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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.
He was on the newshour with Jim Lehrer last night and spoke intelligently and seemed very down to earth. I had a real respect for him when he mentioned he was inspired by Asimov.
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/video/module.html?mod=0&pkg=13102008&seg=5
If you can read this... 01110101 01110010 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100101 01100101 01101011
I'm not saying that Paul Krugman does not deserve a Nobel Prize, but I would like to point out that the judging and awarding process of said prize is subject to the political agenda of those involved, just like the wording of this submission.
...shit! Trantor is only worth as much as Compton now!
Of course others differ in their opinion of Krugman....
Krugman's Posthumous Nobel
And doesn't it make perfect sense that this assclown puts such stock in Asimov's Foundation books? A fictional story that makes zero sense unless one postulates a totally hypothetical science that allows sociologists to acually make valid predictions about human behaviour. That was what the books were about, an exploration of the consequences that would follow from such a discovery, i.e. it was typical of most hard SciFi then and now in that it postulates some new thing and explores the consequences.
Too bad a large portion of the left believes that it possesses the ability to do the sort of micro control today that would in reality only be possible after Hari Seldon created the tools.
Democrat delenda est
that prolonged the Great Depression by 7 years or so?
http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/FDR-s-Policies-Prolonged-Depression-5409.aspx?RelNum=5409
Brilliant stuff...
Do you have ESP?
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?"
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.
Indeed he was - though I have always subscribed to the philosophy that something isn't funny if you have to point out that its a joke (I just thought the Jay-Z comment was too funny not to share).
Prediction: The real iPhone killer is going to be sex robots from Japan. Think about it.
Honestly, as long as you voice an opinion in some editorial form that serves more than a handful of national papers, you are inevitably tied to an agenda by someone else even if you don't claim one (that's not to say Krugman hides his agenda).
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, stop crying about political agenda; the longer we waste on it, the faster we continue to ignore the real problems that need serious critical thinking.
...with the only speed bump being the Slashdot editing process. Seriously, this was in every newspaper PRINT edition before it showed up on Slashdot.
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.
It's "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel."
Slashdot: Playing Favorites Since 1997
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.
I found not only the smell but the shit itself. He'd forgotten to flush.
Barack Obama is leading the way in saving the environment by not flushing. John McCain requires 3 or 4 flushes. Because he's full of shit.
The Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences is a prize given by the Bank of Sweden, not by the Nobel Foundation. It is not one of the prizes established by Alfred Nobel. It's named after him and inspired by Nobel Prizes, but it's not a Nobel Prize.
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?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Let us not forget his contributions to the field of interstellar trade:
http://www.princeton.edu/~pkrugman/interstellar.pdf
Here is a good synopsis and collection of his recent work compiled by an Economics professor at George Mason University.
Marginal Revolution: Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize
If I can not smoke in heaven, then I shall not go. -- Mark Twain
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 stinking liberal from a stinking party whose 8 years of invertebrate opposition to the dumbest president ever is getting rewarded with a mandate to control all branches of government. And the rise not of Clintonian Blue Dogs, but the reddest of greens. Yuk and woe unto the currency.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
As a result, small-scale production for a local market is replaced by large-scale production for the world market, where firms with similar products compete with one another.
That can explain why the wants of developed world have been largely become a special case of the developing world. That is quite a problem.
Now can there be someone who figures out how to allow the developed world to have their wants heard(quality without exorbitant price) and not as a special case of a developing one(such as just making it slightly better and/or shinier junk)?
Make it possible to not have things boil down to junk cheap or exorbitantly expensive(if at all).
Twitter supports and protects racists - by smearing their critics with the "Hate Speech" label.
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
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You might want to read a little more of Krugman's positions if you believe that. He was adamantly opposed to the original Paulson bailout plan, which was a banker's wet dream. He was much more in favor of the Dodd plan and eventually came down in favor of the final plan that passed here, but he was far from enthusiastic about it. "Better than nothing, but just barely" sums up his take, I think.
The British plan, OTOH, is one he supports much more wholeheartedly. But the banking community is far from haapy with that plan.
People can agree on one thing while disagreeing on another.
Details at 11.
Hindsight is always 20/20 (I'm talking about the Nobel Price committee)
The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
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 through resistance? You can only take an educated guess. It's not deterministic.
I intend to live forever, or die trying. - Groucho Marx
Reading the conservative slams on Krugman's Nobel is like reading the Timecube posts on every Slashdot physics story.
Except that the grammar is distinctly better on the Timecube comments.
