NationStates Jolt Archive

http://www.reuters.com/article/marketsNews/idUSLD31939920081013
http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/economics/laureates/2008/ecoadv08.pdf - the paper honoured specifically, worth reading if you care

I've been critical of his more recent focus on Bush-bashing in the public eye rather than on the academic side, but his achievements previously to all that are worth noting. Though the existence of people like him is routinely denied by many people on this board, his contributions in trade theory and the analysis of modern financial crises in developing countries are undoubtably valuable.

Is he the most worthy of potential recipients? Well, I suppose there's a topic for debate. This is definitely one of the more publically accessible finding of the Nobel judges of the past few years.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Krugman
http://topics.nytimes.com/top/opinion/editorialsandoped/oped/columnists/paulkrugman/index.html

Nobody deservers it. You've all failed! You should get nothing!

NL go to http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/default.htm
There is a Yale economist, Robert Shiller who predicted the mortgage crash and he had previously spotted the IT bubble.

His charts will fascinate you

His charts will fascinate you
Watched it. :wink:

and he had previously spotted the IT bubble.


Loads of people actually spotted that.

NL go to http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/default.htm
There is a Yale economist, Robert Shiller who predicted the mortgage crash and he had previously spotted the IT bubble.

His charts will fascinate you

It took a Yale economist to predict that the US would fuck it all up?

Do you think his Prize is tied to Inflation?

Do you think his Prize is tied to Inflation?
They should give it to him in Bank shares. If he's such a great economist, surely he'll be able to make money from them!

Or instead of a cash prize the winner gets to implement economic policy on a country for one year. To make it fair, they're given a lucky dip bag with all the countries of the world contained therein on cards.

They should give it to him in Bank shares. If he's such a great economist, surely he'll be able to make money from them!

Or instead of a cash prize the winner gets to implement economic policy on a country for one year. To make it fair, they're given a lucky dip bag with all the countries of the world contained therein on cards.

And he pulls out... *Drum roll* The Vatican city!:D

Okay, I would ask that people please refrain from talking about the banking crisis in this thread. Not only is Paul Krugman one of the most vocal critics of Wall Street, deregulation and the Bush administration you will find, but it's all utterly irrelevant to the academia that is being honoured (and which is summarised nicely by the pdf in the OP) or the man himself.

Interesting choice. The Self Organizing Economy and The Age Of Diminished Expectations are both on my reading list this year.

The Nobel prize just doesn't mean what it used to... In pseudo-sciences, like economics, it's a measure of how much the candidate has sucked up to the committee. Considering that Krugman hasn't really done anything to this free trade theory since 1991, his nose must be pretty wet.

Apparently Myrm thinks he's come up with such a clever riposte about the Nobel prize, he feels the need to post it in every thread made.
I guess we should credit him for trying.

http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/e...8/ecoadv08.pdf

The introduction of this seems very interesting, I will read it later when I have some time, hell I shouldn't even be on here. *Document bookmarked*

As for whether he deserved to win, as I don't pay a whole lot of attention to nominees I couldn't tell you if someone else deserved it or not.

I think it's great any time the Committee honors an economist who disagrees with their previous recipients. My impression of the Economics prize is probably skewed by the roughly six million* prizes awarded to Followers of Friedman at the U of C, but I've always got the impression that the Committee chose the macro theory they liked and then looked for a specific achievement. Economics is in many ways a very young science, because previous generations of economists couldn't observe behavior the same way we can now with computers -- the computer model may turn out to be for economics what the microscope was for biology. At the current level of theoretical development, the more different kinds of work that the Committee can shine a light on, the better.

I haven't finished reading Krugman's paper yet so I don't know if I think he's worthy of the prize, but so far it's an interesting read.

*a first-order estimate. Upon further analysis, the number turns out to be nine, not sixty million. I maintain that my point stands.

The Nobel prize just doesn't mean what it used to... In pseudo-sciences, like economics, it's a measure of how much the candidate has sucked up to the committee. Considering that Krugman hasn't really done anything to this free trade theory since 1991, his nose must be pretty wet.

Well its a good thing its not a Nobel Prize or given by a Nobel Committee for that matter.

