" In a recent cynical opinion piece titled “Detroit, the New Greece”, New York Times columnist and Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman reasoned more like a callous Wall Street operator than someone with the self-proclaimed humanist “conscience of a liberal” by casually calling Detroit a “victim of market forces.” “Sometimes the losers from economic change are individuals whose skills have become redundant; sometimes they are companies serving a market niche that no longer exist; and sometimes they are whole cities that lose their place in the economic ecosystem,” writes Krugman, forgetting Greece in his laundry list of “innocent victim of these mysterious “market forces.” Krugman concludes his paragraph with: “Decline happens,” as if this is a physical phenomenon, like gravity or magnetism. Like most of the leading international economists, Krugman has adamantly supported the North America Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the World Trade Organization (WTO). Detroit and Greece are not some sort of collateral damage of “market forces” in Krugman’s “decline happens” scenario. Detroit was demolished wholesale by NAFTA, and Greece was enticed to borrow money to join the EURO zone. "
Posted on: Fri, 02 Aug 2013 20:47:16 +0000
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