A Reality We Wouldn't Want to Live in

This article published in The Automatic Earth, 22nd August 2011 is quite long, but well worth reading, here is a short extract:

It’s a thin line beteeen comedy and tragedy. From time to time, quite often actually, stories pass before my eyes that make me think: did I really just read that? Was that serious? Like I had one last week, with Paul Krugman talking about aliens:

Paul Krugman: Fake Alien Invasion Would End Economic Slump

“If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat and really inflation and budget deficits took secondary place to that, this slump would be over in 18 months [..]”

Only, what I found weird was not so much that he talked about aliens, but that he implied that a “common enemy” would end the US economic slump in 18 months. That to me, once again, shows such a deep lack of understanding of the issues at hand that what’s maybe truly weird is that the man still has readers.

You can read the whole article here