"I guess the moral of the story is, don't paint your airship with rocket fuel." -- Addison Bain
I don't think you read the article. It did highlight a few of the nonsensical remarks he's made over the past decade, and those were what I was referring to. No, I haven't followed him, but that doesn't mean I haven't read a few of his remarks. Also, I'm not sure where you got the idea that I concluded that "he's a douchebag." I believe the words I used were "hint of douchebaggery," which could be interpreted as "indication," not "definite proof." Lastly, you can say what you want about some alleged bias that reality has towards "liberals", but given the virulent nature of Krugman's recent political opinions, it's very hard to ignore the political aspect of his being chosen.
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.
Really? They announced last years prize on Slashdot.
That's ridiculous. It may not be well developed, but they use scientific principles and methodology. It IS a science. Buy a clue.
The guy isn't only anti-Bush, he's an arrogant douchenozzle to anyone that disagrees with him on anything. 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. He's a very, very bright man, but he also holds too high an opinion of himself in every regard. He also takes the status of his field far too seriously, often indicating that economics is the most important field of study in the world. Medical doctors, physicists, and engineers would probably beg to differ.
All that said, even though he hasn't done any real research in decades, even his enemies admit that he deserves the prize for his groundbreaking work in the late 70's. When standard Keynesian economists were saying that Stagflation couldn't possibly really exist, Krugman was one of a handful of guys that said "Yes it can, and here's how". He's a pioneer in many theories that are the bedrock of free trade work. You wouldn't know it from his rambling against Bush and Co. today, but he was on the outs with the Clinton crowd because he was too free-trade for them.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
"Whine all you want about the Nobel Committee having a political agenda. Right is right. And Krugman was right"
You act like Krugman was the only one warning us about the housing bubble, when he was one of many, a lot of them being the very people he despises. It's not like Krugman was the first one to go "Hey, this thing is gonna burst".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
retchdog's corollary to Gat0r30y's law: Nothing is funny on slashdot.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
Neither is the Fields Medal...
Mi domando chi à il mandante di tutte le cazzate che faccio - Altan
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 cases.
This doesn't mean the fields are of no importance... they certainly are... but they're not pure science, and I have a hard time with calling some a political "scientist" or a social "scientist".
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Is it not pleonastic to say 'economics science'? The word 'economics' alone includes the meaning of it being science since the suffix '-ics' denotes arts, sciences, branches of study or profession. I could not resist!
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 views on some subjects, but in economics, the very theories that the man won his prize for laid some of the very foundation for "Reaganomics", as you like to put it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
The bottom line is that he favored the bailout. Picking one unconstitutional scheme over another is nothing but splitting hairs.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
... Krugman was not the first or only person to warn of the housing bubble, and many of the people he loathes beat him to it.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
That being the case, the state of education in Sweden must be rather worse than I had assumed.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Keynesian economics is one giant fraud.
Like Keynes himself.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
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...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
I'm sorry to break it to you, but he's right. Astrology is bogus.
10/10, I lol'd
You know, I haven't visited Slashdot in a couple of weeks, and it seems like the comment stupidity level here (not to mention in the moderation) is getting extremely high. Just a few more Bush Regime diehards, and Slashdot comments will achieve the "Catchment Basin for Subnormals" level observable at YouTube.
Who is "they?" And what economy is "our economy?"
Not everybody has the same ideas about what constitutes the best economic system. That's like, fucking political science 101. There is no "they" that makes the rules across the board; world leaders and societies everywhere choose who to listen to. As in any other science, there are crackpots and there are people who know what they're talking about.
Just because some people listen to the crackpots doesn't mean that there is no such thing as "economics."
And stop thinking of gov't and academia worldwide as one homogeneous entity, "they." That is the grossest sort of oversimplification.
Liberal economics : Maxwell House and Folgers
Conservative economics : Starbucks and 2000 different kinds of coffee you can buy in stores.
Have you actually -read- Krugman?
Krugman's a liberal but staunch free trader. He's into the free flow of goods and capital and in a way that would be even more deregulated than is today. All he is saying is that he wants to have this huge safety net so that he can open trade completely. In Krugman's world, the GM's go out of business, but the gov't steps in so people can be reassigned. IT's not too shabby except for that part that if your company can go out of business without consequence, then most people won't work. And, this whole "progressive" notion of fair trade in Krugman's eyes is really a sort of protectionism.
