NP but robots and robber barons

Tue Dec 11 06:51:25 CST 2012

The question remains whether progress based on economic reward serves
desirable ends. You can make a fortune in widget gas that kills everybody
and everything. If the economic reward is the measure of goodness, then the
end product is irrelevant. Therefore, moral value serves at least as much
pragmatic value as economic value. Thus, the cutthroat approach is dubious.

Nothing in Krugman's article as I read it says lock up the barons, the
point is that labor has to be able to offset the barons' inclinations to
rob.

On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 2:47 AM, alice wellintown <alicewellintown at gmail.com
> wrote:

> 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
> >>>
> >>>
> >
>
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