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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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!!
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
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?
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."
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.
Truckin like the Doo-Dah man...
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.
> 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?
Democrat delenda est
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.
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
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
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)
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.
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
retchdog's corollary to Gat0r30y's law: Nothing is funny on slashdot.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
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
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
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?
The enemies of Democracy are
All emotion and feelings, i.e. left. We think, you guys feel.
Oh please, there is plenty of stupidity to go around. There are people on the Right who think Obama is an Arab, Muslim, and/or terrorist and scream "kill him!" at rallies. There are people on the Right that think the earth is 6,000 years old. There are people on the Right that want to force teaching "intelligent design" and want to outlaw teaching evolution. And there are people on the Right that think that a total lack of regulation is a good thing. There are people on the Right that put all of their faith in the "invisible hand."
"We think", no. "You believe," there's a difference.
Some privacy policy Slashdot.
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.
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
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
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.
A good example is the end of I, Robot, where the machines control the economy (and therefore all of society (echoes of the US gov?)) for the good of humanity. Another example is the Foundation series, where the Second Foundation is helping guide events so that the First Foundation will eventually grow to be a society where the populace will accept the Second Foundation as leaders.
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.
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.')"
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
An Invisible Entity of Vast Power whose existence must be taken on faith alone: Liberal Media
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.
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.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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.
Waitjustaminute.... The Huffington Post is right wing? Who are you, Stalin?
> 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' and reselling them. The magic they were performing was due to their being government enterprises, thus the securities were government backed and nobody bothered to look at the underlying assets since Uncle Sugar was supposed to cover the bet.
I won't repeat all of what others have said better in other places but basically Freddie and Fannie distorted the entire market with their antics. Because they accounted for so much of the market their rules came to dominate even transactions that didn't eventually get sold to them. And increasingly Freddie, Fannie and the Democrats in Congress[1] were pushing the notion to give anybody who wanted one a home loan, after all Freddie and Fannie would buy the loan from ya, sprinkle some taxpayer insurance on it and resell it as a Mortgage Backed Security and everybody wins. Right up until everybody lost when Freddie and Fannie went under and people quickly realized even Uncle Sugar couldn't possibly cover all the bets.
> Even if it is, it's my understanding that it was private banks which gleefully picked up
> the home loans, for some reason assuming it was a good investment. Correct me if I'm wrong,
> but isn't the lesson here, if anything, that private enterprise and government enterprises
> don't always interface well?
Remember the part about the securities being government backed? They were supposed to be as safe an investment as treasury bills so of course everybody was happy to buy them. But I couldn't say it better when you note government enterprises and private enterprise don't work well. They don't and that is what conservatives have been saying since the New Deal. The solution here is obvious but politically impossible; wind down Freddie and Fannie. Yes this will mean people who used to get NINJA loans will remain renters, this is life. If we leave em around this situation will recur in 10-20 years as Democrats decide votors have forgotten this time.
> It seems unjustified to me to say it was the government half of the equation that was the
> entire problem, not at all greed and carelessness on the other side.
Granted that individuals should have either known or consulted someone with a clue before signing a balloon mortgage, bankers should have had sense enough to know this scam would eventually burst and raised holy hell... assuming any MSM outlet would give them airtime even if they bought it.... But the root cause was Freddie and Fannie encouraging banks to give loans to anyone regardless of creditworthiness and to then sell them the paper.
> I also don't know much about the previous depression, but I was under the (quite possibly mistaken)
> impression it was because of a lack of government controls.
Yes there was some pretty obvious problems in regulation. A Free Market does need regulation to ensure transparency and protect investors against fraud. Even Libertarians are generally in favor of the Government maintaining the Rule of Law. But it was FDR's New Deal experimentation that made the Depression Great. Go look at the historical record. The Depression threw the whole world into a major slump but while everyone else recovered it took a World War to finally snap the US out of it.
> Anyway, for most of us, "marxist" is not an insult
Because you live in academia where the reality of marxism is carefully suppressed. Marx's ideas have lead to prison states and mass graves each and every time they have been allowed to be fully implemented. Zero ex
Democrat delenda est
You are right and you are wrong. There was no _explicit_ guarantee, but everyone assumed an _implicit_ guarantee. This created a huge moral hazard -- Fannie and Freddie allowed riskier and riskier mortgages. And, in the end, the implicit guarantee became explicit -- just like everyone knew it would.
There was never any chance that the government would let Fannie or Freddie fail -- thus, they have always been 100% government backed.
The idea that scientists and assorted elite intellectuals were the rightful ruling class
That idea goes back at least to Plato. It was wrong then, and it's still wrong today. There is no "rightful" ruling class. We are entitled to our liberty, and anyone who seeks to infringe upon it carries the burden of justifying that use of force.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
and Endless September dawns upon another soul.
~.~
I'm a peripheral visionary.
> 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 again, ACORN's scheme would have failed. So everybody could believe what the wanted when they needed to. And in the end it is going to be bailed out by the taxpayers regardless who wins the election. McCain has already promised to tax those of us who bought wisely to bail out the people with NINJA loans and while Obama is saying he won't everybody knows he will since it is at its heart a redistribution of wealth scheme.
Democrat delenda est
It's funny, but ideology seems to be particularly adept at re-writing history.
For the nth time, Coolidge and Hoover were both laissez-faire capitalists (Coolidge more than Hoover) who precipitated the great depression. Under Hoover GNP fell by 31%. Under Roosevelt GNP rose and unemployment fell the majority of years before the war that he was in power, often in numbers unheard of in modern times.
Now, I'm not saying the New Deal was responsible for this, but to say FDR prolonged the depression when the economy recovered under him (slowly) but failed to do so under Hoover is intellectually dishonest at best and deliberate ideologically driven revisionism at worst. One might also offer the opinion that the bubble of the roaring twenties, where stock prices and investments did not seem to be tied to reality, was not something to be repeated so soon after the disaster it caused.
It took the massive motivation of the second world war which created a new set of real growth (as opposed to a roaring twenties bubble) to actually get things on par again. Oddly enough, most economic historians equate this with Keynes, saying that if FDR had been more willing to spend into deficit (and had adopted a more aggressively interventionist policy), the economy would've recovered even quicker... although, if you can show me a modern Western economy growing at better than 14.1% (as the US did in 1936 under FDR), I'll be surprised!
The most interesting paragraph from the Krugman article is this one:
--- guns don't kill people, people with guns kill people ---