The fact is, regardless of how many talking heads on the left wing speak otherwise, the free trade and free flow of capital which characterizes Reaganomics demonstrably elevated the standard of living of the entire world. At the end of 70 year of so-called progressive liberalism, circa, 1980, the west wasn't that much farther better off than the east, much of asia was starving, and even vast tracts of the USA hung barely above the poverty line. After thirty years of it, billions of people have been lifted out of poverty into the middle class, and nearly everyone has more stuff than ever before.
In 1970 even food was hard to get, but now, the world is increasingly getting fat. In 1970, we were lucky to have a small house, and a car, and maybe a set of clothes for the year. Now, home ownership, even after this so-called crisis, is at all an time high, people have better cars, more cars, more bikes, more clothes, toys, and a whole new category of things called consumer electronics.
Reaganomics was alway about putting the most things into people's lives, and it has succeeded so well, that, the only retort liberals have against it is to create an environmental great depression to save mother earth, or, to bemoan a gap between the top and bottom rungs of society. If you measure things directly, in absolute terms, people right now are richer than they have ever been.
Seriously, people wishing the world was simpler like in the early 1970s have no clue just much those days sucked. It's a stalinist worshipping era of oppression that robbed the country of opportunity, relentlessly oppressed dissent, and if those jackasses try and do the same to this America today, I say we rise up and waste them!
This is my sig.
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...
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
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 wealth tends to concentrate. But remember, the name of the game is to get the rich to overproduce. They do, because, they are greedy and want more, and so they invest, and boom. We get the jobs and the benefit of overproduction.
So yeah, in Reaganomics, you get concentrations of wealth but you also get rich people losing everything. You get a very dynamic society where if you get lucky you can get rich very quick or get poor very quick, and, everyone gets tons of stuff.
To map this out to specific policies, these things are the things Reagan does....
--lower the cost of capital
first off, allow private capital formation.. then, lower tax rates, lower capital gains in particular, lower interest rates.
--allow it to move freely
adopt free trade.
For the most part, we've been on that plan since 1980s.
This has completely worked, and I think its a good deal. We've had a lot of gyrations, dislocations, but as a whole, the world is much, much, richer than it was 40 years ago. Just take a look at what's going in China and India and Eastern Europe...or even Europe once they lowered the corp income tax. In the USA people have way more food and way more stuff than they have ever had before. The world is just richer, and despite a hugely expanded population, everyone has more stuff. That's a huge success.
I think its worth it overall, but a lot of people in this election are fed up with constant social tension all the continuous upheavals cause. , and thus they are willing to sacrifice wealth and opportunity for some sort of stability. And, part of that too is because of an aging society and a more womanly male population. There's just less men willing to take risks and most young guys think like women these days.
This is my sig.
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.
Globalization in this context means the continued lowering of trade barriers a la NAFTA, CAFTA, etc. That has pretty much failed at this point. The psuedo-libertarian idea of free trade, AKA the Washington Consensus, is dead in the water at this point and one can expect that movement in that direction will be reversed by the current economic woes.
On another topic, it should be noted that the Nobel prize for economics is not the same as other Nobel prizes. It was instituted by the Swedish central bank about 70 years after the original prizes were instituted and is not considered a Nobel Prize by the actual Nobel organization. Generally the Prize in Economics, as the Nobel Foundation refers to it, has been awarded to rather more conservative economists. I have to wonder if the utter failure of deregulation and free trade in recent years is a reason for Krugman's winning this year.
A blog about stuff.
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: "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.')"
If your economy is hanging on by a hair, it's pretty damn important which hairs you split.
Pug
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
Well, I just read the article, and what I see is a couple of lines devoid of context that are being used to support a sweeping statement, and there you have the conservative-hit-piece MO in a nutshell.
Dismiss the remark "if the rich get more, that leaves less for everyone else" as over-simplified, if you like, but try reading the entire article and tell me that Krugman isn't talking about a real problem: For richer
You might consider this point (which addresses your implicit "but the pie gets bigger!" argument): "We pride ourselves, with considerable justification, on our record of economic growth. But over the last few decades it's remarkable how little of that growth has trickled down to ordinary families." Or how about this point: "The reason conservatives engage in bouts of Sweden-bashing is that they want to convince us that there is no tradeoff between economic efficiency and equity -- that if you try to take from the rich and give to the poor, you actually make everyone worse off. But the comparison between the U.S. and other advanced countries doesn't support this conclusion at all."
But on the other hand, I have no doubt that you're correct that the award is "politically motivated", at least in part: it's much like the Dixie Chicks getting a Grammie... there are so many people so disgusted with the Bush regime at this point that the awards committees can't resist tweaking some Republican noses.
