I think Krugman is both brilliant and blinded by his own brilliance. Krugman&#x27;s focus on economic data blinds him to the second and third order consequences of worldwide trade. In particular, trade outside borders allows schemes for hiding income, evading taxes, harming particular groups of people, undermining governments, ignoring social values (eg. climate change, workplace safety, quality of life for workers, wages) and amassing fortunes for multi-billionaires who then create even more problems. If that weren&#x27;t enough, there are still many &quot;fuzzy&quot; areas of economics, and I think that many of those areas are fuzzy precisely because they are so complex due to the &quot;open systems&quot; created by free trade (unlike &quot;closed systems&quot; which can be controlled by a nation&#x27;s laws and monitored using modern Big Data techniques.) So, while Krugman is brilliant, he is also very flawed - dragged down by the very data that he understands so well. But isn&#x27;t that always the case for technocrats?