Newsweek: "What If Paul Krugman Were A Woman?"

newsweek.com:

"Please do not believe all the talk about the green shoots of the Japanese economy, which I suspect you might have heard. We are in pretty bad shape."

Narika Hama, a professor of economics at Doshisha University in Kyoto, is a sort of Japanese version of Paul Krugman�"if Paul Krugman were a woman with a purple rinse, pink jacket, funky blue jeans, black patent leather pumps, and a vague British accent. Hama, who lived in the United Kingdom as a child in the 1960s, is something of an intellectual celebrity in Japan. (One of my Japanese hosts was excited to get her autograph after our meeting.) She's a respected academic economist and a well-known commentator. She writes a monthly column for the Japan Timesand is a regular contributor to Open Democracy. Like Krugman, she's a scholar and polemicist who doesn't shrink from speaking directly about politics. She's also got the columnist's gift for phrasing and buzzwords.

Read the whole story: newsweek.com

Comments

[jayes]

the making of a japanese celebrity-­economist?

and the news at hand is?

[MurrayAbraham]

One of the most misleading and stupid titles ever witnessed on the site.

The piece has nothing to do with Krugman, except the fact that a Japanese female economist (who is the real subject of the article) happens to say the same thing about the Japanese economy that Krugman says about the American one.

[JackRusselTerrier]

I agree. Strange title.

[000Jade000]

If he were a woman, he'd be completely ignored.

[JackRusselTerrier]

I have to disagree. There are many women out there who are very intelligent. Naomi Klein ( author of The Shock Doctrine ) immediately comes to mind as someone who I think is ahead of the curve when it comes to this economic crisis. If you haven't read her book, I highly recommend it.

I could go down the list of women who I greatly admire for their analytic ability, but I only have 250 words available to me in the comment section.

[jekyll]

What is the obsession with this guy? His fixes are based on the false belief that the free-market economy has failed. But it is not the market that has failed. It is intervention into the market that has failed. The Federal Reserve and its manipulation of money and interest rates have failed. None of this can be blamed on the free market, but that isn’t stopping newspaper columnists from doing so anyway.

Keynesian so-called economists, led by Paul Krugman, are vainly reaching into their usual bag of tricks to try to solve the problems of intervention with more intervention, and nothing is working. But they are persistent. They’ll keep scrounging around in that bag all throughout the Obama administration. The slump will continue, since none of these tricks has the slightest thing to do with the underlying problems in the economy. All we’ll have to show for them is an empty Keynesian bag and lot more unpayable debt.

Meanwhile, who’s being ignored during this crisis? The economists of Austrian School of economic thought, the very people who predicted not only the Great Depression, but also the calamity we’re dealing with today.

[bdaved]

I was afraid for a minute you were going to leave the Austrians out.

[DiogenesOfAlaska]

Given that you would probably blame both failure and success of the administration's policies on Krugman's columns, there is really no need to ask what your rant has to do with the subject that is being discussed on a hypothetical basis here.

The only question that's still open would be: at which price would you be willing to sell your mother?