(And if anyone cares, this is my take on Krugman: KRUGMAN_FUNNIES.)
And 1 billion people still shit in the water they drink. What does it say about the richest country on Earth when people sleep under bridges? What does it say about us as people when we are so willing to turn our backs on the less fortunate? The measure of a nation is not in how it treats the powerful and the wealthy, but the poor and unfortunate. And by that measure we have failed.
Inventions have long since reached their limit, and I see no hope for further development.-- Frontinus, 1st cent. AD
Most of those billion poor can best be helped by a few well placed bullets. The US tried shipping them grain, she tried building them pumps and sending economic advisors, The US government and US citizens gave massive amounts of aid for hundreds of years. Change only started when the right tin-pot dictators died.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.
Yes, that would explain why the standard-of-living of someone in Sweden has been so much better than the United States in recent years: For richer.
Do you think you "objectivist" types could actually try dealing with reality once in awhile? Theory is nice, freedom is cool, but at some point you've got to come to grips with the real problems... e.g. there's always an asymmetry of power between the democratic citizen and the corporation interested in rigging the system, so the system is always going to be rigged, ergo we can't get an actual "free market", so the theory is pretty close to useless.
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.
But only if someone comes along and explains why this is so...
(Think about it... think about it...)
I won't join Slashcott. OTOH, If Beta goes live, I just won't be back until it's fixed. Sorry Dice.
GP is dead wrong.
Krugman is (or at least was) a very strong proponent of free trade. It's only in the past decade or so (since he became more of an op-ed writer) that he has shut up about it. It appears to many that he did so (shut up), only to avoid disagreements with the liberal intelligentsia, many of whom fawn over him, not knowing that he long espoused the economics of the right, and that he has never disavowed his positions on the subject.
My. $.02
Waitjustaminute.... The Huffington Post is right wing? Who are you, Stalin?
It's an interesting theory. My theory is that since he's been forced into re-examining his beliefs (having been pushed hard left by the Bush administration) he's been avoiding looking too hard at globalization issues, because there's some cognitive dissonance awaiting him in there... (for example, could it be that the lefties have a point about "free trade" being a bad idea when the "comparative advantage" is in the realms of lax pollution regulations or labor laws?).
Much as I like Paul Krugman, I think he shows symptoms (like much of the rest of humanity) of having an awfully hard time admitting that he might've called something wrong. Most recently, he'd convinced himself that we were all supposed to be excited about Hillary because her health plan was more comprehensive than Obama's (myself I care a bit about other things, too, like, you know, that was in Iraq... but that's just crazy talk, when the great Krugman has spoken).
Shhh... my +4 Funny is dependent on the invalidity of my corollary. I am savoring this.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
of course, the article completely ignores that he has won several others economics awards including the Clark Medal and states that he was a very well respected economist (and continues to be) during the time he did the work he got the medal for (the same work he got the clark medal for).
of course, it also leaves out any example of other economists who are "far more deserving".
I don't agree with most of his political views but he has done some great work in economics and has long been considered a possible Nobel candidate. Given his past accomplishments in the field, it's easy to tag this article as conservative whining and complaining when they try to diminish the past accomplishments of someone simply because they disagree (the Nobel prize is almost never given for recent work, it's always work done 10, 20, or even 50 years before).
The choice of Al Gore was... surprising to say the least... as I don't agree he has done anything the peace medal has historically gone towards but Jimmy Carter has done a great deal of work and definitely fell in the long term category of candidates for the prize.
http://earthtrends.wri.org/searchable_db/index.php?theme=5&variable_ID=217&action=select_countries
As percentage of GDP, China: 33%, USA: 14%
and Endless September dawns upon another soul.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
Do you think you "objectivist" types could actually try dealing with reality once in awhile? Theory is nice, freedom is cool, but at some point you've got to come to grips with the real problems
Real problems like the collapse of the fraudulent fiat money supply system perhaps?
e.g. there's always an asymmetry of power between the democratic citizen and the corporation interested in rigging the system, so the system is always going to be rigged, ergo we can't get an actual "free market", so the theory is pretty close to useless.
I agree that corporations as they exist preclude the possibility of a free market, but wouldn't therefore abandon the idea of a free market. Strip corporations of any rights as "persons" or citizens. The individuals who make up that corporation still have their rights, but not the corporate entity itself as separate from those people. So all the individuals in a corp have the right to petition the government for example, but the corporation itself does not.
