Mike Konczal has kindly reposted my back-of-the-envelope estimate of how much a dollar devaluation would boost US demand. (Spoiler: Not much.)
I am far from an expert on international trade and exchange rates. (Or on anything else.) Maybe some real economist will see the post and explain why it’s all wrong. But until then, I’m going to continue asking why Krugman and others who claim that exchange rates are an important cause of unemployment in this country, never provide any quantitative analysis to back that opinion up.
More abstractly, one might ask: Is the time it takes for demand to respond to changes in relative prices, minus the time it takes for exchange rate changes to move relative prices, greater than the time it takes for exchange rates changes to move relative costs (or to be reversed)? Just because freshwater economists say No for a bad reason (because relative costs adjust instantly) doesn’t mean the answer isn’t actually No for a good reason.