COMPARISON: Krugmenistan vs. Estonia. “In his blog post, Krugman started his graph—and his logic—when Estonia’s GDP had reached its peak, in 2007. Wages were high, and unemployment was low. Good for most citizens, and for most citizens now things are still worse than they were then. But if you move Krugman’s graph all the way back to 2000, you see slow, steady growth in GDP, then a short boom, then a hard crash, and now growth leveling back off to where it would have been without the boom. In the boom years, says Varblane, ‘GDP growth was not real. It was artificial,’ fueled by cheap debt from abroad. The peak, Krugman’s point of comparison, was not ‘real,’ he says. That Estonia has not reached it again is a good thing, Varblane and Ligi say. It never should have been there in the first place.”