I'm not really an objectivist though I think they have some interesting ideas, but wouldn't a true objectivist see corporations as a form of collectivism?
http://marriedmansexlife.com/
Krugman predicts doom in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007...
"What's the one time that Paul Krugman didn't forecast a recession? That would be when we actually had a recession. It just wasn't a recession that could be blamed on George Bush."
"Barack Obama is not a real progressive." -- Paul Krugman
"Iâ(TM)d give up the whole first page of my Google Scholar listing to have written 'The Queen and the Soldier.'" - Paul Krugman
What's not to like about Paul Krugman?
The more I read and hear about this liberal vs. conservative, left wing vs. right wing, the more I think you people are losing yourselves in the very agenda's you just spoke of. The polarisation of your country is doing your society more damage than any white house bail-out, mortgage crisis or foreign war will do.
What ever happened to reason and trying to listen to other people's positions and thinking about them before writing them off as liberals or conservatives?
In actual fact, the US - as a single state - is the #1 economy in terms of GDP, but if you see the EU as a single economy, it outperforms the US http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(nominal) (not to mention other indicators such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Development_Index ). And while it may be true, that the US has a good standing in heavy machinerie and such, in consumer goods it quite frankly doesn't look as good. :)
In my personal opinion, the strongest sectors of the US economy, or rather the ones where the US is still ahead, are military and, to a lesser degree, the tech/software sector. In other areas there's mostly parity between either the US and the EU or the US and Asia. Of course I'm happy to be shown different
The most interesting paragraph from the Krugman article is this one:
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---
In the 1960s and 1970s, American Conservatives were way ahead of the curve. Tax reform, welfare reform, free trade, deregulation. Now its the American Liberals that are stuck in yesteryear, yearning for the nostalgic 1970s stagflation. Clinton got it. Obama gets it - those old ideas his party is stuck in will never work.
Republicans aren't the Southern Baptists. They are also libertarians, business professionals, military leaders, and most Republicans are completely sane, patriotic, forward looking people. Democrats have socialists, who hang onto dead ideas of Lenin and Trotsky, and PETA activists telling Ben & Jerry's to use breast milk in ice cream. But they also have progressives and Bill Clintons.
FWIW, I'm a moderate, and proud of it.
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The measure of a nation is not in how it treats the powerful and the wealthy, but the poor and unfortunate. And by that measure we have failed.
If you care so much about these people, why don't you go buy them a house or something? Or, let one of them move in with you? This country isn't some abstract thing, its you and its me and if you want to demand that everyone kick in a dime for these poor, as you say, then what's the measure of YOU, who has not done so?
This is my sig.
I suggest that you buy a clue. Economics is a "social science" - meaning that it deals with social phenomena and all the math and methodology they use is a smoke screen. It will become science when people become robots (read - predictable and rational).
Way to miss the point.
The point is that the money "created" by lending on unsafe investments has been used as a basis for lending to other non-housing related sectors. This is why things are in freefall, the whole system has become dependent on a bad market.
Do you know what an analogy is ?
Maybe you noticed the implied "snip" in the parents post ?
But no, that wouldn't suit your bias, so you fired off an angry post instead. You remember the popular broken window fallacy ? Well it seems your economy has been relying on that system being true.
And your crack about the foreign lenders getting the short end of the stick smacks of US imperialism up the wazoo. Does that mean that your system works perfectly just as long as no-one actually uses it ?
Says the obvious democrat. But seriously, I think you're wrong.
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.
You're shallow attempts to pidgeonhole me (which miss the mark, btw) only prove my point. I'm not attacking the author for HIS bias; I'm pointing out that we now consider it acceptable to slam someone else for bias without even taking a realistic look at their ideas first.
You'll notice that I don't deny that Krugman has an agenda, for obvious reasons: HE DOES! But if that's the first and only thing you have to say regarding him winning the award, then you have nothing useful to contribute. That's a sad indicator of where we are going in civil discourse. People need to spend less time being told who stand on which side and more time analyzing different stances on subject matter...well, presuming we want to actually advance ourselves sooner than later.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Here's the trouble: can you come up with some system -- some set of corporate rules or whatever -- that you can let loose in the wilds and expect it to self-regulate? My contention (and it's hardly controversial) is that the economic incentive to subvert this system of rules is far stronger than the economic incentive to block the subversion. Entity A (a corporation, a rich guy, whatever) sees an opportunity to get richer if they get a certain rule changed: they're going to make millions by ripping off each citizen for half-a-cent each. There may be thousands of such entities, with thousands of schemes like that, but even taken all together, each citizen loses only a total of around five bucks, and they've got other things to worry about.
