Getting to Know Paul Krugman

Here is a feature piece done by the EPI for its first Distinguished Economist Award given to Paul Krugman:

Krugman Identifies the Real Radicals

From Paul Krugman's NY Times blog:

The Amnesiac Economy

Mark Thoma sends us to John Cassidy on the absence of really new ideas in this crisis — largely because we didn’t need new ideas, all we needed for the most part was to remember things that we somehow forgot.

This is a theme dear to my heart. The crisis we’re in is not something unprecedented. It’s a close cousin to the Great Depression — milder, but recognizably the same sort of thing. And we understand — or used to understand — how the Depression happened, and what to do in such a situation. Most of what’s required are fairly straightforward translations of existing concepts. For example, we have a pretty good understanding of bank runs; extending that framework to shadow banking requires little more than the understanding that repo and other kinds of short-maturity obligations are, from an economic point of view, more or less equivalent to deposits.

So how is it that policy is so confused and lost?

I’ve been arguing for a while that much of the economics profession has lost its way, recapitulating old errors because it made a point of unlearning what Keynes taught. But it’s not just economists who willfully threw away hard-won insights.

On Monday night we had a panel discussion of the euro crisis at Princeton — me, Chris Sims, Hyun Shin, Markus Brunnermeier. I was struck by some of what Sims had to say. He pointed out that central banks have always had a wider mandate than simply guaranteeing price stability; they’ve always served as lenders of last resort, including having a standby capacity to finance the government in times of need. And there are good, well-understood reasons for this wider mandate. Yet the creators of the euro essentially threw away hard-won wisdom — stuff that Bagehot knew in the 19th century! — to create a stripped-down central bank without the powers or flexibility that history has shown are necessary. What were they thinking?

The result of all this is that the supposedly sober, serious people are actually radicals insisting that we can make the economy work in ways that it has never worked in the past — hence the embrace of magical thinking on expansionary austerity and the power of structural reform. Meanwhile, the irresponsible bearded professors are actually the custodians of traditional wisdom.

And those who are determined to forget the past run a high risk of reliving it — which is why we’re in the state we’re in.

The similarity of the arrogance shown by many "economists" and the EU bank is the same kind of arrogance shown by the neo-cons and Donald Rumsfeld. It is a willful rejection of the past and a claim to "superior" knowledge that is based not on fact and theory but on a willful distortion to fit a preconceived ideology. History is replete with this kind of "radical" taking control and wrecking things while claiming "superior knowledge".

Stable societies have traditions and accreditation requirements put in place to prevent these usurpers from taking control and wrecking things. Private business faces a similar problem with psychopaths take high positions. These are individuals with no regard for others an an overweening sense of self that lets them wreck everything about them for their own gratification or sense of self importance.

Paul Krugman Despairs the Economics is Not a Science

Paul Krugman has devoted his career to economics and has won a Nobel Prize, but he fells that he is living through a "Dark Age" in which economics has unlearned the lessons of the past. He is really despondent. Here is the relevant piece from a post on his NY Times blog:

I’ve never liked the notion of talking about economic “science” — it’s much too raw and imperfect a discipline to be paired casually with things like chemistry or biology, and in general when someone talks about economics as a science I immediately suspect that I’m hearing someone who doesn’t know that models are only models. Still, when I was younger I firmly believed that economics was a field that progressed over time, that every generation knew more than the generation before.

The question now is whether that’s still true. In 1971 it was clear that economists knew a lot that they hadn’t known in 1931. Is that clear when we compare 2011 with 1971? I think you can actually make the case that in important ways the profession knew more in 1971 than it does now.

I’ve written a lot about the Dark Age of macroeconomics, of the way economists are recapitulating 80-year-old fallacies in the belief that they’re profound insights, because they’re ignorant of the hard-won insights of the past.

What I’d add to that is that at this point it seems to me that many economists aren’t even trying to get at the truth. When I look at a lot of what prominent economists have been writing in response to the ongoing economic crisis, I see no sign of intellectual discomfort, no sense that a disaster their models made no allowance for is troubling them; I see only blithe invention of stories to rationalize the disaster in a way that supports their side of the partisan divide. And no, it’s not symmetric: liberal economists by and large do seem to be genuinely wrestling with what has happened, but conservative economists don’t.

And all this makes me wonder what kind of an enterprise I’ve devoted my life to.

I'm stunned that the field has shown itself that incompetent in the face of the 2008 financial crisis. But the academics fell in love with their models, the math, and the simplifying assumptions required to make the math and the models work. They took their eye off what is critical to any real science: the facts. They've turned economics into a branch of theology where the divines of the field debate the number of angels dancing on the head of a pin. They've gotten away from the hard insights of Keynes from the Great Depression. Tragic.

The Failings of Economic Theory

Paul Krugman has given an address entitled "The Profession and the Crisis" which excoriates economists for failing to understand the 2008 crisis. Here is one bit from that lecture:

But what became clear in the policy debate after the 2008 crisis was that many economists — including many macroeconomists — don’t know the simplest multiplier analysis. They literally know nothing about models in which aggregate demand can be determined by more than the quantity of money. I’m not saying that they have looked into such models and rejected them; they are unaware that it's even possible to tell a logically consistent Keynesian story. We’ve entered a Dark Age of macroeconomics, in which much of the profession has lost its former knowledge, just as barbarian Europe had lost the knowledge of the Greeks and Romans.

As long as monetary policy could bear the burden of macroeconomic stabilization, this didn’t seem to matter too much: even as equilibrium business cycle theory became increasingly dominant in graduate study, central banks, like medieval monasteries, kept the old learning alive. But once we were hit with such a severe banking and balance sheet crisis that monetary policy hit the zero lower bound, it was crucial that the economics profession be able to weigh in knowledgeably and coherently on other possible actions. And it turned out that it couldn’t.

