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Paul Krugman Awarded Nobel Prize For Economics
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.
Safe as Houses
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.
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...
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"
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.
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.
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
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
"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.
"by that I mean people who don't sit on slashdot all day wondering why everyone else isn't building robots" DECS
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.
The most interesting paragraph from the Krugman article is this one:
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---