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Paul Krugman Awarded Nobel Prize For Economics

Posted by kdawson on from the too-smart-fr-government dept.

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.

2 of 425 comments (clear)

  1. We really should have listened to him 3 years ago by StevenMaurer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Safe as Houses

    A snippet (only 3 paragraphs to fall within fair use):

    I used to live next door to a Russian emigre. One day he asked me to explain something that puzzled him about his new country. "This place seems very rich," he said, "but I never see anyone making anything. How does the country earn its money?"

    ...

    In other words, a fuller answer to my former neighbor would be that these days, Americans make a living selling each other houses, paid for with money borrowed from the Chinese. Somehow, that doesn't seem like a sustainable lifestyle.

    How solid, then, is America's economic recovery? The British have a phrase that applies: "safe as houses." Our economy is as safe as houses. Unfortunately, given current prices and our dependence on foreign lenders, houses aren't safe at all.

    Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right.

  2. Re:Fixing Republican Depressions, yet again. by StevenMaurer · · 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.