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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.
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.
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."
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Besides, it is on the Nobel website, equivalent to all the other prizes. If it's good enough for them...
So you might be technically right, but only in the pedant's sense.
How many more politicians and faux-news talking heads will continue to push the pseudo-scientific religion that is reaganomics?
Humans are capable of believing untrue things for a very long time, even after reality begins to seriously challenge those beliefs. The Left has long-cherished beliefs (Example: Unions are good for workers, My Counter-Example: The number of Unions up until the 60s that prohibited blacks from working at a union shop). The Right has its long-cherished beliefs.
There are a lot of possible explanations why people are like that, but the more important thing is to engage those people by asking questions about the basis of their belief and learning yourself. If someone says something, and you don't know if it's true or not, take some effort to find out if it is. Most of the time, you can Google the issue and find a lot of people have done the hard work for you. You just have to verify if their logic is sound and inferences are valid.
Krugman, via his blog and columns, does try his best to do this. In fact, he often posts links to early versions of his papers and mathematics on his NY Times blog and lets his readers pick it apart. He and Tyler Cowan (a libertarian leaning economist) have very civil debates via their blogs.
Most *-wing sites simply tune out contrary voices with more chanting and weak arguments that bolster that community's feelings on right and wrong. In short: people judge arguments by its truthiness, not its validity.
And for the record, we cannot judge if Reagnomics worked because Reagonomics is:
To be honest, I don't believe he achieved those four goals during his presidency, so I'm not sure one can say Reagonomics worked or not:
The bitter lessons of a veteran coder: http://bitterprogrammer.blogspot.com
I had a real respect for him when he mentioned he was inspired by Asimov.
For more geek cred: while at Princeton in 1978, Krugman wrote a tongue-in-cheek paper titled The Theory of Interstellar Trade (PDF) (see Slashdot article on it).
There is no Nobel prize in Economics. It's an associated prize, "The Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel", was instituted by Sweden's central bank in 1968
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sveriges_Riksbank_Prize_in_Economic_Sciences_in_Memory_of_Alfred_Nobel
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
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.
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
For even more geek cred: he made an 'All your base' reference on Olbermann last month: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVsYZo86S-k (0:48)
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.