Separated at birth?

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/a/a2/HugoDrax79.jpg/180px-HugoDrax79.jpghttp://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/8/89/Krugman_FPO.jpg/200px-Krugman_FPO.jpg
aaaaaaaKrugmanaaaaaaaaaaaaCrappy Bond Villain

Though the existence of people like him is routinely denied by many people on this board...

You really do talk tot, don't you.

People make a habit of denying the existence of economists?

I think it should go to they guy who invented "sell in may and go away..."

(Actually, Cashin said that this morning).

You really do talk tot, don't you.

People make a habit of denying the existence of economists?

People like him, because a lot of people recently have developed this bizarre and unfounded belief that all economists are extreme pro deregulation libertarians, which is completely false.

In pseudo-sciences, like economics, it's a measure of how much the candidate has sucked up to the committee.

Such as Kissinger even being nominated, let alone winning it?

Such as Kissinger, who should die, slowly, painfully and horribly, even being nominated?

Have you not learnt by now that every time you make a comment like this, it causes a lot of hostility and threadjacking, whilst being a useless statement, so it's better off not making a comment like that?

Have you not learnt by now that every time you make a comment like this, it causes a lot of hostility and threadjacking, whilst being a useless statement, so it's better off not making a comment like that?

Well, I suppose if Americans don't make that kind of comment about Bin Laden, who is also a terrorist and a murderer, I think I can refrain from making them about Kissinger. Fixing it.

Edit: Fixed it. But I call dibs on the celebratory thread when it happens.

I'll be honest. I didn't understand that text at all. I was maybe getting the gist of it until the equation on page 5, which pretty much melted my brain. But from his Wikipedia page he sounds relatively sensible. So a qualified, uninformed "Woo!" for Mr Krugman from me.

Such as Kissinger even being nominated, let alone winning it?

I think the evolution to the present day ass-kissing contest is a little more recent... Still, did Kissinger and Le really deserve the prize then? Probably not, they didn't do much more than negotiate a ceasefire that didn't hold up any better than his Middle East initiatives. ( or anyone else's Middle East initiatives, for that matter)

I think it's great any time the Committee honors an economist who disagrees with their previous recipients.
Well, last year it went to people who do mechanism design theory, which is not really hands-off free-market, but concerns itself with the framework within which a market would function properly.

The year before was illustrating how macroeconomic models work when you make microeconomic assumptions on imperfect information and so on, and before then it was game theory in auctions, IIRC, which is refreshingly unoffensive. Stiglitz and Akerlof got prizes too, for work on showing how imperfect information brings down markets. Hell, Stiglitz wrote a book called "Wither, Socialism?" in which his answer is "No".

The reason people like Becker and Coase won prizes is because they expanded the field of economics with profound insights. I really don't think you can make a credible argument that the process has favoured any particular school of thought - it is concerned with academic economics, which is a synthesis of ideas from all schools.

You really do talk tot, don't you.

People make a habit of denying the existence of economists?
See Hydesland's response.

I always found it amusing how Myrdal and Hayek were co-winners of the Prize that one year in the 70s.

I'm starting to think it's all psychology stuffs.

I'm starting to think it's all psychology stuffs.

????

You really do talk tot, don't you.

People make a habit of denying the existence of economists?

Oh, I don't know. All these people talk about economists.... but have they ever seen one? One who wasn't dead and memorialized in a few books? I think not. It's become plain to me, with this recent financial crisis that has gone unsolved by any so-called economist, that "economist" is simply a name given by gullible everymen who are misinterpreting some otherwise completely explicable and rational phenomena, such as the existence of economics courses and even econ majors, all of those funny graphs that keep appearing in the news, and the government's apparent ability to make rational economic decisions. None of these are incontrovertible proof that economists exist.

People have asked me whether I "believe" in economists. I usually answer something along the lines of, yeah, I believe a lot of people have seen things they can't explain, and that's what they call economists. But do I believe there are actually people out there who formulate economic theories and make predictions of market cycles and all that technobabble? Well, I don't exactly -- I'm open to believing it, if there's no other rational explanation, but I haven't seen any hard proof that there are economists walking the earth these days.

