Krugman: ‘Dark age of macroeconomics’ is upon us
Midway through his standing-room-only lecture at MIT on Friday, Feb. 5, Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman PhD ’77 took a brief detour into world history — specifically to the Dark Ages.It was a period, Krugman suggested, that was especially dismal not merely due to, say, rampant barbarism, but because it constituted an intellectual reversal: “In the Dark Ages, people forgot what the Greeks and Romans had learned.” It is an analogy Krugman favors these days when he thinks about his own profession. “We’re living in a dark age of macroeconomics,” Krugman said during his lecture, before an audience of several hundred students (and several of his former MIT colleagues) in the Stata Center. “Economists themselves are confused,” he added. “It’s been really amazing within the economics profession to see how much has been lost.”What has been lost above all, Krugman argued, is an appreciation of ideas developed in the 1930s...