Have you ever wondered whether we should have a warning label on college courses? “WARNING: THIS COURSE IS TAUGHT BY A PROFESSOR WHO HAS PROVEN HE IS A DUNCE.”
Your child can sign up for a course at Princeton with Professor Paul Krugman. He won a Nobel Prize in economics. He writes for the New York Times. And for many other papers via syndication.
Very often he writes and teaches garbage.
Your child might attend a course taught by Professor Paul Ehrlich at Stanford University. A course about population trends in the world. He is an expert in this field. He sold 3 million copies of his book on this subject. What he wrote and what he taught is garbage.
First, Krugman. Right after Trump’s election he announced stock markets would plunge and never recover. He proclaimed the new president was irresponsible. The new president was ignorant. Trump has put all the wrong people in charge of the economy.
Krugman said we are probably looking at a global recession with no end in sight. “…a terrible thing just happened”, he proclaimed.
Who is irresponsible here? Krugman. He has probably millions of readers around the world. Serious people take him seriously. After all, he won a Nobel. And Princeton lets him teach. His opinions are so powerful in this world they might easily start a few trembles in markets. Thereby affecting the wealth of hundreds of millions of people.
I am sure many investors took Krugman’s advice and dumped their stocks. Today they look at how stocks rose 40 percent. While their money sat on the sidelines. Economies in most of the world are healthy.
Krugman was utterly, totally, completely wrong. On one of the most important questions of the day.
Fifty years ago Professor Ehrlich scared the hell out of millions. He announced the battle to feed humanity was over. In the 1970’s and 80’s hundreds of millions would starve. They would, no matter what crash programs we fired up. He told us nothing could prevent huge increases in the world’s death rate.
Ehrlich’s impact was powerful. Some claim it frightened India into forcing millions of women to be sterilized. He helped generate hysteria among those concerned with the environment. To this day we hear some folks wail about how overpopulation will destroy us.
All of it was rot. He made numerous predictions of doom. In nearly all cases the very opposite came about. He was as good at predicting as was Krugman.
Suppose you are the top financial guy in a company. Suppose your projections are as far out from reality as those of these guys. You would get fired. And you would deserve it.
Did these guys get fired? Nah. They got promoted. They got protected with tenure. Did the NY Times decide that this guy maybe does not know what he writes about? Nope. The Times seems to love him.
Anybody can make mistakes, of course. But how can Stanford allow someone to teach about population when he is 1000 percent wrong in his big book? How can Princeton take students money? For courses taught by a guy who predicts worldwide meltdown when the opposite happens? Krugman did a little mea culpa on television. He admitted he let his political biases color his thinking.
Fine. Except that flunkies and mediocre academics make such mistakes. Nobel Prize-winning professors at top universities do not. Meatball surgeons in Podunkville Hospital screw up at basic levels. Top brain surgeons at Mayo do not. If they did they would get the boot.
There are countless academics who bill themselves as environmental scientists. Many have tried to scare the world with dire, dark and doom-laden predictions about climate. They created models that predict soaring temperatures melting ice caps and surging tides. They predicted such doom thirty years ago. Many reckoned we would have snuffed it by now.
Many academic experts predicted we would be squeezing the last few drops of oil from the earth by now.
They were utterly wrong. Worse, they influenced the writing of various policies. The policies look ridiculous today. Because they were based on the predictions from these birds.
Yet they continue to teach. They continue to win honors. Tenure is supposed to give academics freedom and protection. Is it supposed to protect them from being dismissed for fraud?
I truly do believe some universities deserve to be branded as purveyors of fraud.
From Tom…as in Morgan.
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