Paul Krugman Awarded Nobel Prize For Economics 425
zogger writes in his journal, "The guy who put together the concept of geographical location combined with cheap transportation leading to 'like trades with like' and the rise of superindustrial trading blocs has won the Nobel economics science prize. He's a bigtime critic of a lot of this administration's policies, and is unabashedly an FDR-economy styled fella. Here is his blog at the NYTimes." Reader yoyoq adds that Krugman's career choice was inspired by reading Asimov's Foundation series at a young age.
Seems like a very cool guy (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=13102008&seg=5 [pbs.org]
Re:Seems like a very cool guy (Score:5, Informative)
I had a real respect for him when he mentioned he was inspired by Asimov.
For more geek cred: while at Princeton in 1978, Krugman wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper titled The Theory of Interstellar Trade [princeton.edu] (PDF) (see Slashdot article [slashdot.org] on it).
Re:Seems like a very cool guy (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Seems like a very cool guy (Score:4, Funny)
Won't be long now before the Chinese will be telling the US "All your business belong to us"
Re:He Doesn't Like Globalization (Score:4, Informative)
You need to read a little bit more of Krugman's stuff before you spout off about it.
Hell, how about the wikipedia article: Paul Krugman [wikipedia.org]: "He was critical of industrial policy (an approach Clinton later dropped under the influence of Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers) and argued in favor of free trade. (He writes on p. xxvi of his book The Great Unraveling that 'I still have the angry letter Ralph Nader sent me when I criticized his attacks on globalization.')"
Deserved (Score:5, Insightful)
Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:3, Insightful)
My point, of course, is that whining about agenda is a symptom of feeling the need crying bias about other people's ideas/opinions. Apparently we, intelligent beings, have come so far that we'd rather just bitch about bias than have a worthwhile discourse.
In summary
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Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:5, Interesting)
Conservative talk radio is consistent? Actually let's put this in context. [fill in the blank] talk radio is consistent?
One thing that people have to remember is that conservatives more likely than not are not going to win awards. And that liberals will...
Think hard about this. What is a conservative? Somebody who believes in their ideals and fundamentals. Thus they are not thinking about the future, but the past.
On the other hand a liberal challenges the notion of today and looks at what could be.
A conservative today is yesterday's liberal.
Go back in history and look at conservative stances, and liberal stances.
Women rights: Conservative of 2000 would say hey yes why not. Liberal of 1800 would say "hey yes why not." Conservative of 1800 would say, "blasphemy"
So you see, a conservative will always be two or three, or four steps behind the real action...
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:5, Informative)
A true economic conservative is someone who believes in traditional economic liberalism. (Liberalism used to mean 'freedomism'.)
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Marting Luther King, Jr. also Republican, died for his Ideals and Fundamentals.
Ron Paul doesn't seem to be steps behind the real action on the economic bust and the problems that interventionist policy causes. He stood up and told the truth to the Republican party about terrorism and the economy. He stood on his Ideals
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:5, Informative)
Thank you. I am moderately conservative, in the old Goldwater sense. I, and many like me, want nothing to do with that hatemongering lying bastards that have taken over the label of 'conservative'. 'Conservative' used to mean wanting incremental, cautious change, keeping what works, and being cautious about expanding the mission of government.
The label conservative, these days, means 'radical religious nationalist'. It has nothing to do with the traditional ethos of small government and individual freedoms.
Changing the subject slightly, I will note that I agree with Krugman more often than I disagree, and I think that a lot of careful economic analysis shows that more governmental intervention may be in the best interests of most of society. I would like to see us cautiously move in this direction.
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:4, Insightful)
My point, of course, is that whining about agenda is a symptom of feeling the need crying bias about other people's ideas/opinions
Right, just like Einstein's theory of relativity is a symptom of his hatred of Newton. The other option is that the nobel committee has a clear bias towards what Americans view as the left, and people who point that out are doing so in an attempt to find the truth. Or, in other words, you're showing your own bias by your attack. If he's wrong, point it out, but the fact that he's crying "bias" just implies that he's of the opinion that they're biased, not that he feels insecure.