You often hear people saying that the crisis has revealed the need for new economic thinking, for new ideas about macroeconomics. Yet the first priority seems to be to resuscitate old ideas. Brad DeLong describes an interview of Larry Summers by Martin Wolf as follows: “Asked to name where to turn to understand what was going on in 2008, Summers cited three dead men, a book written 33 years ago, and another written the century before last.” And in my view, Summers basically got it right.

How did all this knowledge get lost? Well, being the age I am, I was able to watch the transformation of macroeconomics in real time, and I’d say that what happened was a runaway social process.

First, success in academic economics came from publishing “hard” papers — meaning papers that used rigorous and preferably difficult mathematics. This in itself biased publication toward equilibrium business cycle models, as opposed to the ad hoc modeling typical of what I consider useful macroeconomics. Graduate education, in turn, became increasingly focused on the kind of work that could get published and lead to tenure. Successive cohorts of students were trained only in the newly rigorous version of macro, which had lost touch with the field's previous intellectual achievements.

And as these cohorts became professors in their turn, they closed off both publication and promotion to anyone who questioned the dominant academic approach. Robert Lucas wrote more than 30 years ago — approvingly! — about how participants in seminars would “whisper and giggle” when someone presented a Keynesian analysis. No wonder that any non-equilibrium ideas dropped out of the curriculum and the conversation.

All of this would have been OK if the triumph of anti-Keynesianism was justified by superior empirical success. But it wasn’t. As I read the history of the equilibrium approach, it's a story of failing upward. Lucas-type models clearly failed to account for the duration of slumps; rather than reconsider flexible prices and rational expectations, Lucas's followers moved on to real business cycles (RBC). RBC models failed to generate any strikingly successful predictions, and in fact lost whatever plausibility they had once productivity started becoming pro-cyclical rather than counter-cyclical. But by that time the people doing these models didn’t know that there was any alternative.

And the result was that faced with a severe economic crisis, the profession spoke with a cacophony of voices. Or maybe a better way to put it is that the policy debate of 2009–2010 was virtually indistinguishable from the policy debate of 1931–1932. Long-refuted doctrines that should have been consigned to the dustbin of history were stated as if they were fresh new ideas — and they were fresh and new to many economists, because our profession had lost so much of its heritage.

In short, in responding to the crisis, the profession presented a sorry spectacle of unnecessary ignorance that didn’t even recognize itself as ignorance, of bitter debate over issues that were resolved many decades earlier. And all of this, of course, made the profession mostly useless at a time when it could and should have been of great service. Put it this way: we would have responded better to this crisis if macroeconomics had been frozen at the level of knowledge it had in 1948, when Paul Samuelson published the first edition of his famous textbook. And the result has been to leave actual policy discussion without any discipline from the people who should be shaping that discussion: politicians and officials have been free to follow their prejudices and intuitions, never mind the lessons of history and analysis. Economists have failed to fulfill their social function.

The failure of economics is much more than a professional failure. It has demonstrated that the system of economics education, promotion and jobs, the publishing of papers, etc. has failed utterly. It has allowed smart people to convince themselves that they could ignore reality and focus on their "pretty models". Worse, it allowed them to actively purge dissidents and close up the professional shop. Sadly, this is exactly what climate scientists are doing with their models and the doling out of IPCC favoured funding. Like Keynes said of economics (in the long run we are all dead) can be said of science (it is a self-correcting search for truth, but in the short run it can be drastically wrong and the "long run" in which truth is finally achieved may effectively be so far in the future as to be non-existent, i.e. "science" can become a cult and not truly science at all).

Academics Behaving Badly

It is pathetic when your profession claims "expertise" but when a catastrophe happens you either ignore it or have no consensus as to what caused it and how to fix it. Here's a bit from an article by Mark Thoma in Fiscal Times pointing out that economists don't know much about real economics:

What caused the financial crisis that is still reverberating through the global economy? Last week’s 4th Nobel Laureate Meeting in Lindau, Germany – a meeting that brings Nobel laureates in economics together with several hundred young economists from all over the world – illustrates how little agreement there is on the answer to this important question.

Surprisingly, the financial crisis did not receive much attention at the conference. Many of the sessions on macroeconomics and finance didn’t mention it at all, and when it was finally discussed, the reasons cited for the financial meltdown were all over the map.

It was the banks, the Fed, too much regulation, too little regulation, Fannie and Freddie, moral hazard from too-big-to-fail banks, bad and intentionally misleading accounting, irrational exuberance, faulty models, and the ratings agencies. In addition, factors I view as important contributors to the crisis, such as the conditions that allowed troublesome runs on the shadow banking system after regulators let Lehman fail, were hardly mentioned.

Macroeconomic models have not fared well in recent years – the models didn’t predict the financial crisis and gave little guidance to policymakers, and I was anxious to hear the laureates discuss what macroeconomists need to do to fix them. So I found the lack of consensus on what caused the crisis distressing. If the very best economists in the profession cannot come to anything close to agreement about why the crisis happened almost four years after the recession began, how can we possibly address the problems?

...

When the recession began, I had high hopes that it would help us to sort between competing macroeconomic models. As noted above, it's difficult to choose one model over another because the models do equally well at explaining the past. But this recession is so unlike any event for which there is existing data that it pushes the models into new territory that tests their explanatory power (macroeconomic data does not exist prior to 1947 in most cases, so it does not include the Great Depression). But, disappointingly, even though I believe the data point clearly toward models that emphasize the demand side rather than the supply side as the source of our problems, the crisis has not propelled us toward a particular class of models as would be expected in a data-driven, scientific discipline. Instead, the two sides have dug in their heels and the differences – many of which have been aired in public – have become larger and more contentious than ever.

