> This is a case of abject stupidity on the part of Krugman.
He mad a specific statement:
> By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Which if you look at the numbers, isn't really wrong:
> As Skanda Amarnath, head of research at Employ America, wrote to me, what people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.”
> […] -becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other!
As Krugman himself stated a few years ago:
> I must have tossed it off quickly (at the time I was mainly focused on the Asian financial crisis!), then later conflated it in my memory with the NYT piece. Anyway, I was clearly trying to be provocative, and got it wrong, which happens to all of us sometimes.
He mad a specific statement:
> By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet's impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine's.
Which if you look at the numbers, isn't really wrong:
> As Skanda Amarnath, head of research at Employ America, wrote to me, what people see as a major economic impact is really the social impact. From a true data impact, Krugman wasn’t wrong. “Productivity growth has been substantially weaker during the age of the internet,” Amarnath wrote. “The same deceleration is visible in terms of both nominal and real investment in software and even the broadest definition of hardware (information processing equipment). There has been some shifting and cannibalization of activity as a result of retail moving to e-commerce channels, and new media dominating advertising services at the expense of old media, but if we’re talking about macro impact beyond substitution, the burden of proof is with those eager to mock Krugman on this point.”
* https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-05-24/paul-krug...
* https://archive.ph/FD6GR
Where he did get it wrong:
> […] -becomes apparent: most people have nothing to say to each other!
As Krugman himself stated a few years ago:
> I must have tossed it off quickly (at the time I was mainly focused on the Asian financial crisis!), then later conflated it in my memory with the NYT piece. Anyway, I was clearly trying to be provocative, and got it wrong, which happens to all of us sometimes.
* https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/paul-krugman-internets-eff...
It's been over two decades since Krugman wrote that article: get over it.