The only check on that kind of problem is a wise and informed leadership, and a committed, far-sighted electorate that cares about the health of the common weal many years hence.
Now: what's the difference between that situation and a Social Democracy.
Do you know what science means? It's a process that's extremely well defined. And yes, economists use those tools. They don't use them well enough yet, and it's a baby science, but the scientific method is used.
Don't deny reality - it'll only bite you on the ass.
Investors can get really rich, but a lot take a beating, thus wealth tends to concentrate. But remember, the name of the game is to get the rich to overproduce. They do, because, they are greedy and want more, and so they invest, and boom. We get the jobs and the benefit of overproduction.
By what logical leap do you conclude the wealthy will gift us with jobs using that extra money?
If any jobs are created under such policies, they're created off shore, or moved off shore at our expense.
Additionally, the "dynamic market" you are referring to is large scale corprate fraud and malfeasance.
I can't believe you got modded up for this.
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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!"
It didn't even take a degree in economics to see this coming, my mental giant of a friend. Bush tried to implement reforms of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to get a grip on the subprime mess in 2003. These reforms (including new regulations, for you lovers of beauracracy out there) were shot down when, surprise surprise, Democrats stonewalled them. In hearing, Barney Frank in particular said he saw no subprime problem at all, that it was alllll a racist attempt to keep poor people from the American Dream of home ownership. And this is according to a bastion of Republican advocacy.
"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."
Or, maybe because you had your head so far up your ass (or in Indymedia... same thing) that you never noticed anyone else yelling about the problem lo these many years.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
Ah. I suppose we can now expect the Left in the US to be treated with some respect, then? Forgive me if I don't hold my breath waiting for it.
All you have to do to realize that the Right is far more numerous than the Left on Slashdot is to look at the comments and moderation on this very thread. Right at the top is a +5 "Insightful" comment deriding Krugman as some kind of fringe crackpot because he is very critical of the Bush Regime. This is an attitude he shares with fully 80% of the US public, by the way. But no matter. If you do happen to be aware of the fact that most of America hates this President, there are still plenty of other comments to amuse yourself with, including some that actually pretend that Krugman's professional work is completely wrong, and others that pretend Krugman wasn't *actually* awarded a nobel at all. All modded fairly high, so they're easy to find.
As for there being good ideas on the Right side: I'm sorry, but the Right have had absolutely everything their own way in the United States for most of this decade (including a mostly supine Democratic congress since 2006). So we really don't need to waste a lot of time discussing the verity of the Right's policy "ideas". We can judge them empirically. And the experimental results are these: The country is losing two wars, we are hated even by our allies, our enemies (like Russia) demonstrate their contempt for us in ways we do not dare answer, the size of the national debt has tripled, millions of people are losing their homes, a mid-sized American city was wiped out by a natural disaster and left to rot, unemployment is at its highest in five years, the economy as a whole is in free fall, and the Executive violates essential constitutional rights regularly and with impunity. And I'm sure all of that has the same explanation unrepentant Stalinists offer for the fall of the Soviet Union: "But you never really tried our [conservative/communist/pick your ideology] ideas at all!"
You know, I'd like to treat your comment with more respect, since it is at least possible that you're sincere in your belief that there is some sort of equivalence of intellectual or moral tone between the US Right and Left wings. But after 8 years of Bush, the multiple disasters his misrule has brought on us as a people, and the sneering and libels the Right have applied to the Left throughout, having to listen to further levels of denial and intellectual dishonesty like this really make it very difficult to do anything but laugh.
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.
Say what? Hard-core leftists are almost non-existent on Slashdot. Even vaguely liberal comments are lambasted as being socialist or communist around here.
There's certainly no shortage of right wingers around this place.
... and then they built the supercollider.
He's one of the nicest famous guys around.
A few years back, the NYT put all of their columnists behind a paywall (and yes, it was discussed on Slashdot). I was unhappy with this, tracked down an email address for him and wrote him a letter letting him know how unhappy I was with his syndicator. Oddly enough, for a busy professor and writer, he responded to me. He didn't know that this was happening and was not particularly happy about it either. In any case, he wrote back to someone who sent him email out of the blue and I was impressed with his approachability.
I also saw him in Portland, OR on his book tour for his latest book, "The Conscience of a Liberal". He had a cold, but still managed to stay about a half hour longer than he was scheduled for to answer questions.