Pathetic. It is like a meeting of aeronautical engineers that can't decide what might possibly make "heavier than air" machines fly. Could it be the wings? The propeller? The colour of the paint? The direction you pointed the nose of the craft in? The height of the cliff from from which you pushed your invention? Gee... that aerodynamics is a tough field. But the good news is that we have this simulation called Angry Birds which lets our top scientists simulate flight and uncover Mother Nature's darkest secrets.

I can understand squabbling for 80 years after the Great Depression. There wasn't a lot of data back then and "economics" was still a primitive field. But to fail to understand the current situation, to identify what caused it, and to give sound consistent specific advice to policy makers to get the world out of this rut? That isn't a science. That is a bunch of fumblers at an acrobatic school pretending they have the secret of the "dark arts" of balance and control but when asked just can put on even a minimal performance to demonstrate expertise.

I think universities should disband their economics departments and offer up the space to some useful sciences.

Stiglitz Gets a Laugh at the Idea that Macroeconomics is in Its Golden Age

Here is a lecture by George Stiglitz with the title "Imagining an Economics tthat Works: Crisis, Contagion and the Need for a New Paradigm" at the 2011 meeting of The Lindau Nobel Laureate Meetings at Lindau. He savages the state of macroeconomics: the fact that the 2008 economic collapse was not foreseen and has given no useful guidance in how to extract the world economy from the crisis:



Here is the abstract for this lecture:

The standard macroeconomic models have failed, by all the most important tests of scientific theory. They did not predict that the financial crisis would happen; and when it did, they understated its effects. Monetary authorities allowed bubbles to grow and focused on keeping inflation low, partly because the standard models suggested that low inflation was necessary and almost sufficient for efficiency and growth. Advocates of capital market liberalization argued that it would lead to greater stability: countries faced with a negative shock borrow from the rest of the world, allowing cross-country smoothing. The crisis showed the deep flaws in this thinking, but policymakers have been slow to rethink the paradigms they relied on. There is a need for a fundamental re-examination of the models. This lecture first describes the failures of the standard models in broad terms, and then develops the economics of deep downturns, and shows that such downturns are endogenous. Further, the lecture will argue that there have been systemic changes to the structure of the economy that made the economy more vulnerable to crisis, contrary to what the standard models argued. In particular, the lecture will explore how integration can exacerbate contagion; and how a failure in one country can more easily spread to others. There are conditions under which such adverse effects overwhelm the putative positive effects. Finally, the lecture will contrast the policy implications of our framework with those of the standard models; for instance, how capital controls can be welfare enhancing, reducing the risk of adverse effects from contagion.

Thoughts on God

Here is your chance to find out what some really smart people think about the idea of "God"...


Speakers in order of appearance:

1. Lawrence Krauss, World-Renowned Physicist
2. Robert Coleman Richardson, Nobel Laureate in Physics
3. Richard Feynman, World-Renowned Physicist, Nobel Laureate in Physics
4. Simon Blackburn, Cambridge Professor of Philosophy
5. Colin Blakemore, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Neuroscience
6. Steven Pinker, World-Renowned Harvard Professor of Psychology
7. Alan Guth, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Physics
8. Noam Chomsky, World-Renowned MIT Professor of Linguistics
9. Nicolaas Bloembergen, Nobel Laureate in Physics
10. Peter Atkins, World-Renowned Oxford Professor of Chemistry
11. Oliver Sacks, World-Renowned Neurologist, Columbia University
12. Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal
13. Sir John Gurdon, Pioneering Developmental Biologist, Cambridge
14. Sir Bertrand Russell, World-Renowned Philosopher, Nobel Laureate
15. Stephen Hawking, World-Renowned Cambridge Theoretical Physicist
16. Riccardo Giacconi, Nobel Laureate in Physics
17. Ned Block, NYU Professor of Philosophy
18. Gerard ‘t Hooft, Nobel Laureate in Physics
19. Marcus du Sautoy, Oxford Professor of Mathematics
20. James Watson, Co-discoverer of DNA, Nobel Laureate
21. Colin McGinn, Professor of Philosophy, Miami University
22. Sir Patrick Bateson, Cambridge Professor of Ethology
23. Sir David Attenborough, World-Renowned Broadcaster and Naturalist
24. Martinus Veltman, Nobel Laureate in Physics
25. Pascal Boyer, Professor of Anthropology
26. Partha Dasgupta, Cambridge Professor of Economics
27. AC Grayling, Birkbeck Professor of Philosophy
28. Ivar Giaever, Nobel Laureate in Physics
29. John Searle, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
30. Brian Cox, Particle Physicist (Large Hadron Collider, CERN)
31. Herbert Kroemer, Nobel Laureate in Physics
32. Rebecca Goldstein, Professor of Philosophy
33. Michael Tooley, Professor of Philosophy, Colorado
34. Sir Harold Kroto, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
35. Leonard Susskind, Stanford Professor of Theoretical Physics
36. Quentin Skinner, Professor of History (Cambridge)
37. Theodor W. Hänsch, Nobel Laureate in Physics
38. Mark Balaguer, CSU Professor of Philosophy
39. Richard Ernst, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
40. Alan Macfarlane, Cambridge Professor of Anthropology
41. Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, Princeton Research Scientist
42. Douglas Osheroff, Nobel Laureate in Physics
43. Hubert Dreyfus, Berkeley Professor of Philosophy
44. Lord Colin Renfrew, World-Renowned Archaeologist, Cambridge
45. Carl Sagan, World-Renowned Astronomer
46. Peter Singer, World-Renowned Bioethicist, Princeton
47. Rudolph Marcus, Nobel Laureate in Chemistry
48. Robert Foley, Cambridge Professor of Human Evolution
49. Daniel Dennett, Tufts Professor of Philosophy
50. Steven Weinberg, Nobel Laureate in Physics

The "Yes Men" of Academia

Here is a bit from a post by Dean Baker on his Beat the Press blog that takes Ezra Klein to task for misunderstanding the point of a documentary about the financial crisis of 2008:

I always enjoy reading Ezra Klein’s blog. He’s an excellent writer and he does his homework. However, he really missed the story in his review of Inside Job (even though I do appreciate the favorable mention).

