Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Barro on Krugman

in today's WSJ:

Atlantic: Oh, well he wrote a series of posts saying he thought the World War II spending evidence was not good, for a variety of reasons, but I guess . . .

Barro: He said elsewhere that it was good and that it was what got us out of the depression. He just says whatever is convenient for his political argument. He doesn't behave like an economist. And the guy has never done any work in Keynesian macroeconomics, which I actually did. He has never even done any work on that. His work is in trade stuff. He did excellent work, but it has nothing to do with what he's writing about.

Expert innovators in parochial models are smart. They aren't necessarily wise, even about things in their putative field.

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