He seems to be the very model of an old school academic. Which is probably why he doesn't take this very seriously and posted a link to Borowitz's humorous critique on his blog. You may not agree with his economics or politics, but he really is a nice guy.
That is all.
Here's the trouble: can you come up with some system -- some set of corporate rules or whatever -- that you can let loose in the wilds and expect it to self-regulate? My contention (and it's hardly controversial) is that the economic incentive to subvert this system of rules is far stronger than the economic incentive to block the subversion.
Hence Moridin's suggestion to stop using fiat currency and return to real money (presumably gold and silver). You have made an excellent summing up of why increasing regulation (even to the point of nationalisation) will not fix the problems inherent with fiat money, which absolutely precludes the possibility of a free market. The fact that some countries temporarily achieve a good standard of living while using this system is irrelevant.
Allowing government and banking corporations to create money out of thin air is a recipe for disaster.
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Why do you think the right-wing gained it's grip on the government? The Left wing had a huge margin of control for a good 50 years, resulting in numerous recessions, high unemployment, high rates of crime, fraud, and corruption.
I'm not saying this to deride the Left at all. Merely pointing out that you're selectively picking and choosing your facts. There have been terrible Republican administrations, and terrible Democratic administrations. Neither of which can be conflated with the be all end all of their theologies.
Actually, Iraq is working out nicely now. Sure, it was a terrible situation for 3 years, due entirely to a lack of leadership, but your facts are never the less wrong.
Our relationship with France is closer and better than it has ever been. It's in part due to the election of Sarkozy, but was a movement developing in earnest for about a decade.
In France, American Rap music is popular, hamburgers are everywhere, the economy is being de-socialized progressively to appear more similar to the American model. etc.
Not at all. Heavy political pressure has been directed at Moscow, which is very likely the only reason for the pullout of Russian troops from Georgia. Putin is actually the one lobbying empty threats, to try and get Washington to lay off.
When there's economic troubles, the national debt is supposed to increase to pay for recovery programs. So this isn't a direct indicator of anything.
No, actually just one Parish of a major city was wiped out, and left to rot. It is, of course, an open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place. The poor quality of the levies dates back through several Republican and democratic administrations alike.
You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all. Never the less, none of your points has any hope of proving that there are no good ideas on the Right, nor that everything the Left does is therefore good. Jimmy Carter, in particular performed almost as badly as Bush in every area you're criticizing Bush for.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
"Iraq is working out nicely now"? Suggest you try that particular idiot remark out on some Iraq veterans, or the Iraqis themselves. "An open question if the city should have been there (20' below sea level) in the first place"? Please do me a favor and stand in Union Square and explain that idiotic theory to San Franciscans after the next major earthquake. They'll have some fun hanging you from the nearest lampost and beating your corpse to a pulp. "You aren't going to get me to defend Bush at all." Who, precisely, are you kidding with that bullshit? There's nothing here but a defence of the last 8 years and the Bush Regime. And this crap is +5? I'm sorry, but if you're sincere about this, you clearly think politics doesn't actually have any meaningful impact on real events. And if that's so, you're really too stupid to waste any more time on. Bye.
I was talking about it with an Iraq war vet less than a month ago. He was happy to extol all the good work his unit has been doing for the people over there.
I have numerous friends and relatives currently in the military, and many more old vets. I worked on-base for a military contractor for about a year, not long ago, and had numerous discussions with people about to go to Iraq, often for their 3rd tour.
I'm not all that far from SF. Driven there numerous times over the years.
There aren't any discussions about whether SF is in too dangerous an area to be sustained... There were innumerable such debates about the viability of New Orleans, a very long time before Katrina.
I have to keep correcting your "facts" and I'm supposedly the "stupid" one?
I think you've pretty well proven you're just the blind ("drooling morons") partisan I was describing in my first reply... No wonder you think there's so many far-right-wingers on slashdot... Might have something to do with the fact that your (factually ignorant) view of reality is heavily to the left. So far, you've gone out of your way to condemn every little thing that can possibly be ascribed to the Republicans, with no real rational basis for your chosen criticisms. You've also completely failed to realize the Democrats have numerous failings, and the left wing has plenty of shortcomings of their own and flaws in their favored ideology.
If you were a right-wing moron, I'd criticize you just as much for (a whole different set of) brainless assertions in direct opposition to reality.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
This fools no one. Your non-partisanship is mostly up your ass, like your "corrections" to my facts. You've selected a tiny portion of the crimes Bush has committed against this country and excused every last one of them with a pack of unverifiable and unsuppported assertions. You're as partisan on the right as I am on the left.
