ERIC GAY/THE THE NEW YORK TIMES

An officer with the Texas Department of Public Safety patrols the border between the United States and Mexico near Mission, Texas.

KEITH MEYERS/THE NEW YORK TIMES

A tugboat approaches the Hyundai Glory container vessel to help guide it under the Bayonne Bridge in New Jersey.

Paul Krugman joined The New York Times in 1999 as a columnist on the Op-Ed page and continues as a professor of economics and international affairs at Princeton University. He was awarded the Nobel in economic science in 2008. Mr. Krugman is the author or editor of 21 books and more than 200 papers in professional journals and edited volumes. His latest book is End This Depression Now!

DEBATING POLITICS, ECONOMICS AND OTHER TIMELY TOPICS WITH PAUL KRUGMAN OF THE NEW YORK TIMES FRIDAY, JULY 24, 2015

Some years ago, I facetiously sug-gested on CNN that we should invent a fake threat from space aliens in order to break the destructive ob-session with deficits and create the fiscal stimulus that the American economy so badly needed. (Watch the video here: huff.to/q6gHGM although the idea came from an epi-sode of The Outer Limits, not the Twilight Zone.) No one followed up on my suggestion. But something along the same lines is now going on in Texas.

Texas is a Medicaid-rejection state officials there have refused to accept billions of federal dollars to help the states less fortunate. But money for a largely pointless border-protection project? Now youre talking.

According to an article from Bloomberg: In Rio Grande City, named for the river that splits the U.S. from Mexico, footpaths cut from the brush by drug smugglers and illegal immigrants have a new look, rehabbed into family-friendly hike-and-bike trails. Now that the state has authorized $800 million to ratchet up security on the Mexico line, more troopers are on their way to deliver another shot to what might be the biggest stimulus program this needy part of Texas has ever seen. (Read it here: bloom.bg/1J1HWvb.)

This really is Keynes and burying bottles of cash in coal mines: Spend-ing that actually helps people is un-acceptable, but pure waste is O.K.

The Inconceivable Success of Obamacare

For my sins, I recently attended FreedomFest, the libertarian con-clave in Las Vegas, and debated Ste-phen Moore from the Heritage Foun-dation. It went pretty much as you might expect: evidence, evidence, evidence versus Reagan, Reagan, Reagan. But in a way, the most inter-esting thing was the audience reac-tion when I described the Affordable Care Act as a major success story so far: boos and hisses.

Whats amazing about this is that the good news about Obamacare isnt really debatable. Its a simple fact that there has been a stunningly rapid drop in the number of unin-sured Americans, and the evidence is coming from multiple independent sources. Its also a simple fact that outlays on Medicaid and exchange subsidies are coming in well below projections.

You can argue that this is all tem-porary, that insurance premiums will eventually skyrocket, even though they havent yet, or that the laws predicted death spiral will come back from the, er, dead. But Obamacare is, by any measure, do-ing better than even its supporters expected.

Of course, this wasnt supposed to happen and, therefore, given the epistemology of the modern Ameri-can right, it didnt. Failure was in-evitable, success inconceivable so failure must have happened.

PAUL KRUGMAN

A Wasteful Project Takes Precedence Over Public Health

Earlier this year, lawmakers in Texas passed a series of bills allot-ting $800 million for security mea-sures along the states border with Mexico. Initiatives include a new 5,000-acre training center for bor-der security officers, funding for heavily increased helicopter sur-veillance and the hiring of several hundred new law-enforcement per-sonnel, who will be paid salaries well above the average income in the border region.

Much of the funding will flow into the Rio Grande Valley, which borders Mexico and includes some of the nations poorest areas Starr County, for example, has a median household income of about $24,000. News reports have sug-gested that many residents in the region are hopeful that spend-ing on border security will have a

long-term economic impact as new personnel frequent local business-es and build houses in towns along the border. Tax revenues in Rio Grande City, Starr Countys coun-ty seat, for instance, are expected to rise with each new wave of per-sonnel that is hired.

