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Venturing predictions of large-scale socioeconomic trends is part and parcel of what economists do, so for members of that august profession the odds are fairly high that now and again one will be required to eat one's own words. Sometimes those words will even be served back to one on a silver platter, as in the case of Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, who thanks to the Internet, will probably never live down a prediction he allegedly once made about the Internet. The quote is so infamous, in fact, that it has turned into a meme often wielded against him by people hoping to discredit other pronouncements Krugman has made: It has also made the rounds in a slightly longer version: The prediction was wildly inaccurate in either form, obviously. Internet growth has done nothing but boom since the late 1990s. And although the fax machine was a crucial innovation that increased the speed and affordability of inter-office communications everywhere, the economic effects of the Internet — which has come to play a central role in virtually every aspect of life in every developed country — have been nothing short of transformative. As of this writing, the market capitalization of Google, Amazon, and Facebook alone is more than $700 billion, which is more than the GDP of all but eighteen countries, observed Freakonomics authors Steven D. Levitt, Stephen J. Dubner in a 2014 takedown of Krugman's prediction. If you throw in Apple, which isn't an Internet company but couldn't exist without it, the market cap is $1.2 trillion. That could buy a lot of fax machines. That Krugman wrote the passage isn't under dispute, so much as where and when he wrote it. In an e-mail to Business Insider in 2013, Krugman said it was part of a piece he contributed to New York Times Magazine in 1998: The magazine celebrated its 100th anniversary in 1996, not 1998, however, and although Krugman did write a piece for the 29 September 1996 edition that matches the above description, it did not contain a passage contrasting the effect of the Internet to that of the fax machine. Levitt and Dubner correctly cited an article by Krugman in the 10 June 1998 issue of Red Herring magazine as the actual source of the quote: When we asked Krugman about the confusion over the provenance of the quote, he said he couldn't remember writing the Red Herring article, but he didn't shy from admitting his mistake:
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