Russ Roberts offers his thoughts on the recent Mankiw vs Krugman debate. A snippet:
Does anyone (even Krugman or DeLong) think that the $100 billion or so of stimulus money that had been spent at that point had really saved or created one million jobs? (I’m ignoring the “tax cuts” which were mostly saved.) It’s possible of course. But does anyone think that the claim of one million was the result of careful objective analysis to control for everything necessary it would take to measure the number of jobs that would exist in the absence of the stimulus? And it’s not even clear that the exercise is econometrically possible. Yes, economists try to estimate things like the multiplier and the estimates vary widely for purely statistical reasons and not just the challenge of measuring confidence say, or why all government spending is not alike or any of a myriad of other challenges.
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