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:5, Interesting)
"The other option is that the nobel committee has a clear bias towards what Americans view as the left,"
No.
The Nobel Prizes are Scandinavian institutions. To Scandinavians, what Americans think is "left" looks like extreme far right wing kookery, and what Americans think is "right" is simply beyond the pale.
Americans have no business talking about the left and the right in terms of their own politics which is extremely right wing, extremely religious and extremely authoritarian compared to the rest of the world's democracies. You guys need to realize that it's you that are out of step and it is your politics that is weird and kooky.
How's that then. You've made the Canadians look normal!! Hang your heads in shame.
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:4, Informative)
I think that the one major difference is the universal (or social if you prefer) healthcare that exists in most European countries. Beyond that, I don't think that there are any major differences that I can think of off the top of my head, but I'm sure some European slashdot readers could provide a few more examples.
For the most part, things probably aren't that different. I think that the whole thing is just some meme started by Europeans to mock Americans (as though there weren't already enough reasons.) some more. There's certainly a larger difference on the social scale, but that really doesn't have much to do with economically left or right. You could be a completely socialist country or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
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or a completely free market country and still legalize prostitution, marijuana, abortions, etc.
"still"?
There is a fundamental contradiction between being a fiscal and social conservative. One requires a belief that government should be small and weak with reducing regulations and laws. The other requires that the government be large and strong with increasing regulation and laws. The American definition of Liberal is equally contradictory; greater freedom through greater regulation...
These contradictions exist because the political system is one dimensional; left and right, and the political system i
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:5, Informative)
Granted to the US is to the right of europe, buts funny you mention this because there really isnt a nobel peace prize in economics. This award established in 1968 by a bank with a lot of political pull. Its not a Nobel award. It just lifts the name. The name of this award is: The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. [wikipedia.org]
So in other words you're criticizing the US by holding up a questionable award which only exists because of authoritarian political clout by a financial institution in 1960s Sweden? Pot meet Kettle.
Re:Agenda: It's everywhere! (Score:4, Insightful)
The truth is, for better or worse, most people that remain in academia (and generally speaking, most people with high levels of education) tend to lean left. Blame academic bias, truth, or tradition as you choose, it doesn't matter; it's probably a bit of all three, honestly. Regardless, since a) academics usually win Nobels, and b) most academics lean left, the fact that those that win Nobels lean left is not a matter of bias on the part of the judges, it's just what happens when your pick winners from a pre-skewed population.
In other words, move along, folks, there's nothing to see here.
Hayek and Friedman got one too (Score:2, Insightful)
Does that mean the Nobel people endorse all their political viewpoints? Even though I might agree they were more deserving.
Krugman, is getting a nod for specific contributions to economic theory, not full approval of a progressive worldview. And in many specific areas of global free trade, Krugman is closer to Friedman than the duds who will be inheriting the current mess. (And likely to make it worse, I might add)
But Krugman's worthiness in economic theory should not be diminished just because he is a stin
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Does that mean the Nobel people endorse all their political viewpoints?
Since Al Gore and Yasir Arafat, it seems like political viewpoint is the most important thing for consideration for a Nobel prize.
Re:Hayek and Friedman got one too (Score:5, Informative)
Good job confusing the Nobel Peace Prize, the Prize in Economics, and the scientific Nobel Prizes, which are selected by different groups and with different criteria.
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Re:Hayek and Friedman got one too (Score:5, Informative)
There is no Nobel prize in Economics. It's an associated prize, "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", was instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sveriges_Riksbank_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences_in_Memory_of_Alfred_Nobel [wikipedia.org]
Re:Hayek and Friedman got one too (Score:4, Insightful)
The Peace Prize is usually awarded for a recent achievement, or for a lifetime of achievement that is sort of continuing to the present day. If you look at the winners you'll see that they almost always fall into one of these two camps.