Ezra criticizes the movie for making the story one of corrupt economists blessing the evil doers of Wall Street:

“What’s remarkable about the financial crisis isn’t just how many people got it wrong, but how many people who got it wrong had an incentive to get it right. Journalists. Hedge funds. Independent investors. Academics. Regulators. Even traders, many of whom had most of their money tied up in their soon-to-be-worthless firms.”

This is the right point, but I think Ezra takes it in the wrong direction. Certainly all of these people were not on the take in the same way as some of the film’s heroes (i.e. former Federal Reserve Board Governor Frederick Mishkin who got paid six figures to write a report praising Iceland to the sky in 2006). However, it does not follow that they had incentive to “get it right.”

Getting it right meant that you had to say that the honchos were wrong. You had to say that Martin Feldstein, Gregory Mankiw, Larry Summers, Alan Blinder, Ben Bernanke, and the Maestro, Alan Greenspan, were missing the largest asset bubble in the history of the world right in front of their eyes.

This would really put you on the firing line if you were an economist at the Fed, the IMF, or even an academic economist hoping to advance in the field. After all, you could be wrong, in which case you might as well spend the rest of your working career wearing a tin foil hat.

On the other hand, what is the cost of going along? It turns out that economists are a remarkably forgiving lot – not in respect to workers in workers in the United States or retirees in Greece – but certainly when it comes to each other. The mantra “who could have known?” has provided a pretty much blanket amnesty. Next to no one got fired and very few people even missed a scheduled promotion for missing the housing bubble; the collapse of which may wreck the economy for a decade. In fact, even Daniel Mudd and Richard Fuld, the men who bankrupted Fannie Mae and Lehman respectively, have both found their way back into very high-paying jobs in finance.

What I particulary enjoy about Baker's comments is the inner workings of academia, i.e. you are allowed to be stupid and get things wrong so long as you go with the crowd, but if you get things right while being out of step with the majority, your career is ruined. This is precisely the problem with the "global warming" crowd. This is a cabal of academics who have truth by the tail and they will sabotage your career if you don't toe "party line".

This kind of "group think" means that real academic progress is slow (and in economics, it means that like in Orwell's 1984, the past gets rewritten and whole chunks of economics is forgotten). The joke is that academics preen themselves over their "reputation" for open-mindedness and diversity of opinion. But reality is something else. The academic career is a treadmill with a pecking order and you have to pay your dues as a grad student and even when you get your credentials you still must maintain party line. Of course this kind of careerism is worse in some fields than others. From my perspective the two worst fields right now are economics and climatology and the reason is that both have been politicized and politics controls the flow of funds.

DeLong's Response to the Crash of 2008

Here is a bit from a very honest appraisal by Brad DeLong of the shortfalls in modern economic theory in the face of the banking collapse and economic catastrophe of 2008:

But I was shocked by how large a panic was produced by what seemed to me – and still does – relatively small losses (in terms of the size of the global economy) in subprime mortgages; by the weakness of risk controls at the major highly-leveraged banks; by how deep the decline in demand was; by how ineffective the market’s equilibrium-restoring forces have been at rebalancing labor-market supply and demand; and by how much core-country governments have been able to borrow to support demand without triggering any run-up in interest rates.

It is the scale of the catastrophe that astonishes me. But what astonishes me even more is the apparent failure of academic economics to take steps to prepare itself for the future. “We need to change our hiring patterns,” I expected to hear economics departments around the world say in the wake of the crisis.

The fact is that we need fewer efficient-markets theorists and more people who work on microstructure, limits to arbitrage, and cognitive biases. We need fewer equilibrium business-cycle theorists and more old-fashioned Keynesians and monetarists. We need more monetary historians and historians of economic thought and fewer model-builders. We need more Eichengreens, Shillers, Akerlofs, Reinharts, and Rogoffs – not to mention a Kindleberger, Minsky, or Bagehot.

Yet that is not what economics departments are saying nowadays.

Perhaps I am missing what is really going on. Perhaps economics departments are reorienting themselves after the Great Recession in a way similar to how they reoriented themselves in a monetarist direction after the inflation of the 1970’s. But if I am missing some big change that is taking place, I would like somebody to show it to me.

Perhaps academic economics departments will lose mindshare and influence to others – from business schools and public-policy programs to political science, psychology, and sociology departments. As university chancellors and students demand relevance and utility, perhaps these colleagues will take over teaching how the economy works and leave academic economists in a rump discipline that merely teaches the theory of logical choice.

Or perhaps economics will remain a discipline that forgets most of what it once knew and allows itself to be continually distracted, confused, and in denial. If that were that to happen, we would all be worse off.

I don't know how any serious student of economic behaviour could waste his time in "modern" economics courses. They are irrelevant. They teach ideologically "pure" claptrap that has no utility in the real world. These courses are great if you wish to aspire to a position in a "think tank" for some right wing billionaire, but if you want to help shape the future and help the world move forward, you wouldn't waste your time of what comes out of the Chicago school or any of the other "modern" economics faculties. That is a simple, sad fact.

