Apparently in the world of establishment economics the best path to success is to fail upwards; Paul Krugman is the proof.

Outside of financial circles the majority of people don't know or care who Krugman is, but it's a mistake to dismiss his influence within the mainstream media and politics.  You will hear many of his arguments repeated by human parrots when you least expect it.  His faulty narratives and illogical conclusions tend to spread into regular dinner table conversation in the weirdest ways.

His best known terrible prediction is perhaps his internet prophecy.  In 1998 he predicted that the growth of the web would 'slow drastically' and would have little overall meaning for the global economy, comparing the internet to the fax machine in terms of relevance.  This might seem like a harmless fail today, but the problem is not the prediction, it's the fact that Krugman consistently proves that he is arrogant enough to venture wild analysis on subjects he has zero understanding of.  This is a characteristic that has followed him around for most of his career. 

Another habit of Paul Krugman is his propensity to flip-flop on every economic issue so that when the consequences of events become readily clear he then searches through his backlog of hundreds of contradictory editorials and contradictory comments to find the one prediction that fits the bill; he then proclaims himself the great prognosticator of crisis or recovery depending on whatever happens first.