Agreed in general but not in this case, because in this case Person B is a group of people who Krugman has been telling us, on a daily basis for months, are liars, scumbags and charlatans.

But to wave my hands, repeatedly invoke “Surely”, and thus conclude that the statement is incontrovertibly false: that, my friends, requires a Nobel-level intellect.

he then very briefly goes through each case suggesting why they don’t hold up as very good examples

The only argument that Krugman makes for Canada not being a good example is that somebody else might have used Canada as an example of something different.

This does not seem to me to be a good argument against Canada as an example.

Moreover, it seems to me that this argument fails in the same way that many of Krugman’s recent arguments fail: He points to someone who has made a silly argument against extending unemployment benefits, refutes that argument, and acts as if this suffices to dispense with *all* arguments. (I’ve given citations to this in previous blog posts.) Reinhart/Rogoff are no more responsible for what someone else might have said about Canada than the entire community of fiscal conservatives is responsible for some quote from Senator John Kyl.

Of course none of this detracts from Krugman’s real accomplishments. But sometimes accomplished people say silly things, and in my opinion, Krugman’s been saying a lot of them lately.

Pretty basic points that any one with the most rudimentary of training in regression analysis could have made.

I’ve really enjoyed reading your books and other writings and I normally admire them for their sophisticated sense of humor. But I fail to grasp your analogy/attempt at humor on this issue. By most published quality-adjusted citation ranking systems (e.g. recursive impact rankings) Paul Krugman remains one of the most cited economists, and without a doubt so in the field of international trade. The ‘market’ of other well cited economists seems to rank him very highly. Hence his Nobel Prize seems to rest on considerably more solid empirical evidence than this particular cross-country regression claim of R&R. You may wish that that were different, but the datapoints are what they are.

One could equally well say that Krugman’s Nobel Prize is based on so few papers that it would be possible to comment on each one of them in a relatively short blog post:

Paper 1: Ha ha.

Paper 2: This is absurd.

Paper 3: This contradicts something Hubert Humphrey once said.

I do not think that a blog post along those lines would be a useful contribution to any discussion.