The "model making" of modern economics strikes me as on a par with scholasticism where academics debated the number of teeth in a horses mouth but nobody could be bothered to go out on the street and actually count them. The math is elegant but irrelevant. There is no homo economicus. The real world is filled with flesh-and-blood economic actors with incomplete knowledge, time pressures, and faulty cognitive equipment. That's not in the math currently in use.

DeLong hopes that economics will reform iself, but I'm much more pessimistic.

Cooperative Robots

Here is a video that purports to show research that has developed cooperative robots:



I'm not disagreeing that the robots cooperate or that they have used genetic algorithms to evolve or neural networks to express their behaviour. My complaint is that this research is "oversold". The result isn't as profound, ground-breaking, or deep as the video would imply. This is just another research group doing a little bit that essentially confirms what others have done. I see nothing earth-shaking in this research.

Sadly research groups have to compete for money. So the funding institutes have set up a "learning environment" which encourages researchers to "oversell" their research and do too much "me-too" research. Pressures for research funding are setting up their own "evolution" which is perverting research into optimizing the selling of research and not necessarily optimizing the efficient discovery of new science.

The Collapse and Failure of Modern "Economics"

Here is a bit from an article in Foreign Affairs magazine which is reprinted in the blog Crooked Timber. The article looks at how monetary and economic policy in Europe is failing as that continent falls under the sway of "austerity" and the incompetence of "modern" economics:

The EU is now drifting toward a thinly disguised version of the gold standard, which wreaked economic havoc in the 1920s and led to a toxic political fallout. Under that system, European states had fixed exchange rates. During economic crises, they refused to increase government spending because of a failure to either understand or care that monetary disturbances and shocks to demand could lead to joblessness. The result was generalized misery. Governments responded to economic crises by allowing unemployment to go up and cutting back wages, leaving workers to bear the pain of adjustment. As Golden Fetters, Barry Eichengreen’s classic history of the period, shows, the gold standard began to collapse when workers in Europe gained the power to vote out of office the parties that supported austerity.

...

This approach cannot be sustained for long. The EU has never had much popular legitimacy: many voters have gone along with it so far only out of the belief that their politicians knew best. Today, they are more suspicious. And if they come to think that further European integration is causing more economic hardship, their suspicion could harden into bitterness and perhaps even xenophobia. Ireland’s new finance minister, Michael Noonan, has told voters that the EU is a game rigged in Germany’s favor; editorials in major Irish newspapers warn of Germany’s return to racist imperialism. As economic shocks hit other EU countries, politicians in those states will also look for someone to blame.

If the EU is to survive, it will have to craft a solution to the eurozone crisis that is politically as well as economically sustainable. It will need to create long-term institutions that both minimize the risk of future economic crises and refrain from adopting politically unsustainable forms of austerity when crises do hit. They must offer the EU countries that are the worst hit a viable path to economic stability while reassuring Germany, the state currently driving economic debates within the union, that it will not be asked to bail out weaker states indefinitely.

...

Contrary to the beliefs of nearly all anti-Keynesians—and, regrettably, some Keynesians, too—Keynesianism demands more, not less, fiscal rectitude in normal times than does the orthodox theory of balanced budgets that underpins the EU. John Maynard Keynes argued that surpluses should be accumulated during good years so that they could be spent to stimulate demand during bad ones. This lesson was well understood during the golden age of Keynesian social democracy, after World War II, when, aided by moderate inflation, the governments of the countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development greatly reduced their ratios of public debt to GDP. This approach should not be confused with the opportunistic support for large budget deficits evident, for example, among advocates of supply-side economics. If anything, “hard” Keynesianism suggests that the problem with the macroeconomic rules governing the euro is not that they are too tough and too detailed but that they are not tough or detailed enough. States in the eurozone should not be allowed to run moderate budget deficits in boom years, the Keynesian argument goes; instead, they should be compelled to run budget surpluses. The surpluses could then be saved in rainy-day funds or used to pay down government debt or, if the country had reached a satisfactory debt-to-GDP ratio, spent as a fiscal stimulus in the event of a crisis. Unlike the kind of budget management advocated by the German government, this approach does not seek to eliminate or minimize governments’ leeway to conduct fiscal policy. It gives governments up-front the means to manage demand whenever they might need to.

The call for "hard Keynesianism" is the right call. It is the call that points out that the last 80 years of "economics" has been a disaster and a mistake built around lovely mathematics but an idiotic understanding of markets and humans.

I think it is funny. The call for "hard Keynesianism" is the call to go back to Joseph in Egypt in 1000 BC when during the 7 fat years the Pharaoh stored up surpluses from the land to feed the people during the 7 lean years. That "modern" economics doesn't understand this need to lean against the wind says volumes about the incompetence of "modern economics".

Learn Philosophy by Watching Science Fiction Movies

Modern communications and the ever more thoughtful thrust of popular themes in science fiction movies mean that you can learn all you ever wanted to know about philosophy from watching this derivative of Star Wars...



I find the superficial discrepancies between the French dialog and the English subtitles part of the charm of this exercise in philosophy.

This is a student's exercise in existentialism and post-modernism where you discover that desconstructing the "subtext" of the dialog exercises your ability to find philosophical depths beyond the merely suggestive readings provided by the literal subtext. Philosophy frees the mind to look behind these appearances to find layers of reality each with their own self reference and abundant existential possibilities.

The best discussion of post-post-modernism was captured by Alan Sokal in his brilliantly deceptive recreation of post-modernist techniques in his essay "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity".

I find that if you replace the pathetically derivative subtext of the above video by liberal reading from Sokal's article, you can quickly realize the profound essence of modern philosophy as it relates to the epistemic insecurity of the modern professoriate and the narrative strictures of academic philosophizing.

