Now, I'm an undergrad, and not in econ, so I may or may not have any idea what I'm doing here or talking about, but after lurking for a while I came across what seems to be some really bad econ, and decided to make that my first R1.

I came across a poor review of Paul Krugman's End this Depression Now!.

This person begins their attack on the Krug with the following:

Krugman states that he started to see problems developing in the American economy in 2003. I noticed that September twelfth 2001 was considered by some major American firms to be a good day to bury bad news. Even more of them buried their bad news on September thirteenth 2001. At that point I knew the American economy was sliding to a crash, which had nothing to do with the events of September eleventh.

But that's just the teaser. Here's where the R1 material really starts:

Since major companies in Ireland, from Waterford Glass to Philips, were already sending manufacturing to Eastern Europe or China and computer work to India, where labour, rent and electricity were cheaper, I knew the boom was essentially over.

Adding,

The economist doesn't seem to understand that manufacturing has shifted to Asia, mainly China.

Stepping aside from the Free Trade and "outsourcing" shtick that I don't know nearly well enough ("Comparative Advantages" and "Specialization" and all that, and from what I've gleaned from people like Krugman and James Kwak, globalization has had negative and non-trivial effects on developed nations), this person, I think, must hold the view that the entire world economy for the last 20 years or so (given by how the recovery is going) depends on the housing market as its linchpin.

Regardless of the implications later on that "strict enviromental regulations" have a part to play in this, the first thing that really caught my eye was:

Consumption has screeched to a halt.

If we define this as consumer spending, then LOL (Since I don't like playing with CSV mumbo-jumbo, here's Wolfram Alpha's data).

Krugman admits that rich people are becoming richer while the middle class are shrinking down to the poorer end of the scale. Yet he likes rich people because they spend.

Are we talking about the same Marxist-Leninist Paul Krugman here? Two years before writing this book, here's him on tax cuts for the rich. Also, "End of the scale" sounds suspiciously like "share of total" rather than in "relative year-to-year" total.

But the really rich do not have money by spending it.

TIL Bill Gates is the reigning penny-pinching world champion.

They buy property and resources. Property to rent and to push up the cost of property for home and business owners.

Uh, I'm not quite sure what to make of this. What immediately came to mind was Piketty's r > g, and how housing fits in to this. But to me it's really just sounds like "rich people buy capital so poor people can't get it cheaply".

Further on, the poster berates Krugman for failing to understand the impact of QE, apparently. And then:

In Britain, their quantitative easing which he doesn't mention, is done by paying civil servants with imaginary money, topping up their bank accounts with wages that have no gold behind them.

Even the BBC know what QE is. Also apprently most of Britain consists of civil servants. I'll leave the gold buggery alone.

But it is the last paragraph that really outdoes itself:

Krugman doesn't say what infrastructure he would recommend - in a world of rising seas, governments are having to consider sea barriers and shore evacuations. Why renovate a city you may have to abandon? Krugman also doesn't realise that everyone now hates the banks, so they are not taking out loans. As I write the European Central Bank has reduced its base interest rate to zero.

This was not the only bad econ review (of this particular book), but so many of the others were not even wrong. The rest of the one-star reviews just have him as a neoliberal shill or a lapdog for the (((Banksters))).