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Charlie Stross, Paul Krugman Discuss the Future
Peripatetic Entrepreneur writes "At the Science Fiction World Convention in Montreal, Hugo Award winning author Charlie Stross and Nobel Prize winning economist Paul Krugman opened the show with a 75-minute, wide-ranging conversation on stage. From flying cars to decoding the genome of the Pacific Ocean to vat-grown Long Pig, it's all there. Audio is also available — video soon."
Krugman and Stross Transcript
Paul Krugman (PK). Nobel Prize winning economist and columnist for the New York Times.
Charlie Stross (CS). Hugo-winning science fiction author.
Anticipation World Con, Montreal, Quebec
August 6, 2009
Transcription by Edwin Steussy, Apogee Communications. Please send corrections to ed âoeatâ my last name âoedotâ com.
CS: Good evening, weâ(TM)re very pleased to be here and thank you very much for inviting us to talk.
PK: Yeah, this is different for me, but it should be a lot of fun. ⦠(Set up problems) ⦠What do you really think the world is going to look like, say, 30 years from now?
CS: Ummm, thereâ(TM)s a very simple answer to that and a misleading one, I think, and the simple answer is unless we are really, really unlucky the world in about 30 years time is going to look more complex. By really, really unlucky â" nuclear war, major plagues or similar â" the world in 30 years time after that is going to look a lot simpler, though not a good way.
PK: Right. Obviously what Iâ(TM)m thinking about is the technology. Given my perspective â" I was thinking about his coming up â" and thinking that â" maybe it was just my age or something, but things donâ(TM)t seem to have changed as much in the last 30 years as myself as a sci-fi reader would have expected them to. And I donâ(TM)t know if Iâ(TM)m missing something â" kinda that perspective.
CS: I think things have changed a lot in the last 30 years, but not in the direction that somebody 30 years ago would have expected. The 20th Century, and going back to the 19th Century, the real visible vector of change technologically was transportation speeds. You go back to 1809 and to get across the English Home Counties, the areas around London, you go via stagecoach and it would take you a couple of days to cross them, it would cost you probably about a monthâ(TM)s wages and cause you considerable discomfort. 2009, it costs about the same amount of money, it takes about the same time and the same amount of discomfort to get from here to New Zealand. The whole world has shrunk to the scale of the English Home Counties in 1809 over about two centuries. At the same time weâ(TM)ve gotten used to performance improvements in speed. Thereâ(TM)s this weird sort of political thing in the early 20th Century called air-mindedness. Everybody knew that flight was going to be the next really important technological revolution. They were all trying to find ways of making money from it or using it to demonstrate how important and modern and with-it they were and how on the cutting edge they were â" sort of like computers today with politicians. Who will never pass up a photo-op with a computer even if they donâ(TM)t even know how to type. Now the whole air-mindedness thing, the problem we ran into was ⦠it was sigmoid curve â" we had a slow start, a very rapid period of improvements where we went at about 20 years from biplanes to supersonic jets. And then the curve stopped going up â" it flattened off. And the reason it flattened off is all to do with energy. To go much faster, you need more and more energy inputs. Itâ(TM)s not a linear input increase but virtually an exponential one. We hit a point at which chemical propulsion wouldnâ(TM)t send us any faster. And for a variety of reasons including both engineering and politics, nuclear power wasnâ(TM)t an acceptable answer. And airliners today are slower than they were 20 years ago. However, the big difference is that everyone and his dog flies today, whereas 20 years ago, or 40 years ago more accurately, thatâ(TM)s where the term jet-set came from, its because those were the people who could afford to fly long distances.
PK: And yet, let me press on. What I kind of expected. Let me show my age here. What you came out believing if you went to the New Yorkâ(TM)s World Fair in 1964 w
http://michaelsmith.id.au
neither did anyone investing in the market that lost any money. the ability to predict market crashes has little to do with predicting things over the long term. the market recovers and people move on. the real reason why predictions of the future are more often wrong than not is because people have a tendency to expect what they think is interesting [flying cars] rather than anything of practical use. if you want an accurate prediction make one that is the result of several small practical steps away from what exists now. for example; I predict that hybrid cars [or some offshoot of them] will make up a majority of cars within 50 years. not a very exciting prediction but it's probably more accurate than expecting flying cars any time soon.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
Krugman is of the opinion that the economic crisis will come back when the government spending is done. You're thinking of Jim Cramer who thinks it's over.
http://www.thestreet.com/_yahoo/story/10569659/1/cramers-mad-money-recap-cramer-vs-krugman-update-1.html?cm_ven=YAHOO&cm_cat=FREE&cm_ite=NA
Sorry, don't have the original article by Krugman, don't really follow him, but the relevant part is at the beginning.