As for Arafat, as usual this complaint is provided with no context. I'm not sure how many of the people that raise this issue even know the context, I suspect they just have heard it mentioned and have no idea what the circumstances were. Arafat was awarded the prize jointly with Shimon Peres and Yitzak Rabin after the Oslo Accords were made. It was awarded for a specific and very recent achievement, and while the peace process has not exactly been successful most of the elements in those agreements are still being worked towards. This is the same reason Henry Kissinger won the award, for negotiating peace with Vietnam.
So while you might argue that only really nice people should get the award, the reality is that people that can significantly affect peace in the world are often gigantic assholes. If you refused to recognize them then then you'd be unable to recognize major achievements in peace. Either way has some merit, I don't see anything particularly unreasonable about the path the Peace Prize has taken.
Re:Hayek and Friedman got one too (Score:5, Insightful)
Your Flame definitely shows the integrity (or lack thereof) of your arguments. I note that you condemn Yasir Arafat and not Shimon Peres or Yitzak Rabin.
economics is a soft science (Score:4, Insightful)
the issues involved are to some degree subjective. its not like physics where you can make a hard true or a hard false out of an issue
therefore, it is absolutely impossible to talk about economics without some sort of bias. of course there is blatant purposeful bias, and then there is an honest attempt at intellectual honesty, in spite of the bit of bias we all have
everyone serious realizes this. then there is sort of paranoid partisan type that sees agendas and bias everywhere they look. this kind of hysterical approach to the subject matter only cheapens you, so you need to lose your hypersensitivity to the issue of bias, you only make yourself look foolish
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This really requires mentioning that the prize in Economics is not one of the Nobel Prizes, though there is limited political influence on the selection. The more-often-criticized selection, the Peace Prize, has much heavier political influence, but is decided by a different committee and hosted by a different country.
The scientific Nobel Prizes are quite free of political agenda.
Re:Deserved (Score:5, Insightful)
Interesting...
Did you maybe happen to look at what he won his prize on?
It actually is a very interesting theory and idea...
Oh but wait he is a LIBERAL... and thus he can't have good ideas...
Re:Deserved (Score:4, Interesting)
Especially interesting is that the work Krugman won his prize for is about global free trade. Like most economists who've seriously studied the issue, Krugman has concluded that free trade is unabashedly a good thing.
But in the current U.S. political climate, free trade is mostly being touted by conservatives and reviled by liberals. So if you're a conservative and you want to claim liberal bias, you have to account for the fact that Krugman got the prize for work you probably agree with. And if you're a protectionist liberal who wants to boast, you're similarly stuck.
And if you're just generally tired of ideologues crowing about victory or whining about bias when neither is deserved, you can enjoy the whole spectacle of people getting tongue tied when someone wins the Nobel prize on (gasp) the strength of his ideas.
citation needed (Score:5, Informative)
Some supporting evidence making it hard to fit this prize into an ideological box...
In his popular writing, including his NY Times column, Krugman is a pretty outspoken liberal on most issues. But within his academic expertise -- which is what he won the prize for -- he is very willing to depart from liberal orthodoxy if that's where logic and evidence lead him.
Hari Seldon says... (Score:3, Funny)
Playing up his anti-Bush sentiment (Score:5, Insightful)
only serves to diminish the value of this award. IF he starts to link it to his political views, then he'll bring derision upon himself and the Nobel committee. But he doesn't need to, because in his prior life as an full-time economist he did work that was genuinely worthy of recognition. I've spoken with several conservative economists who admire that work, even as they wondered "what happened to him?"
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In Krugman's world, if you don't agree with him... be it economics, politics, whatever... you're not just wrong, you're an idiot.
Sounds like he'd fit in perfectly on Slashdot!
Re:Not just anti-Bush (Score:5, Funny)
I mean, if only he'd had the common decency to NOT predict the housing bubble, and the complete havoc it could wreak on our economy. Then everyone who told him he was totally wrong wouldn't be nursing their hurt feelings.
The sheer nerve of that guy!
