Damn you, Paul Krugman!

I'd been planning a post drawing an analogy between the way certain academics forced the data to fit their models and the efforts made in the dying days of the Ptolemaic system. I guess the bloom is off that one.

Nobel Prize winners who work on Saturday are just showing off.

You can, if you’re desperate, try to explain this away by saying that there was some fundamental structural change in the early 1970s, but at that point you’re deep into epicycle territory. And there’s more — for example, Ireland went abruptly from having a stable real exchange rate against the UK to having a stable rate against Germany when it joined the European exchange rate mechanism, etc..

[Emphasis added.]