Nobel Laureate Said the Internet Would Be "No Greater Than the Fax Machine." The Internet Is Now a $17 Trillion Industry.

Writing for The Red Herring magazine in an article titled "Why Most Economists' Predictions Are Wrong" (the irony writes itself), Krugman confidently declared that the internet was overhyped and would soon be revealed as economically insignificant. His reasoning? People have nothing to say to each other. The article ran just as Amazon was preparing to dominate retail, Google was being founded in a garage, and the entire world economy was about to be rebuilt around the technology he dismissed. By 2024, the global internet economy exceeded $17 trillion annually. E-commerce alone hit $6.3 trillion. The fax machine industry, meanwhile, is worth approximately $1.8 billion and declining. Krugman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2008 — the same year Facebook hit 100 million users and the iPhone App Store launched. He has since admitted he "doesn't remember writing" the piece but was "trying to be provocative." Mission accomplished.