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Really? Preach it brother - Name Names of those conservative economists that were screaming about the problems, yet being ignored by the Bush Administration and the Republican Congress!
Because I never heard anything from any of them - possibly they were too busy talking about how lowering taxes on the wealthy was going to generate an economic boom, the likes of which the world has never seen.
Pug
Flat earth... (Score:3, Informative)
...with the only speed bump being the Slashdot editing process. Seriously, this was in every newspaper PRINT edition before it showed up on Slashdot.
Re:Flat earth... (Score:5, Funny)
Nobody comes here to stay current with the news; we come here for discussion that's better than most other places.
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No, discussion is not better here than most other places. Sure, there are often a few informed people around, but far from always. Most science debates show that the average slashdotter doesn't have the slightest idea about what science is, for example. Most technology discussions show that there are loads of fanboys with mod points, and loads of people with nothing to say who know these fanboys have mod points, and go out to say whatever gives them their +5.
I come here mostly to flame.
We really should have listened to him 3 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Safe as Houses [nytimes.com]
A snippet (only 3 paragraphs to fall within fair use):
Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right.
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Re:We really should have listened to him 3 years a (Score:5, Insightful)
No. Everything you are crediting him with saying was WRONG.
In fact the US is the #1 manufacturer in the world, more than twice as much as #2, and several times ahead of the likes of China.
The notion that we are a nation that makes nothing but houses, is idiotic. Go anywhere in the world, and you'll see mostly US-made airplanes (Boeing), turbines (GE, Pratt&Whitney), heavy construction equipment (CAT, Mack, Peterbuilt, etc.), et al.
Nothing here predicts the US bank and lending market collapse. Quite the opposite really. In fact foreign lenders got the short end of the stick this time around, so they were the un-safe ones. He's only right that prices were ridiculously high, but that's a bit like predicting the sky will be blue in the future...
Re:We really should have listened to him 3 years a (Score:4, Interesting)
The most interesting paragraph from the Krugman article is this one:
Re:We really should have listened to him 3 years a (Score:5, Insightful)
Topics here have certainly been getting much more politicized than I recall them ever being before, and diverging from factual and technical discussion more than they used to. It's not over the past few weeks, however, it's been long in coming. There were complaints about the process a couple years ago. Introducing the YRO section just made the editors feel better about doing it more and more, and seemingly sped-up the process...
Technical discussions have become similarly undermined as well, as the demographics of /. have changed... With 90% of comments on technical stories being jokes, mindless anecdotes, and other clearly baseless nonsense that gets modded up.
But in both cases, for every 100 morons, there is still one very well informed individual occasionally posting a comment, and shedding important new light and context on a subject... So, IMHO, it's still worth staying, even as a signal-to-noise slowly increases.
I've seen repeated phases like this in the past as well. A few years ago, the trolls and flamers were winning, and discussions were even worse than they are now. It's just that now there seems little way to combat it, and it's rather condoned and encouraged by the editors, for the sake of more page views I assume. Hence the regular banalization of stories here.
But as I said, despite the increasing quantities of smoke, I'd still say the
That seems a strange comment to make. The hard core left-wing crowd that mindlessly bash everything from the right is just as bad, and, at least appear to be, far more numerous.
There are good ideas and bad ideas on both sides. But picking the good from the bad requires the kind of intelligent discussion of policy issues we haven't seen here in some time. Of course if you're buying into the political party nonsense, it's easy to think that everyone on the other side of an issue are drooling morons, while your side is always right...
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Slashdot long ago ceded the technical discussion high ground, simply because it lacks focus. It's difficult for any forum to maintain quality of both breadth and depth, and Slashdot has clearly gone for breadth.
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and Endless September dawns upon another soul.
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People can agree on one thing while disagreeing on another.
Details at 11.
It's not a Nobel Prize (Score:5, Informative)
There is no Nobel Prize in economics (Score:4, Informative)
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The prize was established by the Bank of Sweden but it's important to note that the winner is determined by the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, just like all the others except for the Peace Prize.
