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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 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.
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.
To be fair you have to add Krugman's response to this accusation:
http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/and-i-was-on-the-grassy-knoll-too/
god n. : the Supreme Being, indistinguishable from a good random number generator.
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.