Talking to you is a little like talking to Bryon York, another right-wing jackass who knows exactly zero about the subject under discussion.
I didn't pick ANY of them. YOU picked every last one. I merely responded.
Pick ANY statement I've made here in the numerous replies in this thread. It's all verified easily.
Of course, to refute any of my points you'd have to look up the relevant information (and you'd certainly find that I'm correct) instead of depending on your favorite pundits, opinion pieces, etc., etc.
I don't think there's been any doubt you're heavily partisan. So much so that you (ironically) see *me* (PBS-watching, heavily Dem. voting, etc.) as far right-wing... but I've defended myself more than enough from your baseless personal attacks. Your head just might explode if you ever met a Fox News and AM talk-radio addict.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
As rohan pointed out, I touched upon one very real problem, but I'll spell out the two biggest ones:
Fiat currency. Fiat currency allows the government to counterfeit as much money as it wants. As the newly-created money works its way through the economy, those who get it first (the "imperial CEOs" Krugman laments) benefit at the expense of those who get it last (Main Street USA). This "inflation tax" is the most heinous of all taxes imposed by the government, because it is regressive: it robs from the poor and gives to the rich.
Fractional reserve banking. When I place a $100 demand deposit into my local bank, and my bank then loans $1000 that it doesn't have to someone else based on the "reserves" of my $100, that's fraud.
There's no difference, as neither can ever be realized.
It's not that societies haven't tried, mind you. But what the proponents of social democracy fail to understand is that the "wise and informed" leaders have all the same foibles and predilections towards greed as do their counterparts in the free market.
The free market isn't perfect. As you have noted, the greedy will try to rig the system. But in the free market, there's at least opportunity to combat the greedy. Once the greedy move into an all-reaching, all-empowered government, the dream of social democracy descends into the nightmare of dictatorship or oligarchy.
If you haven't already done so, I strongly suggest you read the article I link to in my signature.
Your bank is insolvent.
Taking Money Back
So if we just create the right kind of system (no fiat money!) and stick to it, then we'll have no pesky problems with human corruption of our grand system ever again.
This would appear to be circular. Any way you look at it, you're stuck with "eternal vigilance".
(By the way, I think you exaggerate the role of fiat money in the present collapse, but they you would, being a gold bug.)
Bullshit. Your response was to cherry-pick among the ones I listed.
Shall we start with your alleged location "near" San Francisco and your base-contractor employment and your acquaintance with many Iraq vets? All perfectly verifiable, right?
No sale. I run into faux Dem trolls like you all day long. Along with plenty of Bill O'Lielly "moderates" and the usual Limbrains. You're running very true to type. The accusation of "baseless personal attacks" when your utter lack of facts or sense is pointed to and laughed it is a classic response pattern.
So if we just create the right kind of system (no fiat money!) and stick to it, then we'll have no pesky problems with human corruption of our grand system ever again.
This would appear to be circular. Any way you look at it, you're stuck with "eternal vigilance".
The "and stick to it" part is the eternal vilgilance, so it isn't circular. In any case, people will use gold as an exchange medium even without a government enforcing a system, that's why it's called real money. The thing about fiat currency is that it involves government decree in every transaction, so arguments that the free market has failed are always deceptive arguments in a fiat currency system. Even with gold backed currency though, if fractional reserve banking is allowed then you will still have the same problems. Lending money you don't have ought to be prosecuted as fraud. I don't have a problem with someone taking on the risk of financing a project based on another parties promise to pay, but when that promise is allowed to be circulated as currency as though it represented existing wealth rather than future production, then the currency system itself becomes vulnerable. If a significant % of people can't pay it collapses the money supply, which is what we see now.
(By the way, I think you exaggerate the role of fiat money in the present collapse, but they you would, being a gold bug.)
Without fractional reserve banking (which is fiat money, even if you have the appearance of having gold backed currency) the current financial crisis would be impossible. There would be no collapse of the money supply because the same amount of money would exist even if someone didn't pay a debt. The lender would be out of pocket but the money supply wouldn't be affected at all.
Gold, silver, copper, hey make lead money for all I care. The important thing is that all legal tender be based on existing goods, not future production. Even gold doesn't solve the problem if you are creating currency backed by gold you hope do dig up one day. If you fail to dig it up, your money supply collapses, just as if you create currency backed by debt, the money supply collapses if that debt doesn't get paid.
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