Re:There is no Nobel Prize in economics (Score:5, Informative)
Besides, it is on the Nobel website, equivalent to all the other prizes [nobelprize.org]. If it's good enough for them...
So you might be technically right, but only in the pedant's sense.
Re:There is no Nobel Prize in economics (Score:5, Informative)
It's not actually "good enough for them"
http://nobelprize.org/nomination/economics/nominators.html [nobelprize.org]
The Prize in Economics is not a Nobel Prize.
One more nobel winner anti-reaganmics (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet another nobel winner for a mixed economy which offers the general public a hedge against the risks taken for, say, entrepreneurial endeavors, trade policies which encourage the retention of jobs and the continuation of a healthy middle class, and regulations which will insure at least a basic check on corporate malfeasance and market consolidation.
How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?
Re:One more nobel winner anti-reaganmics (Score:5, Informative)
How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?
Humans are capable of believing untrue things for a very long time, even after reality begins to seriously challenge those beliefs. The Left has long-cherished beliefs (Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop). The Right has its long-cherished beliefs.
There are a lot of possible explanations why people are like that, but the more important thing is to engage those people by asking questions about the basis of their belief and learning yourself. If someone says something, and you don't know if it's true or not, take some effort to find out if it is. Most of the time, you can Google the issue and find a lot of people have done the hard work for you. You just have to verify if their logic is sound and inferences are valid.
Krugman, via his blog and columns, does try his best to do this. In fact, he often posts links to early versions of his papers and mathematics on his NY Times blog and lets his readers pick it apart. He and Tyler Cowan (a libertarian leaning economist) have very civil debates via their blogs.
Most *-wing sites simply tune out contrary voices with more chanting and weak arguments that bolster that community's feelings on right and wrong. In short: people judge arguments by its truthiness, not its validity.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not:
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That's a counterexample for "Unions are perfect", not for "Unions are good". I don't have any strong opinions on unions, one way or another, but I just hate to see a bogus argument go unchallenged.
Re:One more nobel winner anti-reaganmics (Score:4)
(Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop)
That's a counterexample for "Unions are perfect", not for "Unions are good". I don't have any strong opinions on unions, one way or another, but I just hate to see a bogus argument go unchallenged.
Touche! Excellent point, and good call on my straw man argument. :-)
We can tell if it worked. IT did. (Score:3, Interesting)
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
The point of Reagonomics was to increase the amount of goods that people have and can choose to have. The idea was to stimulate production by encouraging investment. To some extent, Reaganomics is the Karl Marx critique of capitalism applied full tilt - overproduction, based on the observation that, if you produce a ton of stuff, competition emerges and prices fall.
Investors can get really rich, but a lot take a beating, thus
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Do you even know what Krugman won the prize FOR? (Score:3, Insightful)
Where was your fanboy-ism for the Nobel when the Austrian School types were winning it?
What's plainly idiotic about your post is that despite Krugman's other political views, the work in which he won his Nobel for advocated for free trade heavily. He was in part rejected for a job in the first Clinton Administration because he thought their early protectionist views were disastrous, and he lobbied for free trade policies in the 90's.
I'm no fan of the man, and he does advocate some uncomfortably nanny-state
For those of you interested in learning more (Score:2, Informative)
Marginal Revolution: Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize [marginalrevolution.com]
look, slashdot (Score:3)
i know that there is some friction between the hard sciences and the soft sciences. and that physics, chemistry, and math types tend to look down in disdain on the economics, sociology, and psychology types
but there really is no need to blatantly use the "sci-fi" label for an economics story. really slashdot, come on now
Waah, my world view is under liberal assault (Score:3, Funny)
Except that the grammar is distinctly better on the Timecube comments.
Re:Huff post concerned primarily with douchbaggery (Score:4, Informative)
The author of the article was joking.
Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com.
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Re:Huff post concerned primarily with douchbaggery (Score:4, Funny)
retchdog's corollary to Gat0r30y's law: Nothing is funny on slashdot.
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Any economist can look at any data and come to any conclusion.