????

Yah, that behaviorally economics thingy. I mean, people don't act in their own best interest, and you can't explain the stupid from lack of information. People are just stupid.

Yah, that behaviorally economics thingy. I mean, people don't act in their own best interest, and you can't explain the stupid from lack of information. People are just stupid.
Kinda relevant, and very on-topic:

http://www.pkarchive.org/theory/serfdom.html
WHY I'M AN ECONOMIST (SIGH)
Paul Krugman

SYNOPSIS: In praise of Economists, who have the most rigorous frameworks and generally correct predictions out of all the Social Scientists. (For now.)

Writing an introductory textbook has some perhaps unexpected side effects. By forcing you to go back to basics - to explain to an audience of young people why economic theory is useful and important - it also makes you think about why you yourself went down that path. And so the other day I found myself in a reverie about the choices I myself made, all those years ago. (Was I also trying to avoid working on the task at hand? Of course). As an undergraduate, I wasn't especially interested in economics per se: I was interested in History, in understanding the fate of empires and the destiny of kings. But I settled for something far narrower. Why?

I asked myself this slightly rueful question while revising my exposition of the Ricardian model of land rent. Every economist knows it: peasants cultivate the best land first, then the next best, and so on. Competition among the landowners ensures that each peasant gets no less than what he could grow on the best uncultivated land; competition among the peasants that he gets no more. It's a beautiful example of economic reasoning in action.

But as I was rewriting the chapter section, I had a sudden fantasy vision of a bright but cynical undergraduate declaring that this was nonsense, that the landowners would conspire to keep the peasants down. And that undergraduate would, historically, often - but not always - have been right. Indeed, my old teacher Evsey Domar wrote a classic paper arguing that serfdom and slavery often were the response of ruling classes to labor shortage. Thus Russia imposed strict restrictions on the mobility of peasants from the late 16th century onward, precisely because the availability of rich new farmland on the expanding frontier would otherwise have increased their bargaining power against landlords. (The frontier expansion itself was probably the result of the growing effectiveness of firearms, which turned the military balance against the steppe nomads; so gunpowder, which contributed to the rise of the bourgeoisie in the West, created serfdom in the East). And, of course, slavery - which, along with serfdom, had died out in the West during the labor-abundant high Middle Ages - was reintroduced in the land-abundant conditions of the New World.

On the other hand, of course, it has not always worked that way. England's peasants were not reenserfed after the Black Death drove up their wages; attempts to build a system of indentured white servitude in America failed; slavery was abolished; and in the modern world wages do more or less reflect marginal productivity.

Now suppose I were to ask the question, why does a labor shortage sometimes lead to a rise in wages, sometimes to political action by the ruling class to keep the lower orders in their place? And I won't be satisfied with a narrative about what happened in some specific case: I want a widely applicable model, like Ricardo's model of land rent. That is, I want a framework that is more than an after-the-fact rationalization of what we already know happened.

But of course there is no such model. Worse yet, not only don't I know of any such model, I don't even know how one might begin to create one. My perplexity is not, I believe, a reflection of my ignorance of political science, or sociology. Economists may make lots of bad predictions, but they do have a method - a systematic way of thinking about the world that is more true than not, that gives them genuine if imperfect expertise. (That is also, of course, why lay commentators and other social scientists tend to hate them). Other social sciences haven't yet found anything remotely equivalent. Oh, there are bits and pieces, and some of them are very exciting; try taking a look at Robert Axelrod's stuff. But basically when it comes to most of the questions that I am really interested in, one man's view is as good as another.

When I was young and naive, I used to imagine that my career as an economist could eventually branch out into one as a general social scientist. And I still love to read and think about the broader questions - a book like Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel can keep me happy as a clam for weeks. But the clarity and power of economic analysis can spoil you: once you have a taste of what it means to have a really insightful model, you tend to be inhibited about looser speculations.

The truth is that other social sciences are still waiting for their Adam Smiths. Someday they will find them; as Colin McEvedy wrote in his introduction to the Penguin Atlas of Ancient History, "History being a branch of the biological sciences, its ultimate expression must be mathematical." But for the meantime I guess that I am stuck with my day job.