Forty years after the fact, I still look back lovingly to my experience reading, re-reading, and re-re-reading Sartre's Being and Nothingness and Heideggar's Being and Time. The two great pillars of modern philosophy's plunge into irrelevance capped by the crowning glory of English philosophy, the jabbering of Ordinary Language Philosophy which was the death knell of empiricism and pragmatism in philosophy in favour of incoherence and nullity. OLP is a philosophical "stance" that let you step through existentialist text's dry discussion of angst and anomie and experience it directly, right off the page, as you wade through philosophical gibberish of the most learned sort.

Dysfunctional Institutions, the Science Edition

I saw the corruption of the proposal process in the sciences when I was working in R&D. I found that you had to promise more than you knew you could deliver in order to "stick out from the crowd". Another problem that I encountered was that, as industry, you had to include university partners and offer them large sums to sign on. But there was simply no way to get the university researchers to live up to their contractual promises. The system was broken. It was a mess. And the fund administrators didn't know enough science to even understand this since they could be flim-flammed.

Here's an article from The Chronicle of Higher Education which exposes the problem:

Academic science is in a crisis. At a time when scientific innovation is desperately needed to solve some of the world's most pressing environmental, technological, and medical problems, how scientists get money for their research stifles, rather than spurs, creativity.

The structural defect causing this major problem can be stated simply: The failure rate for proposals submitted by academic scientists has reached such high levels that many professors must spend virtually all their time writing proposals, leaving the creative thinking to graduate students and postdoctoral associates. The result is science by proxy.

...

Universities are partly to blame. Some institutions explicitly tell their faculty members that they are expected to bring in $300,000 or more in grants each year. Researchers sometimes receive awards for bringing in more funds than anyone else at their institutions. At one academic banquet, a dean requested that professors who brought in over a half-million dollars stand up and be applauded by the audience. Such displays of commercialism exemplify what has been called the "selling culture" and a "gold-digger" mentality among university administrators.

Two things need to be done. First, increase the respect for teaching and lower the career rewards for publishing and winning grants. Second, give professors a free hand to pursue their own research interests through some system that gives them a large but not unlimited timeframe in which to establish their careers, say 10 years, before the publish or perish and grant wars pressures are brought to bear.

Errol Morris Wrangles Philosophy

Having been a graduate student in philosophy many years ago and studied Thomas Kuhn, Saul Kripke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and others mentioned in the following posts, I found this philosophical rant by film-maker Errol Morris fascinating. This brings back memories of my graduate student days, of the philosophy of science, of paradigm shifts, of possible worlds, of meaning, or reference, etc. In these postings Morris has exorcized his demons of graduate school.

Part 1

Part 2

Part 3

Part 4

Part 5

Some of my favourite "moments" in the above essay:

I asked him, “If paradigms are really incommensurable, how is history of science possible? Wouldn’t we be merely interpreting the past in the light of the present? Wouldn’t the past be inaccessible to us? Wouldn’t it be ‘incommensurable?’ ”

...

I call Kuhn’s reply “The Ashtray Argument.” If someone says something you don’t like, you throw something at him. Preferably something large, heavy, and with sharp edges. Perhaps we were engaged in a debate on the nature of language, meaning and truth. But maybe we just wanted to kill each other.

The end result was that Kuhn threw me out of Princeton. He had the power to do it, and he did it. God only knows what I might have said in my second or third year. At the time, I felt that he had destroyed my life. Now, I feel that he saved me from a career that I was probably not suited for.

This reminds me of my student years. I constantly questioned my professors and found them wanting. Sure they were learned and smart, but most were brittle and dead to new ideas and were resistant to questioning. They preferred the students to sit at their feet and lap up the wisdom on offer.

Kripke’s theory provides an alternative to what had become known as the description theory, an amalgam of ideas proposed by Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein. (And to that mix, in the ‘50s and ‘60s you can add Peter Strawson and John Searle.) Here’s one way to distinguish between Kripke’s theories and the description theory that preceded it.

You have two fish in a fishbowl. One of them is golden in color; the other one is not. The fish that is golden in color, you name “Goldie.” The other fish you name “Greenie.” Perhaps you use the description “the gold fish” and point to the one that is golden in color. You are referring to the gold fish, Goldie. Over the course of time, however, Goldie starts to change color. Six months later, Goldie is no longer golden. Goldie is now green. Greenie, the other fish — the fish in the bowl that was green in color — has turned golden. Goldie is no longer “the fish that is golden in color.” Greenie is. But Goldie is still Goldie even though Goldie has changed color. The description theory would have it that Goldie means the fish that is golden in color, but if that’s true then when we refer to Goldie, we are referring to the other fish. But clearly, Goldie hasn’t become a different fish; Goldie has merely changed his (or her) appearance.


It’s Kripke’s version of “Where’s Waldo.” If the description theory (courtesy of Frege, Russell and Wittgenstein) is correct, then Goldie is on the right. If Kripke’s historical-chain of reference theory is correct, then Goldie remains Goldie no matter what color Goldie is.

You could also think of Goldie and Greenie in terms of beliefs, although this is not how the description theory was originally framed. Goldie is the fish that you believe is golden in color. But Goldie starts to change color. I can believe anything I want about Goldie. I can even believe that Goldie isn’t a fish, but Goldie — that fish out there swimming around in a fishbowl — remains Goldie.

These were the kind of logical "puzzles" I loved. This was why I graduate student pursuing logic in the philosophy faculty.

The most important and most controversial aspect of Kuhn’s theory involved his use of the terms “paradigm shift” and “incommensurability.” That the scientific terms of one paradigm are incommensurable with the scientific terms of the paradigm that replaces it. A revolution occurs. One paradigm is replaced with another. And the new paradigm is incommensurable with the old one. He made various attempts to define it — changing and modifying his definitions along the way.