2 UCLA economists' opinion is not a consensus though it's certainly not "proven" that what FDR did helped either.
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It's funny because most historians paint the New Deal as having helped the Great Depression, when in fact no such consensus exists among economists.
Fixing Republican Depressions, yet again. (Score:2, Insightful)
Even now unabashed Hayek/Friedman fanboi come out of the woodwork to passive aggressively promote the often failed free market scam.
Get a real economic clue, PLEASE, the planet can not afford more of the lies, fraud, and outright theft of failed ideologues. The Reagan clan has spawned devastating economic failure, again. How many more times must the ripoffs occur before y'all wake up? S&L, Enron, W/Cheney. Even Libertarians are FINALLY growing up and catching a ride on the Keynes cluetrain.
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The reason why I don't like Keynesian economics are two facts:
1) It caused the Great Depression to last longer than it should have, especially with the confiscatory level of income taxes after FDR came into power in 1933, which did a lot to discourage economic expansion.
2) Britain tried Keynesian economics after World War II, and while it had early success in the end it nearly drove the British economy into ground. It took former PM Margaret Thatcher's privatization of many British companies for the British
Re:Fixing Republican Depressions, yet again. (Score:5, Interesting)
We had bubbles and depressions before FDR, but the government had very little power to interfere in the recovery process, and they were typically over in two years or less.
Your assertions don't square against known history. The panic of 1857 was interrupted only by the civil war. The panic of 1873 lasted five years. The panic of 1893 lasted nearly four.
And in all of them, the American governments of the day did indeed try to take various measures to stop them, although they weren't always very effective.
And these panics were far more serious. For people who lost their life savings in a supposedly guaranteed savings account, they could be literally deadly, given that retirees did not have Social Security to fall back on. If you didn't have an extended family who could provide food, you could (and would) starve to death.
Insofar as your attack on FDR and farm price supports, you are clearly not aware that some goods and services (most notably rail transportation) did not substantially fall during that period. The result: it cost more to transport goods to market than you could get by selling them. So your idea that there would be food for all, if only bad old FDR hadn't stopped the market from working, is, to put it mildly, completely unsupported by fact.
I would go on, but given the tenor of your original post, I'm pretty sure any additional logic or fast would be wasted on you. There's a rule about arguing on the internet, and believe me, I'm not retarded.
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Point is, you can't do that based on the assertion that other depressions were "typically over in two years or less". At 23 years, the Long Depression is a counterexample to this assertion - and the wik also notes [wikipedia.org] the Depression of 1807 (7 years), the Panics of 1819 (5 years), 1837 (6 years), 1857 (3 years), 1873 (6 years), and 1893 (3 years), and the Post WWI recession (3 years). In fact, it lists only one recession/depression of less than
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Assuming you're refering to the WPA, read the page. It states, "Note that these figures do not include farm or WPA employment."
Of course, it's also a debatable proposition whether building national infrastructure is "unproductive".
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Even now unabashed Hayek/Friedman fanboi come out of the woodwork to passive aggressively promote the often failed free market scam.
Hayek was from the Austrian school of economics. Friedman was from the Chicago school. Like every other Chicago school economist, Friedman defended government intervention through a central bank. Hayek won the Nobel Prize for showing how central banking and the government manipulation of interest rates caused and aggravated recessions.
The fact that you've associated Hayek and F
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Are you insinuating that Krugman's The Mule?
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Re:The other side..... (Score:4, Insightful)
> The foundation series, and the robot series as well, both have this nasty premise
> that people should be manipulated by the characters that Asimov considers superior.
Asimov was a socialist. Of course this was from a time when all right thinking people believed socialism was the future, but he never appears to have totally freed his mind from many of the basic assumptions that underlie the system of ideas we lump under the word. In his case the notions behind 'scientific socialism' seems to have been deeply engrained into him. The idea that scientists and assorted elite intellectuals were the rightful ruling class; that under their enlightened rule the lot of the masses would be improved was pervasive during his formative years and carried over into much of his work. It doesn't take much imagination to see how the idea of the new soviet man morphed into the all knowing benevolent rule of the robots in his later works. It became obvious to all thinking creatures that no human could know enough, be just enough, etc. to actually be entrusted with the sort of absolute power fascism/socialism/communism implied, thus his later works substituited robots.