"He [Cramer] refuted an article by noted New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, who argued the economy is slowly getting worse.
According to Krugman and others skeptical of the market's recent rally, the economy is simply being propped up by government spending and will return to March lows as that spending wanes. But Cramer asked his viewers pointedly, 'Are things slowing getting worse for you?'"
It seems "experts" in economics, uh, aren't. At least not all the time.
To fight this recession the Fed needsâ¦soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. [So] Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip.html Krugman and the Keynesian economists don't predict economic downturns, they create them. They believe that "bad" money in the short term is better than "good" money and say that in the long term we are all dead. Krugman's prize wasn't for being a good economist but for his mathematical model much like John Nash. Personally after reading Krugman the past two years I believe he is also just as nuts.
If you have something that you dont want anyone to know, maybe you shouldnt be doing it in the first place -Eric Schmidt
He didn't exactly see the financial meltdown coming in advance
He was pointing out back in September of 2007 (and perhaps earlier - I didn't check any further) that housing prices were far too high with respect to historical price-rent levels and that a reckoning was coming. You're right, he didn't predict the collapse - he just predicted the precursor and had been warning about the deregulation that turned it into a disaster.
That is all.
Krugman is no psychic. He didn't exactly see the financial meltdown coming in advance...
That's not fair. Krugman predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions.
The problem with Krugman is that he is relentlessly political and that is a bad trait for an economist. He tireless argues for greater and greater interventions in the marketplace (that is, he's a statist) without taking into account the secondary effects of those interventions because that would contradict his world view. He's also very popular in Washington :-).
That's not fair. Krugman predicted 11 of the last 3 recessions.
You should be more careful. Mixing binary and decimal notation can really confuse some people.
Reading code is like reading the dictionary - you have to read half of it before you can go back and understand it.
I don't think the future of entertainment will be so different than it is today, or even 500 years ago. The medium may change, but that's really about it. Humans like to be entertained, period. Here's an interesting new development in 'moderntainment'; http://us.dubli.com/The-New-York-Spygame__3_2913?gmt=-60 which I think could really indicate how people are starting to think about their space and entertainment, and how to make the most of something that even a few years ago was pretty much the preserve of novels and OTT Hollywood shows. Food for thought, I think.
actually, everyone who was in the market knew it was a bubble. the only thing they didn't know was when it would burst. everyone stays in hoping to cash out before it bursts. anyone who was predicting that housing wasn't a bubble was either lying or he is a charlatan.
Any guest worker system is indistinguishable from indentured servitude.
You, sir, are smoking crack.
Of all the economists to go after for having poor "prognostication skills" you couldn't have picked anyone worse, except for maybe Nuriel Roubini. The fact is that Krugman called the bubble in at least May 2005, warned of disastrous consequences in August of that year, and continued to do so all the way to when the shit hit the fan. From his August 8 2005 piece:
"If housing prices actually started falling, we'd be looking at a very nasty scene, in which both construction and consumer spending would plunge, pushing the economy right back into recession. That's why it's so ominous to see signs that America's housing market, like the stock market at the end of the last decade, is approaching the final, feverish stages of a speculative bubble."
This is when Fox, CNBC, and the Fed were rah-rahing about how everything was fine and shouting down those who'd voice otherwise.
It was worse than even he suspected, as the bubble continued to grow, he continued to point it out. For anyone who read his column and blog in the years leading up to this clusterfuck it was quite clear that Krugman had a very prescient and accurate prediction of the varied causes and effects of the chaos that would ensue along with numerous warnings not to let it happen. So the parent can shut his pie hole because he clearly hasn't read a word the man has written.
I invite anyone to Google and read Krugman's columns for yourself. Because this is insane backwards bullshit. The guy was crying his head off that this was going to happen.
It isn't intended for consumption. It's just that if some muscle grafts fail QC for internal use, you might as well fry it up. Plus, PETA has a reward out for "vat grown meat", but they didn't specify the species.
Human flesh that hasn't been abused for 30 years is probabally quite tasty. Or at least it smells pretty good when cooked by accident, so it might taste good when cooked on purpose.
Especially if there isn't any same-species viral concerns.
Even the second biggest one (12mb) is only 24kbps / 8000Hz and sounds like crap. And there's 8mb and 4mb versions below that! Surely a single 64kbps 220000Hz stream would of done? :s
The large version is here - 96kpbs / 32000Hz....
http://cluebytwelve.net/anticipation/Stross-Krugman%202009-08-06hi.mp3
This UID is 7651 digits too high to subjectively infer IQ from.
Where is my damn jet pack? What about my teleporter?!
Can anyone recommend a good therapist for me.. er.. my schizophrenic network card?
but the big thing was the freight container.
