Bad Advice
Krugman poses a troubling and puzzling incite about the White House and its advisers. All the while he stumbles on a key point even he misses : Interesting back and forth between Brad DeLong and Noam Scheiber over the question of whether Democrats, possibly including the White House, really believed last summer that “[t]he stimulus was working more or less on schedule, and the job market was gradually recovering.” I guess it must have been true. But all I can say is, what were they thinking? There was ample warning, even before the severity of the crisis was clear, that the recession was likely to be followed by a prolonged jobless recovery. E.g., here (January 2008): I still keep reading articles asserting that the last two recessions were brief and shallow. Formally, that’s true. But … in both cases the employment slump went on for a long time after the recession was supposedly over. There’s every reason to think that the same thing will happen this time. There’s a huge overhang of e...