Also, as an aside, Krugman gives Alwyn Young a lot of credit for the underlying analysis for his article on the Asian Miracle (or lack of it), so he wasn’t the only one. And Young’s is basically a growth accounting excercise based on measuring macro inputs. This is also where he got the mis-focus on Singapore since Singapore comes out worst in that paper out of all the Asian Tigers.

It’s a while since I read it, but as I recall the “economic consequences” in question more or less all flow from the persistent current account surpluses Germany would be reuqired to run to pay reparations. No surplus and the argument is irrelevant.

Of course it’s true that even as a dead letter, the reparations did stoke German resentment. But so did lots of other things, and anyway that’s not an economic consequence.

As a matter of fact, the main economic effect of reparations was to raise the volume of US government loans to Europe through the Dawes and Young plans—notionally loans to Germany, in practice to England and France. Since Europe needed to finance a current account deficit with the US, just like after WWII, but unlike after WWII there was no political consensus in the US to finance European reconstruction, it’s hard not to see the strictly economic consequences of Versailles as positive.

It’s not enough to say that Keynes was right to expect trouble; there has to be some correspondence between how he thought it would come, and how it actually did.

(I believe he himself acknowledged later that ECotP basically got it wrong, but I could be mistaken.)

I heard stories about hyperinflation and people dying on the street of starvation.’’

At least now the Banksters have a pool of some 70 billion for bonus payments to go along with the bail… Rescue monies. Starvation will be curtailed.

Since the predictions in Economic Consequences were conditional, they weren’t so much falsified, as proved irrelevant. But the judgement on the book’s prescience still has to be basically negative. Dsqaured’s general point still holds, of course.

But economics with ecology is a good analogy.

I heard stories about hyperinflation and people dying on the street of starvation. Did the bailouts come quickly enough or strongly enough? I think if we got enough inflation that peoples yearly social security payments would buy them a loaf of bread, and we got significant numbers of people starving on the sidewalks, we might get some horrible political consequences even if there were some bailouts.

It was a bad analogy. Just give up.

but they got rescheduled and the like even before that. Basically France couldn’t scrap the agreement wo loosing face but for all practical purposes, Germany WAS unable to pay up.

MQ, I’m pretty sure that if psychologists spent 20 generations or so breeding lab-humans to be predictable, we could predict them as horticulturalists.

Animal trainers don’t predict real well, they look hard for individual clues (cues) that let them get desired results with individual animals. And they try to make the consequences for the animal as consistent as they can.

If a psychologist wanted to get college students to do cute animal tricks with complete reliability, and he paid off in $100 bills or co-eds, he might get a pretty good result. College students are in general hard to train because it’s hard to get their attention.