It’s soothing to read your Krugman on this stuff. It’s nice to retreat to graphs and stats about it, though Krugman always uses words like “misery” and “suffering” to remind his audience what we’re really talking about.
Reading them as “economics experiments” like “Trickle Down Definitely Doesn’t Work, Test #97” or “Austerity reduces consumption and is therefore the worst move in a consumption-bound economy, Test #36” at least gives you the feeling that EVENTUALLY, when people finally get mad enough to show up at polls in bigger numbers, we’ll have a pretty good set of economics theories to actually apply, having all this data from ruinously expensive and harmful experiments.
It’s like knowing all that stuff from Nazi experiments, how long it takes people to starve, or die of cold - experiments no moral individual would have a part in…but the data has inarguable value to do good, should some bastard provide it. Here we have data from immoral economics experiments that no decent person should have attempted. May they do some good - if only to prove they should never be used again.