When I read Kuhn's book the issue of "incommensurability" never came up. I took the simplistic view that a paradigm switch was a benign "larger view" that incorporated the previous science as a special limited case. So in Einstein's theory Newtonian equations hold as a limited case when speeds are near zero. Sure there were philosophical differences. Newton viewed space and time as absolute and Einstein showed they were dynamic and relativistic depending on your frame of reference.

In John Ford’s movie “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), Ransom Stoddard (James Stewart) becomes an archetypal hero for shooting and killing Liberty Valance (Lee Marvin), the paid stooge of the cattle barons. But Tom Doniphon (John Wayne) – literally hidden in the shadows – is really the man who shoots him. Stoddard gets Doniphon’s girl and goes on to a spectacular political career – governor, senator, etc. Doniphon is the unsung hero. After many years, Stoddard, following Doniphon’s death tells a local newspaper editor what really happened, but the editor refuses to print it, “This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”

A legend that is not true can never become fact, but it can get printed as fact, anyway. With Hippasus, it is pretty easy to imagine why the legend of his drowning got “printed” even before there was printing. Someone believed that there should have been a crisis even if there wasn’t any. They believed that the Pythagoreans should have been upset about the discovery of incommensurable magnitudes. But it was a retrospective belief, that is, a belief formed hundreds, if not thousands of years, after the crisis was supposed to have occurred. I find it mildly amusing – possibly even ironic – that Kuhn’s metaphor for “incommensurability” could have been derived from a Whiggish interpretation of an apocryphal story.

This is simply wonderful. I love the way Morris has brought his film-making into this discussion. And I love the way he nails Kuhn.

But there is a messier problem. Why stop at historical relativism? Why not imagine each and every person in a different island universe? And indeed, Kuhn at least in one instance seems to embrace that possibility. In one particularly bizarre passage in “The Road Since Structure,” he suggests that his critics are writing about two different Thomas Kuhns – Kuhn No. 1 and Kuhn No. 2.

...

To me Kuhn’s claim – that there are two Thomas Kuhns plus two books by the same name and author – suggests that there may be no coherent reading of Kuhn’s philosophy. Kuhn, of course, sees it differently. For Kuhn, the multiplicity of Kuhns and Kuhn-authored-books-with-the-same-title provides further proof of his belief that people with “incommensurable” viewpoints can’t talk to each other. That they live in different worlds.

This is the slippery slope of solipsistic theories of knowledge.

Years ago, Bertrand Russell wrote “Nightmares of Eminent Persons” (1954). (Supposedly, he was trying to meet alimony payments.) Among the various nightmares – the Mathematicians’s Nightmare, Stalin’s Nightmare, the Psychoanalyst’s Nightmare, Dr. Bowdler’s Nightmare – is the Existentialist’s Nightmare. At the conclusion of the nightmare, the existentialist is screaming, “I don’t exist. I don’t exist.” Poe’s raven appears, speaking in the voice of the French poet Mallarmé: “You do exist. You do exist. It’s your philosophy that doesn’t exist.”

I absolutely love this little tale of being hoisted on your own petard.

I often think of the attraction of smoking, that it simplifies the world into three parts. There’s you, there’s the cigarette, and everything else is the ashtray.

(This catches Errol Morris' latent hostility toward Thomas Kuhn who threw his ashtray at Morris.)

Please remember: This is not an empty intellectual exercise. It is not a matter of indifference whether it was God or natural selection that produced the complexity of life on earth. Nor whether there is such a thing as global warming. The devaluation of scientific truth cannot be laid on Kuhn’s doorstep, but he shares some responsibility for it.

One more parable. For those who truly believe that truth is subjective or relative (along with everything else), ask yourself the question – is ultimate guilt or innocence of a crime a matter of opinion? Is it relative? Is it subjective? A jury might decide you’re guilty of a crime that you haven’t committed. You’re innocent. (It’s possible. The legal system is rife with miscarriages of justice.) Nevertheless, we believe there is a fact of the matter. You either did it or you didn’t. Period.

If you were strapped into an electric chair, there would be nothing relative about it. Suppose you are innocent. Would you be satisfied with the claim there is no definitive answer to the question of whether you’re guilty or innocent? That there is no such thing as absolute truth or falsity? Or would you be screaming, “I didn’t do it. Look at the evidence. I didn’t do it.” Nor would you take much comfort in the claim, “It all depends on your point of view, doesn’t it?” Or “what paradigm are you in?”

(I like the way this makes clear that relativism is not an answer and Kuhn's incommensurability in of no use, and in fact a real danger as a glib answer. Morris still harbours a grudge against Kuhn and I have one for a "philosophy of education" professor I had who treated my claim that moral judgements could be objective as rank foolishness. But I didn't buy into ethical relativism and that outraged this professor. I am a realist who can subscribe to G. E. Moore's "ethical non-naturalism" or to Sam Harris' program to develop a science of morality. I waver, but one thing I'm sure of, moral judgements are of real facts not subjective whims or culturally defined tastes.)

It’s always been unclear to me, in social protest, is the important thing to be there, to be arrested, to be beaten, to be in the newspaper, to be booked, or to be incarcerated? Maybe all of the above.

Given the events in Wisconsin and other states, the above questions are as relevant today as they were in the 1960s protests against the Vietnam war.

The issue of murder, mass murder, has stayed with me over the years. It’s certainly part of the film that I made with Robert S. McNamara, “The Fog of War.” I remember sitting in the Firestone Library and reading volumes upon volumes of the transcripts of the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal. Ultimately I had the opportunity to go with Robert McNamara to the International Criminal Court [ICC] in the Hague, to show “The Fog of War” to the court, and to answer questions with McNamara.