However, critics of the border legislation have charged that Tex-as is wasting money on an issue that no longer warrants so much spending, given that the number of undocumented immigrants appre-hended from Mexico has dropped dramatically from 1.6 million ar-rests in 2000 to 230,000 last year.

Proponents of the bills have cit-ed crime reduction as a major aim of the spending program, but the crime rate in the Rio Grande Val-ley is also lower than in previous years, according to government

statistics.Much of the momentum behind

the new security initiatives is of-ten attributed to the large, tempo-rary influx of undocumented im-migrants who began arriving on the border from Central Ameri-ca in 2014. The migration, which largely consisted of unaccompa-nied children fleeing violence in their home countries, was strongly criticized by state Republican law-makers during the recent election campaign.

Though that immigration wave has subsided, Republicans have attempted to crack down on so-called sanctuary cities mu-nicipalities that have chosen not to enforce immigration laws and end the states policy of providing in-state college tuition rates for un-documented immigrants.

BACKSTORY

Texas Spends Big on Border SecurityAll we have to do is trick the Re-

publicans into believing some fake threat, and they will create jobs!

Fooling conservatives should not be too difficult, given that a bunch of people in Texas recently thought that a standard military exercise was really a federal invasion meant to take their guns.

B., VIRGINIA

This situation actually confirms what I have suspected for a while: If we want serious stimulus, we have to elect a Republican president. After that, the G.O.P. will stop ob-sessing over spending. All this anti-deficit drivel is just a smart strategy aimed at preventing President Obama from doing what Republi-cans themselves want to do.

G.J.C., IOWA

Remember that this is Texas, after all. Its a state that requires

a picture ID at the polls in order to combat a nonexistent wave of voter fraud. But while a student ID is not acceptable, a concealed-weapon card is.

BOB DOBBS, CALIFORNIA

Have we forgotten the Y2K scare? The threat that computer systems would crash in 2000 drove a very broad-based technological reboot across public and private sectors. It had the right balance of vagueness and existential panic, and the scare had a clear deadline that also served as a point at which we could all relax. It even helped pull older workers back into key posi-tions.

It would be an interesting exer-cise to figure out how much of the economic momentum of the last few years of the Clinton administration can be attributed to that one threat.

TODD, HONG KONG

We already solved our problem with illegal immigration from Mex-ico and the rest of Latin America: We exported to Asia the millions of entry-level jobs that those im-migrants used to seek. And then we blew up our economy with a massive financial fraud and panic. Today, net immigration on our southern border is approximately zero.

N., MINNESOTA

More security means immi-grants will resort to even more dangerous routes, leading to more smugglers, more crime and more death.

A.P., CONNECTICUT

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

A Fake Threat Might Spark Some Progress

ONLINE: COMMENTS Comments have been edited for clarity and length. For Paul Krugmans latest thoughts and to join the debate online, visit his blog at krugman.blogs.nytimes.com.

So many interlocking pieces make up our complex domestic and international systems. They depend on each other, and they must work within acceptable parameters or the entire system falls apart. It is all frighteningly fragile.

NAME WITHHELD, OHIO

Mr. Krugman, your encounter along the New Jersey Turnpike stirred your awareness of the realities of the worlds economic future. I also hope it will turn your focus toward the future of transport.

History shows that transporta-

tion is the most important influence on the American economy. And through the years, we have come to greatly rely on hydrocarbon-fueled, rubber-wheeled vehicles traveling on paved highways.

But this system has become too congested, too dangerous and too dependent on the planets finite re-sources.

We have to keep in mind that ef-ficiency is the principal factor in the successive replacement of transport technology. Horses gave way to canals; canals were replaced by railways; railways were replaced

by cars, trucks and aircraft. Each system grew reasonably fast, until a more efficient technology was in-troduced.

JAMES JORDAN, VIRGINIA

In other words, Mr. Krugman, your message is to look out the window once in a while something many policy makers and pundits often fail to do.

