NP but robots and robber barons

[alice wellintown]

Krug is not a fool; he's not a Marxist, but he engages in stupid normative
economics because he believes, deep in his liberal conscience, that  it is
better to look like a jerk, one that goes on talking-head tube programs and
argues with idiots like Ron Paul, than to give free lectures on basic
economics, on what the Fed does, and what we can do to address the massive
problems we have been confronted with, in other words, do what Ben B has
been doing....or maybe he doesn't actually believe it is the better thing
to do, but it is what he enjoys doing, um...yeah...that seems to ne the
reality of Krug's double talk: he says one thing in his economics
publications and another in his editorials. Of course he must write for the
audience and these are two different ones. One is the Dave Morris type, who
knows nothing of economics, is, like most, illiterate, and one is a smart
set who can't stomach the bullshit he, like Chomsky now, shoves at us each
day. By godless MARX, what is Krug smoking? What progress? Huge progress.
Look at the world! Open your eyes. You have to admit it is getting better
all the time, that is, unless you are so euro and American centric that you
only care about your real world and the tv shows you suck from. The cut
throats, as the MIT boys so brilliantly explain....if you read what I
posted....are making it better for the world. Asia can't copy the cuddle
capitalists because they don' innovate and design either. So, the tough
Puritan Americans will do the hard labor of dreaming and sweating. So it
goes. As the yanks like to say, somebody's got to do it.

On Tuesday, December 11, 2012, Ian Livingston wrote:

> 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
>
>
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