NP but robots and robber barons

[alice wellintown]

notes:

Krug doesn't know what the problem is, but he is fixated on the
normative or political economic solutions to what he claims, in his
remarkable book, is a trend of deminishing expectations; he proposes
faster growth, easy money, a focus on employment and improved income
equality, all what Ben has been working on, taking on extraordinary
risks, but Krug ignores the cmplexities of regulations, one area where
the Europeans, who have recently brought in a Canadian, and are slowly
merging these giant and complex roles of central banks. Krug makes it
all seem so easy, just lock up the robbers and promote labor, but
these are nothing more than interesting provocations, and so, Krug has
reduced himself to a journalist with a Nobel in Economics.

WASHINGTON -- When the Federal Reserve's vice chairman said in a 1994
speech that the central bank "had a role in reducing unemployment,"
colleagues were publicly dismissive. The very word "employment" did
not appear in a policy statement until 2008. The Fed was focused on
inflation, officials said time and again.

That era is over. The signs have been there for some time, but they
are now unmistakable. Ben S. Bernanke, the Fed's chairman, made clear
on Thursday that job creation is its primary concern for the
foreseeable future.

The remarkable transformation of the Fed's priorities is partly a
response to the grim reality that more than 20 million Americans
cannot find full-time jobs. It is made easier by the fact that the Fed
has been so successful in stabilizing inflation right around the 2
percent annual pace that officials consider most healthy.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/15/business/fed-chooses-jobs-over-fighting-inflation.html

Throughout history, rich and poor countries alike have been lending,
borrowing, crashing--and recovering--their way through an
extraordinary range of financial crises. Each time, the experts have
chimed, "this time is different"--claiming that the old rules of
valuation no longer apply and that the new situation bears little
similarity to past disasters. With this breakthrough study, leading
economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff definitively prove them
wrong. Covering sixty-six countries across five continents, This Time
Is Different presents a comprehensive look at the varieties of
financial crises, and guides us through eight astonishing centuries of
government defaults, banking panics, and inflationary spikes--from
medieval currency debasements to today's subprime catastrophe. Carmen
Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, leading economists whose work has been
influential in the policy debate concerning the current financial
crisis, provocatively argue that financial combustions are universal
rites of passage for emerging and established market nations. The
authors draw important lessons from history to show us how much--or
how little--we have learned.



http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8973.html

In an interdependent world, could all countries adopt the same
egalitarianism reward struc-
tures and institutions? To provide theoretical answers to this
question, we develop a simple
model of economic growth in a world in which all countries bene t and
potentially contribute
to advances in the world technology frontier. A greater gap of incomes
between successful and
unsuccessful entrepreneurs (thus greater inequality) increases
entrepreneurial e¤ort and hence
a country s contributions to the world technology frontier. We show
that, under plausible as-
sumptions, the world equilibrium is necessarily asymmetric: some
countries will opt for a type of
 cutthroat  capitalism that generates greater inequality and more
innovation and will become
the technology leaders, while others will free-ride on the cutthroat
incentives of the leaders and
choose a more  cuddly form of capitalism. Paradoxically, those with
cuddly reward structures,
though poorer, may have higher welfare than cutthroat capitalists  but
in the world equilib-
rium, it is not a best response for the cutthroat capitalists to
switch to a more cuddly form of
capitalism. We also show that domestic constraints from social
democratic parties or unions
may be bene cial for a country because they prevent cutthroat
capitalism domestically, instead
inducing other countries to play this role.

http://economics.mit.edu/files/8086

On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 7:28 PM, alice wellintown
<alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> On Monday, December 10, 2012, alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> Well, I'm down wit p-krug when he doesn't devalue his Nobel wih Marxist
>> cant and rhetoric, with slick op-eds that make him read like a weaker Thomas
>> Friedman, with who can look crazier debates with Ron Paul, with all manner
>> of headlines bull he doesn't believe....with anything that will keep his
>> name in the google pages.  I like krug, the economist. the editorialist is a
>> jerk. what lover of words would find those rrrrrrr over robots robbing Xmas
>> grinch barons brilliant?
>>
>> One. What measure  of the us economy finds it in depression? Depressed?
>> No, not even in recession. Unemployment is falling, not fast, but
>> falling...and the fed, now there is a prince man I'm down wit, Ben B is
>> focused on that 1/3 of his mandate. It ain't gonna drop to 6% over night.
>> Heck, we ain't in a depression, but we just got out of one, and, as the
>> "this time it is different" hangover ends, yes, it is ending, we can not
>> expect much more. Because Ben and others in the us have done such a good job
>> with this crisis we may be out of it in under 8 years, and that is the best
>> we can expect.
>>
>> Two. corporate profits. Records. Sure enough. Do we want them to go down?
>> Not if we want to grow. We want to grow. What about that piece of pink Floyd
>> pie? Is corporate profit at a record because labor is weak? Because of
>> off-shored jobs, because of off shored profits? Because corporations have
>> been cutting jobs, raising cash, raising dividends, tapping the low interest
>> rate bond market, holding back on investment spending? Yes, and more yes.
>> But krug says the pie needs to grow with a conscience, and this is not
>> economic, nor is it economics. It s politics. As he MIT guys explain we
>> can't all be cut throat capitalists, some have to be cuddle-capitalists and
>> live off he innovations of the cut-throats, so Scandinavians. Maybe krug is
>> a closet Scandinavian.
>>
>>
>> On Monday, December 10, 2012, Ian Livingston wrote:
>>>
>>> Only available to subscribers. The robber barons win again.
>>>
>>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 10, 2012 at 1:25 AM, Matthew Cissell <macissell at yahoo.es>
>>> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> For the p-list, except Alice who is not down with Krugman.
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/opinion/krugman-robots-and-robber-barons.html?ref=global-home&_r=0
>>>>
>>>> neo-luddites arise!
>>>> ciao
>>>> mc
>>>
>>>
>