… is from page 15 of Paul Krugman’s March/April 1994 Foreign Affairs article, “Competitiveness: A Dangerous Obsession,” as it is reprinted in Krugman’s important 1996 collection, Pop Internationalism (link added):
The competitiveness metaphor – the image of countries competing with each other in world markets in the same way that corporations do – derives much of its attractiveness from its seeming comprehensibility. Tell a group of businessmen that a country is like a corporation writ large, and you give them the comfort of feeling that they already understand the basics. Try to tell them about economic concepts like comparative advantage, and you are asking them to learn something new. It should not be surprising if many prefer a doctrine that offers the gain of apparent sophistication without the pain of hard thinking.
The absolute best that might be said about Donald Trump’s economics is that Trump is the stereotypical businessman who, mistakenly thinking that an economy is but a scaled-up-in-size business firm, mistakes his knowledge for how to successfully operate a business firm for knowledge of how to successfully ‘operate’ an economy.