Notice how his later books reveal the robots to have absolutely taken over all important aspects of human society, but that we are told that this isn't a totalitarian distopia, nay the future projected in the book is virtually a utopia. We are carefully lead to believe we are still in control because we have a need to believe we are free people who are in control of our destiny, but that it is a carefully maintained fiction,
More importantly, a careful reader can see that the whole system is already blowing itself to hell. The robots have already discarded the laws of robotics, substituiting for them a notion that they should generally follow the laws in terms of protecting humans as a group if not as individuals, but hey! ya gotta break a few eggs to mame an omelette. They allow humans to die, both by acts of omission and commission in the name of their new greater mission to serve humanity by ruling them. Where have we heard that crap before?
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Damn insightful. And I just used up all my mods points a few minutes ago.
Re:The other side..... (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, a careful reader can see that the whole system is already blowing itself to hell. The robots have already discarded the laws of robotics, substituiting for them a notion that they should generally follow the laws in terms of protecting humans as a group if not as individuals, but hey! ya gotta break a few eggs to mame an omelette. They allow humans to die, both by acts of omission and commission in the name of their new greater mission to serve humanity by ruling them. Where have we heard that crap before?
It doesn't take careful reading at all to see the system is blowing itself to hell. The failure of the 3 Laws begins in the second short story of I, Robot, and by the end of the same book the robots control everything and are already sacrificing individuals for the "good of the whole". The entire point of the book is that he hypothesizes these perfect laws that you can somehow program a robot to never violate, and then proceeds to show all the ways these "perfect" laws fail and yield undesirable results.
So given that he goes out of his way to show you how the system fails in rather deliberate and obvious ways, I'm not sure how you conclude that his point was that totalitarian socialism works as long as you have perfect beings in control. Is it that there are characters who argue in favor of the system, without being overtly evil like O'Brien of 1984? That's not Asimov's style.
I suppose you would also say the point of Foundation is that once you have invented psychohistory, you can control the future perfectly and the masses will simply do what you want with no need for individualism, even though at every point in time it took daring and creative individuals a great deal of effort to actually overcome the obstacles?
Re:The other side..... (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, remember that his books also state that the ruling class is not the right way to go. The robot series ends with Robots and Empire, which states that humanity living without robots is healthier (this is where the Zeroth law comes in, which you obliquely refer to in your last paragraph). The Foundation series ends with Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth where the true solution is Galaxia, without the overlords of the First or Second Foundations (a "living death", in the words of Gaia). There is also reference to The End of Eternity, where the overlords of Eternity are brought to an end, since they do more harm than good, preventing humanity from reaching its full potential.
In sum, I would say you overgeneralized.
Re:The other side..... (Score:4, Interesting)
This seems to be a careful attempt to read his books without studying both sides of the issues he presents.
Asimov posits both positive and negative issues resulting from the robot based society he has created - and you obviously went to a great deal of effort to ignore half his writing if you only saw him speaking of some wonderful liberal society rising from it.
Anyone that reads it otherwise, has a fairly obvious axe to grind.
Pug
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Re:The other side..... (Score:4, Informative)
But the question is - is that portrayed as good? The short answer is that in both, it isn't. Ultimately, it all falls apart, with the message that humanity has to stand on its own.
Re:The other side..... (Score:4, Insightful)
Huh. I wonder if you understand the difference between "inspired to go into the field" and "puts stock in". Just kidding, I already know the answer.
I mean seriously, what if he said he was inspired to go into aerospace engineering by the same books? Would you complain that he puts too much stock in books that require hypothetical FTL drives to be invented, and that his ambitions to eventually people a colony on mars requires science we don't have yet?
