Paul Krugman is wrong in his criticism of my brief summary of last week’s economic policy conference at Stanford’s Hoover Institution. Krugman was not at the conference, which lasted a full day and went well beyond previous research by the participants. In general people focused on policies to restore strong economic growth and reduce unemployment in the United States.
First, Krugman incorrectly claims that I mischaracterized the research of my Stanford colleague Nick Bloom and his coauthors Scott Baker and Steve Davis presented at the conference. Krugman says my conference summary suggested that “Bloom, Baker and Davis had showed that fear of Obama was holding the economy down.” No, my summary said or implied no such thing; there is no mention of Obama, Bush, or any politician in my summary. It simply says that these authors “presented their empirical measures of policy uncertainty and showed that they were negatively correlated with economic growth.”
