In his Friday New York Times column, economist Paul Krugman exploded the myth that success in business necessarily means a firmer grasp of the basic principles required to manage an economy.
He granted that Trump is in fact successful, despite the fact that he is "a clear case of someone born on third base who imagines that he hit a triple," as he "inherited a fortune, and it’s far from clear that he has expanded that fortune any more than he would have if he had simply parked the money in an index fund."
Krugman contended that "[e]ven genuinely brilliant businesspeople are often clueless about economic policy," largely because "a country is nothing like a corporation, and running a national economy is nothing like running a business." For example:
Last fall, the now-presumed Republican nominee declared: “Our wages are too high. We have to compete with other countries.”
The truth is that wage cuts are the last thing America needs right now: We sell most of what we produce to ourselves, and wage cuts would hurt domestic sales by reducing purchasing power and increasing the burden of private-sector debt...
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