Good ideas do not need lots of lies in order to gain public acceptance (2008)

Summary

Economics and similar, for the sleep-deprived A subtle change has been made to the comments links, so they no longer pop up. Does this in any way help with the problem about comments not appearing on permalinked posts, readers? Update: seemingly notUpdate: Oh yeah! Thursday, May 27, 2004 Update, September 2008. Hullo there Paul Krugman readers. Yes, I did say "Good ideas do not need lots of lies told about them in order to gain public acceptance", and as a general maxim I wholeheartedly recommend it. I don't necessarily, however, either endorse or whatever-the-opposite-of-endorse the specific use of that maxim in the context of Prof. Krugman's post about the Paulson bailout plan; I don't actually have a fully formed view about that plan. I do, however, wholeheartedly endorse "Development, Geography and Economic Theory", which I think is a terribly underrated economics book, and am at this moment rather starstruck at having one of my essays admired by the nearest modern equivalent to my hero JK Galbraith. Anyway, as you were; by way of context, the post below was written just as a lot of high-profile commentators like Thomas Friedman were abandoning their support for the Iraq War.The D-Squared Digest One Minute MBA - Avoiding Projects Pursued By Morons 101Literally people have been asking me: "How is it that you were so amazingly prescient about Iraq? Why is it that you were right about everything at precisely the same moment when we were wrong?" No honestly, they have. I'd love to show you the emails I've received, there were dozens of them, honest. Honest. Anyway, I note that "errors of prewar planning" is now pretty much a mainstream stylised fact, so I suspect that it might make some small contribution to the commonweal if I were to explain how it was that I was able to spot so early that this dog wasn't going to hunt. I will struggle manfully with the savage burden of boasting, self-aggrandisement and ego-stroking that this will necessarily involve. It's been do...