STEVE, NEW ZEALAND

I think success in understand-ing just how the economy works in a larger sense comes not from the intellectual agility one demon-strates in developing little models, but from the humility with which one approaches the task.

NEALE ADAMS, CANADA

I had a similar feeling while fly-ing over Lower Manhattan a year after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Even though I was familiar with the geography below, I had to search for ground zero.

I realized that as painful the at-tacks were, they were limited to a small portion of Lower Manhattan, which is only one-fifth of New York City, which itself is dwarfed by the rest of the tri-state area, all of which could probably fit into a county in Texas.

NAME WITHHELD, NEW JERSEY

Mr. Krugman, the stylized little models and the economic truths behind them are what support all the software that drives the pano-

ply you saw before you. As we each do our part in the

maintenance of our ever-expanding virtual universe, it behooves us to take off the blinders every once and a while and look around.

This is why vacations were in-vented.

R. LAW, TEXAS

When I became an assistant professor in 1982, undergradu-ate students could legally drink beer, and faculty were expected to occasionally mingle with them. I re-member that at one fraternity event, a student turned to me and asked: What are you majoring in?

So on came the beard, which Ive had for the last three decades.

JONATHAN WIGHT, VIRGINIA

READER COMMENTS FROM NYTIMES.COM

A Necessary Perspective

On a recent Friday, I drove from Vermont to New York, but as usual avoided driving into Manhattan and parked at Secaucus Junction, a quick train ride into the city and a good jumping-off point for a drive to Princeton, N.J.

As I headed south from Secaucus on my way to Princeton a couple of days later, I had one of those mo-ments when the sheer scale of the world economy hit me.

The vista: in front of me the New Jersey Turnpike, 12 lanes wide at this point, and already full of trucks early in the morning. On the right, Newark Liberty International Air-port only one of three airports in the New York metro area with many planes taking off and landing. On the left, the massive cranes of the Elizabeth container port marching off into the distance.

These days New York is only one

of many huge metropolitan centers across the globe. The scale of the whole thing is, more or less, incon-ceivable, in the sense that nobody can picture the reality of our getting and spending.

Maybe the reason that this real-ization hits me now and then is that in my normal line of work I analyze this gigantic system using little stylized models that reduce its vast-ness to a couple of intersecting lines. And thats O.K. people who reject stylized models invariably end up relying, whether they know it or not, on implicit models that are even less realistic because the assumptions underlying them go unexamined. Furthermore, those stylized mod-els have been hugely successful in recent years, predicting the quies-cence of inflation and interest rates, the adverse effects of austerity and more.

But every once in a while, it does seem worthwhile to contemplate the enormity of the system were talking about.

No Shaving GraceSerious matters are afoot, but I

dont know if theres anything more I can say about them right now. So, on to a subject where I think I can make a useful intervention: Peter Dormans query about why so many economists wear beards (read his blog post here: bit.ly/1CZdywR).

Actually, other economists, in ad-dition to Mr. Dorman, have asked the same question and found that bearded Nobelists are not quite as prevalent as one might have thought.

Mostly its about the impression conveyed by myself and Joseph Sti-glitz, although Simon Wren-Lewis has an even more impressive dis-

play.But to the extent that there is a pat-

tern here, it basically comes down to the whiz-kid culture of economics, in which careers can take off very quickly and ones appearance may not have kept up with ones pro-fessional reputation.

In my case, I grew my beard when I was 26, and it was definitely a de-fensive move. There I was, writing what I hoped were groundbreaking papers everything everyone has said about international trade is wrong! and looking like an undergraduate. (Seriously when I went to see a colleague once, some of the students waiting to see him complained that I was cutting ahead of the line.) So I was looking for a bit of hairy gravitas.

And by the time I no longer needed that gravitas, the beard had become part of my persona.

PAUL KRUGMAN

Reflections on a Vast Economic System