than predictions about the future.
vestigeofgreen@lemmy.dbzer0.com 14 hours ago
I think Krugman has generally focused on labor productivity when talking about technology and the economy. He made that prediction in the 90s, when the productivity paradox was a topic.
He has a recent-ish oped (direct nyt link) where he admits he was wrong but then brings up labor productivity again, waggles his eyebrows, and gives you a smouldering look. He sounded convincing to me, but I don’t have the background knowledge to know if he’s cherry picking his numbers.