I am starting to wonder if "don't trust economists who run a column" would be a useful rule of thumb. Yes I know he won the nobel price, but so far his columns left me unimpressed.
He's a hack. God do I look forward to the liquidation of the new york times so we don't have to put up with friedman and krugman anymore. Not to mention about five others.
I don't really understand the merits of comparing the production of a few months in one country to that of several years in another, but then again I'm not an economist (is he?).
For those interested, here is the source for his US data with a full history (rather than a selective sample), which clearly shows that recessions are relatively common:
1. Yes, he is an economist. He's got a Nobel in Economics just this year. You can diss economics as a whole (Taleb-style or otherwose) but you can not diss Krugman alone.
2. The comparison is not of output of one country to another. The comparison is of one country, Ukraine, to istelf months by month and it shows a 28% YoY decline in manufacturing output. 28% umber is hard to judge without context, so to give perspective second graph shows that 28% is a halmark of a deep depression like the one in 1930s in the US.
3. Recessins are common, 28% drop is not common. Ukraine is in for a lot of pain.
It appears to be the third not the second great depression for Ukraine. According to the world fact book they had a 40% GDP decline in the nineties. I suspect it's mostly commodities related this time.
How much oil production is there in Ukraine? Don't they also produce a lot of grain, which has gone through big price swings as well? I don't know enough to criticize, I'm just wondering if commodity price swings directly affect GDP or only indirectly through lost revenue.
