Consistently confident and consistently wrong.

I don't know why, but some people are pointing out Making the Most of the Coming Biden Boom by Paul Krugman from November 19th, 2020 just after Biden's election.  The subheading is The economic outlook is probably brighter than you think.

It is useful to have public intellectuals either generating new ideas or amplifying those of others.  But a little bit of accountability would be nice.

Krugman made the following forecast in his comparable NYT piece, The Economic Fallout (November 9, 2016) four years earlier following the election of Donald Trump as president.  

If the question is when markets will recover, a first-pass answer is never.

As Wikiquote usefully points out, "Markets recovered the following day."

He is obviously a smart guy (Nobel Laureate in Economics and all), but it has been obvious for a couple of decades that Krugman's opinion pieces are partisan rather than driven by that expert economic knowledge.

If his ideological orientations underpinned his accuracy, that wouldn't be too much of an issue.  If Democrats always produce better economic outcomes than Republicans, he would be right but perhaps for wrong reasons.

As it is, he is simply wrong.  Trump was elected, Krugman forecast economic doom and he was proven spectacularly wrong.  A boom economy followed.  Biden was elected, Krugman forecast economic boom and has been proven spectacularly wrong.  Economic catastrophe followed.

To be fair, while Trump had strong market instincts and government deregulatory policies, he also had strong protectionist instincts that got translated into policy as well.  There were reasons to believe that the economy would do well under him, as it did, but there were also reasons to be concerned.  An ambivalent forecast would have been justified.  That was not the road Krugman took.  He was mistakenly confident in economic disaster.  

We have a pundit making very confident economic forecasts under two entirely different scenarios, for clearly partisan reasons and in both cases he has been dramatically wrong.

Why are we reading him?  

And to be clear, I quit reading his pieces for these very reasons fifteen years or more ago.  But others still appear to accord him some degree of credibility for reasons I don't comprehend.