In the future, people will wonder with utter incredulity how ridiculous assertions about conjuring money out of thin air and borrowing your way out of debt could possibly pass as science ... at how political leaders listen to modern day soothsayers, directing national policy and robbing wealth from hundreds of millions of people based on faux-science ... and how we can actually award our most esteemed prizes to men who tell us that we can spend our way out of recession and tax our way into prosperity.
“No doubt, people in the future will look back, and theyll wonder..”
In the present, some people with a couple of functioning brain cells are looking on, and we shudder....
I will actually allow that there is SOME truth to the statement, but only in a negative way. If the genius entrepreneur is born in North Korea, he likely won’t be able to use his ability. This doesn’t say anything marvelous about governement, except to the degree that it protects people from violence allowing them to make the most of their lives.
Such a government must be kept lean and narrow, or it will become the perpetrator of violence.
Stiglitz’s first bestseller after winning the Nobel Prize was a diatribe against Reagan.
His whole idea in “Globalism and its Discontents” was that everything was Reagans fault because he did not regulate enough. Interestingly enough he wrote this after 8 years of Clinton and after having served on Clinton’s cabinet.
This was sort of like the manager at the supermarket who had the job for 8 years blaming a spill in aisle 3 on the guy who ran the place 8 years ago. As a member of the Clinton cabinet, he had ample time to regulate us to prosperity.
Stiglitz is an ass.
The President and his advisors are devout Keynesians.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Galton_Institute
Check the list of Directors
John Maynard Keynes, Director 1937-1944 V.P. 1937
Arthur Neville Chamberlain, British prime minister between 1937 and 1940
Note the years. While Hitler was exterminating the genetically defective in the camps, Keynes was loudly banging the drum for him in England.
Check the Science used to justify Galton’s garbage:
http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pmed.0020212
http://www.councilforresponsiblegenetics.org/GeneWatch/GeneWatchPage.aspx?pageId=384
70 years later and Galton/Keynes genetically inferior races Still can’t be identified as genetically pre disposed to behave or think in any inferior way, shape, or form.
Also see, Keynes at Harvard
http://www.keynesatharvard.org/
There has never been any science whatsoever to justify Galton and Keynes, none.
I always thought that Paul Krugman would hold that record forever, but I am inclined to agree with you.
Eugenics has been practiced by match making great aunts for centuries. It works as well as any tool, as long as it is used by one of skill.
There ARE industrious people all over - but it was The USA and the FREEDOMS we have that made us go from a collection of colonies to the worlds biggest superpower in 150 years.
There were entrepreneurs all over the world- did they succeed in Communist Russia? China? North Korea?
The places with THE MOST FREEDOM and LEAST government did the best
So YES the type of government is what made the difference- the places with the LEAST government control.
Economics is more a quantitative discipline than a science. Any such discipline worthy of the attention and participation of people such as Milton and Rose Friedman is not without value. That it can be perverted for political purposes is one of the great distinctions between economics and sciences
Remember that agronomy is a real science but a man named Lysenko did much harm by politicizing it with the aid of a fellow named Stalin.
As Al Gore Junior, rainmaker and former Vice-Prezzydent, would say, "the scientists had consensus".
The first clue should have been the Nobel prize. What makes you think a bunch of Norwegians using unknown criteria can pick any winner? Look at their past track records.
The Inequality is the new rage. Anybody worth anything has to have sprouted it a dozen times a day. It is pure bunk.
Find something in nature, in real life, that is truly 'equal'.
Here's where the author and I violently diverge.
Society doesn't believe any of it. In fact it doesn't have to believe anything.
So long as the person holding the political and military reins believes it, whether it's Hitler, Idi Amin, Pol Pot, Hugo Chavez, or... or...
Dag nab it, I can't think of a single leader of a beneficent stable country/culture led by a benign depot.
Anyway, my point is, that society doesn't decide. Small totalitarian bent groups do.
Well, now I know where Obama got his Big Idea.