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assclown? English has tens of thousands of potential insults-- and you come up with "assclown"?
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I agree with you that that sort of micro control is BS, but you are the ass clown if you are condemning a Nobel Prize winner based only on the fact that he read a book once. He never said he put any stock in "Psychohistory."
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Krugman explained there is more to trade than simple comparative advantage - Japan and Germany don't make and sell cars the world over because engines grow on tree in their soil. That's the work cited for prize.
Who's the assclown? You, citing intellectually decaying National Review (just hounded out a Buckley, didn't it, any sane one left there?), or Krugman for liking science fiction.
Re:The other side..... (Score:5, Informative)
Of course others differ in their opinion of Krugman....
I have to point out that the "other" side does not have a nobel prize or a college diploma, and appears on Fox news and National review.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donald_Luskin)
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> but I'm doubtfull that Fannie Mae is an example of marxism.
But it is. Most people knew nothing about Freddie and Fannie until a few weeks ago. They are old New Deal relics that won't die. They were created to help the 'poor' get a home loan. Right before they blew up they were involved with almost half of home loans. Now either that is a hell of a mission creep or half of America is in poverty. What they were doing is buying up paper from banks and packaging them as 'mortgage backed securities' a
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> Except of course that the securities were in no way goverment backed.
Even though I hate the socialists who did this I have to admire the scam on it's artistic merits.
Had the securities actually been government backed the calls for oversight would have been too loud to keep quiet and the scheme would have failed. But without the implicit promise of a bailout implied by Freddie and Fannie being Government Sponsored Enterprises nobody would have bought their paper without a lot higher risk premium and ag
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The British plan, OTOH, is one he supports much more wholeheartedly. But the banking community is far from haapy
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The Economics prize is actually selected by a committee of members of the The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences. The prize was established by the Sveriges Riksbank, but it is not awarded by it.
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Agreed. The stock market is a direct indicator of the current balance between fear and greed. And since both of these are human emotions, they are very difficult to predict with any accuracy.
However, if you use technical charting, some statistical markers such as price point values can provide support and resistance to the price going through them. But again, it's people that push the price up or down through these. Is there enough fear to push it down through support, or enough greed to push it up thr
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True of all "social sciences" (Score:3, Interesting)
Economics, a fine scholarly field, is not a science, as much as some economists would like to pretend with their crude algebra and stats.
This is one of the things that makes Krugman in particular so insufferable about his profession. He places far too much importance on it in relation to it's actual value. Like all social sciences... sociology, psychology, political science... economics is not a hard science. It's a genuine field of study that uses some math and some science to reach conclusions, but also depends upon human behavior, which is not easily quantified, and cannot be quantified with any scientifc certainty or accuracy in many cas
Re:True of all "social sciences" (Score:4, Insightful)
The issue with economics as a science is that it is very difficult to conduct experiments. The methodology and math is fine, and there are plenty of folks who work hard to be rigorous, but you fundamentally can't take one United States, and hold the money supply constant, and take another and allow the money supply to grow. As such, you are limited to after the fact analysis, often comparing situations that aren't strictly alike.
Is this science? I don't know that we need to measure the angels on the head of that pin. Is it important, and susceptible to thoughtful study? I hope we all agree that it is.
I studied econ in college, and am of the opinion that it is not possible to make educated political decisions without a solid understanding of macro and micro economics. Political history is rich with examples. Take the hyperinflation in various world economies, for example. Knowing what happened in Argentina, Mexico, pre-revolutionary France, and pre WWII Germany, I'll tell you this, now. The US is likely to undergo serious, double digit inflation for several years, in the next ten years, because printing money is the only way the US government can work its way out from under the debt and entitlement burdens we are taking on. Is it science that underlies this conclusion? Or is it just history, analysis, and a theory of the relationship between the money supply, interest rates and price levels? If I am right, does this become an experiment, and thus make econ science?
I don't really care, but I'll tell you that I'm not investing in bonds or other dollar denominated investments.
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Really? They announced last years prize on Slashdot [slashdot.org].