Paul says: "hyperinflation is coming any day now" and "minimum wages at their current levels are killing millions of jobs" are joining "there is no such thing as global warming" and "evolution is false" as destroyers of "conservatives" in academia: *Paul Krugman: "Today's column has nothing directly to do with... the puzzling failure of wages to grow faster despite what look like tight labor markets https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/04/opinion/conservative-free-speech.html...
...But there is an aspect of the debate that is linked, I think.
I was going to tell the conference that the debate over how to make sense of wage stagnation is pretty non-ideological, as such things go. But that's not really right: because it's a debate taking place almost entirely among center-left economists https://www.gc.cuny.edu/CUNY_GC/media/LISCenter/pkrugman/pk_gc_inequality.pdf. The thing is, there are quite a few conservative economists, certainly compared with other academic fields. But when it comes to inflation issues, that side of the profession basically blew itself up in 2009-2010. Almost every well-known figure on that side predicted that the Obama administration and the Fed's attempts to fight mass unemployment would produce runaway inflation; and as far as anyone has been able to tell, none of them have admitted that they were wrong. And I guess if you went all-out in declaring that Ben Bernanke was debasing the dollar with easy money in 2010, and won't admit you were wrong or learn from your error, you're not going to be able to make useful interventions on the question of what's holding wages down now.
So when @delong asks http://www.bradford-delong.com/2018/06/the-wise-and-thoughtful-dan-nexon-gets-this-i-think-exactly-right-the-question-is-why-is-conservatism-intellectually-irre.html why conservatives have become intellectually irrelevant in so many disciplines, here's an example of that happening in real time...
