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… is from page 78 of Paul Krugman’s 1995 paper “The Illusion of Conflict in International Trade,” as it is reprinted in Krugman’s superb 1996 collection, Pop Internationalism [2]:
It seems, then, that I am asserting that the conventional wisdom about international trade is dominated by entirely ignorant men, who have managed to convince themselves and everyone else who matters that they have deep insights, but are in fact unaware of the most basic principles of and facts about the world economy; and that the disdained academic economists are at least by comparison fonts of wisdom and common sense. And that is indeed my claim.
DBx: Indeed so.
Pictured above – Trump, Wilbur Ross, and Peter Navarro – are unalloyed examples of men entirely ignorant of the most basic principles of and facts about the world economy. Sadly and scarily, these men have power to shove the poisonous fruits of their ignorance down the throats of hundreds of millions of people – a power made all the more frightening by the fact that many of their victims are positively begging to be fed these poisonous fruits.