Economist Paul Krugman was arrested today for urinating on a teddy bear belonging to the 6-year-old daughter of rival economist Kenneth Rogoff.
According to police in Cambridge, Mass., Krugman stole the bear from a window sill at the Rogoff family home and was relieving himself on it when a passing police officer caught him.
Krugman had intended to return the pee-soaked bear to the window sill as part of a long running feud with Rogoff and his collaborator Carmen Reinhart over the merits of austerity.
According to witnesses the Nobel Prize winning trade economist resisted arrest and was shouting pro-Keynesian slogans to the officer and the onlookers.
"This motherf****r said output growth slowed when public debt rose above 90 percent of GDP, but he was f*****g wrong," Krugman told the police officer, "and you're arresting me? This little bitch falsifies his data, and somehow I'm the f*****g criminal?"
Behavioral Economics
Krugman has a long running feud with Rogoff and Reinhart, who in 2010 co-authored a paper which argued that excessive government debt slowed economic growth. That paper has since been found to contain numerous factual and methodological errors, and Krugman has not missed an opportunity to publicly blast his rivals' mistakes.
The disagreement took a new turn last weekend when the Harvard duo called Krugman out for his highly negative and personal attacks, deeming it "spectacularly uncivil behavior." Rather than back down, however, Krugman escalated the dispute by flying to Boston and bringing the fight to Rogoff's doorstep.
"This isn't sociology, this is economics," Krugman explained in an exclusive interview from the Middlesex County jail. "Economics is a motherf*****g war, and I'm a motherf*****g soldier.
"If this little coward didn't want his daughter's teddy bear involved in this s**t, then maybe he should have thought twice before he published a study that called into question my own personal beliefs about the relationship between public debt and growth."
Krugman is expected to be charged with public urination for the bear incident and defacement of private property for spray-painting the equation "AD = C + I + G + (X-M)" on Rogoff's garage door.
For her part, young Lindsey Rogoff says it will be hard to find a replacement for the teddy bear she called Samantha.
"It was my most favorite stuffed animal," she says. "Daddy said he was sorry. I don't know why Mr. Krugman has to be so mean."