He's right. There's a great book called "The Box", which is a history of modern shipping containers. Containerization reduced the cost of ocean shipping of manufactured goods by about 90%. Breakage and theft went way down, too.
A few decades ago, if you went down to the docks in New York or San Francisco, there were thousands of big guys lifting and carrying stuff. Not only did containers end that, they ended the ports of New York and San Francisco - both were replaced with new ports in New Jersey and Oakland. If you go to a container port today, you see very few people around.
The other big development that made international trade work was fax machines. With fax machines, you could send ordinary business paperwork to people far away. Even if they didn't speak your language, they could probably figure out a purchase order. So you could do the basics of commerce at a distance. This cut out many of the expensive middlemen in international trade. It used to be that to import something, you had to deal with an importer, who dealt with an exporter at the sending end, who dealt with the manufacturer, possibly with a wholesaler and a warehouse company somewhere in the chain. With fax machines and containers, you cut the deal with the manufacturer by fax, they filled a container, and the container came to you without any intermediaries who cared what was in the box.
What? Krugman wrote "The Return of Depression Economics" in 2000. He has been saying something is fundamentally wrong with the world economy since then, while the median response by economists is that everything is fine, the free market has to take its course etc. Krugman has been throwing closer to the bullseye than most other mainstream economists.
Do you apply that to all politically outspoken economists, across the spectrum? So you would say, for example, that Milton Friedman was a bad economist?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Once he got the Times column, he began analyzing Bush's budgets and saying the numbers did not add up because they were wildly over-optimistic. This brought him into the political arena more.
Also - what mainstream economist does NOT argue for intervention in the economy? Milton Friedman who is supposed to be the free market guru supported a government/Fed run expansionary money policy. This is a capitalist economy, do the capitalists who run it and own it pay attention to any economists who don't advocate government control over at least money? The answer is no. In fact, the capitalists who run this capitalist economy were who advocated the bailout of the banks and all of this.
The difference is that Krugman changes his recommendations based on the political party of the politician backing the economic policies. There were economic policies that he supported when the Clinton Administration proposed them and opposed when the Bush Administration proposed them. If he had said that he used to support such policies but now realized that they were wrong, it would have been one thing, but he instead wrote as if he had always opposed such policies and only an idiot would support them.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
That's a very fair point. I'll say this though: most libertarian economists warn about the dangers of governments using policy to direct economic matters. This criticism is very well founded; generally things start out well, but inevitably things go wrong and the perpetrators end up blaming the free market for all the problems. There are of course examples and counter examples on both sides, so things are completely black/white, but as a general trend it rings true. While libertarian economists (to use a stereotype) are political in the sense that they look at the economic problems resulting from political issues, they tend to think that economic policy should be apolitical...that is, get politicians of all striped out of the money business. Krugman is the nemesis of that line of thinking.
Asking an economist to predict the stock market is like asking your channel 7 weather man to model global climate change.
Nevertheless, if you've been following Krugman he's certainly not been an optimist about a lot of the aspects of economy leading up to the meltdown. Here's a pretty pessimistic article about housing prices from 8/2005: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/08/08/opinion/08krugman.html?_r=1 Of course, at the time people accused him of being a pessimist.
Waltz, nymph, for quick jigs vex Bud.
He'll come back to it sooner or later, I'm sure. It just might take him a while. I understand his problem with writing more... he's started with a beginning that promises a particular kind of ending, and it's hard to wrap your head around how he can get to that ending. That doesn't mean it's impossible, though, and I'll bet one day he'll come up with an answer...
No it's not.
Seriously what is government intervention to pump money into the economy when the economy looks like it is starting a downward trend, if it isn't stock standard Keynesian IS/LM curve shifting?
Sure Greenspan called himself a free-marketer, but actions speak louder.
"I'll say this though: most libertarian economists warn about the dangers of governments using policy to direct economic matters."
But that's a political point of view right there. It's akin to saying that Sector X of the economy (where X in this case == banking) should be above the law. Why? Well... just because we say so! It's our axiom that GOVERNMENT == BAD and FINANCE == GOOD!
Both government and finance are means of social control - and neither come from Mars but both execute with the consent of the people, and as the means of implementing the people's will. It's also valid to say that finance should not control people's lives any more than government should.
Do libertarian economists warn against the dangers of financial speculation wasting resources and causing gross mismanagement? But they should, if they're going to be honest. Economists should be both apolitical and afinancial.
However, "libertarians" often seem to have a huge blind spot when it comes to money. They seem to think that money is a self-justifying power base which can do no wrong, unlike those evil Gubmint bureaucrats. But greed and power is greed and power no matter what the label on the suit.
You are not a brain: http://books.google.com/books?id=2oV61CeDx-YC