And my two favorite moments from that experience – going with McNamara to visit the archivist for the ICC. McNamara told him, “I wish that they had these statutes governing war crimes back when I was secretary of defense,” and the archivist replied, “But, sir, they did.” Another completely bizarre experience, beyond Kafkaesque, seeing Milosevic on the stand. None of the proceedings had anything whatsoever to do with the content of the charges against him. It was all procedural — procedures about procedures about procedures, epicycle upon epicycle upon epicycle. And yet, the knowledge that Milosevic’s crimes were being addressed, even if only in a vague and uncertain way, was gratifying. At least someone was doing something.

I'm from the same generation as Errol Morris, so I'm very much caught up in the same issues as he is. Not just graduate school, not just philosophy, not just war & mass murder, but a stance toward life that was prevalent in many of the 60s generation.

Years later, I’ve come to realize that there was a debate embodied here about the nature of language – of whether truth is socially constructed or whether ultimately concerns the relationship between language and reality. I feel very strongly, even though the world is unutterably insane, there is this idea that we can reach outside of that insanity and find truth, some kind of certainty. ... There are endless obstacles and impediments to finding the truth – You might never find it; it’s an illusive goal. But there’s something to remember, there’s a world out there that we can apprehend, and it’s our job to go out there and apprehend it. It’s one of the deepest lessons that I’ve taken away from my experiences here.

This is more than philosophical. Morris makes it clear that this is a living issue with him, present in his films, and present in his engagement with the world.

What Was Known in 1829 in Economics but has been Forgotten in 2011 in Economics

Few fields of knowledge have shown the spectacular ability to run off the rails and forget hard won truths like "modern" economics. Sadly ideologues infest modern economics so what was well know nearly 200 years ago in a rudimentary capitalist system has been largely forgotten during the last 40 years when rampant right wing ideology has taken root in academics and now in politics. Here is a bit from a talk to be given by Brad DeLong at UC Berkeley political economy colloquium:

From my perspective, the technocratic economists by 1829 had figured out why these semi-periodic grand mal seizures happened. In 1829 Jean-Baptiste Say published his Course Complet d'Economie Politique... in which he implicitly admitted that Thomas Robert Malthus had been at least partly right in his assertions that an economy could suffer from at least a temporary and disequliibrium "general glut" of commodities. In 1829 John Stuart Mill wrote that one of what was to appear as his Essays on Unsettled Questions in Political Economy in which he put his finger on the mechanism of depression.

Semi-periodically in market economies, wealth holders collectively come to the conclusion that their holdings of some kind or kinds of financial assets are too low. These financial assets can be cash money as a means of liquidity, or savings vehicles to carry purchasing power into the future (of which bonds and cash money are important components), or safe assets (of which, again, cash money and bonds of credit-worthy governments are key components)--whatever. Wealth holders collectively come to the conclusion that their holdings of some category of financial assets are too small. They thus cut back on their spending on currently-produced goods and services in an attempt to build up their asset holdings. This cutback creates deficient demand not just for one or a few categories of currently-produced goods and services but for pretty much all of them. Businesses seeing slack demand fire workers. And depression results.

What was not settled back in 1829 was what to do about this. Over the years since, mainstream technocratic economists have arrived at three sets of solutions:

1. Don't go there in the first place. Avoid whatever it is--whether an external drain under the gold standard or a collapse of long-term wealth as in the end of the dot-com bubble or a panicked flight to safety as in 2007-2008--that creates the shortage of and excess demand for financial assets.


2. If you fail to avoid the problem, then have the government step in and spend on currently-produced goods and servicesin order to keep employment at its normal levels whenever the private sector cuts back on its spending.


3. If you fail to avoid the problem, then have the government create and provide the financial assets that the private sector wants to hold in order to get the private sector to resume its spending on currently-produced goods and services.
   

There are a great many subtleties in how a government should attempt to do (1), (2), and (3). There is much to be said about when each is appropriate. There is a lot we need to learn about how attempts to carry out one of the three may interfere with or make impossible attempts to carry out the other branches of policy. But those are not our topics today.

Our topic today is that, somehow, all three are now off the table. There is right now in the North Atlantic no likelihood of reforms of Wall Street and Canary Wharf to accomplish (1) and diminish the likelihood and severity of a financial panic. There is right now in the North Atlantic no likelihood at all of (2): no political pressure to expand or even extend the anemic government-spending stimulus measures that have ben undertaken. And there is right now in the North Atlantic little likelihood of (3): the European Central Bank is actively looking for ways to shrink the supply of the financial assets it provides to the private sector, and the Federal Reserve is under pressure to do the same--both because of a claimed fear that further expansionary asset provision policies run the risk of igniting unwarranted inflation.

The great tragedy is that Obama has joined this chorus of ignorance that proudly has unlearned the lessons of 200 years. It seems Obama is determined to re-create the FDR fiasco of creating the 1937 Recession in the midst of the Great Depression.

Here is how DeLong will finish his talk:

And here we reach the limits of my mental horizons as a neoliberal, as a technocrat, as a mainstream neoclassical economist. Right now the global market economy is suffering a grand mal seizure of high unemployment and slack demand. We know the cures--fiscal stimulus via more government spending, monetary stimulus via provision by central banks of the financial assets the private sector wants to hold, institutional reform to try once gain to curb the bankers' tendency to indulge in speculative excess under control. Yet we are not doing any of them. Instead, we are calling for "austerity."

John Maynard Keynes put it better than I can in talking about a similar current of thought back in the 1930s:

It seems an extraordinary imbecility that this wonderful outburst of productive energy [over 1924-1929] should be the prelude to impoverishment and depression. Some austere and puritanical souls regard it both as an inevitable and a desirable nemesis on so much overexpansion, as they call it; a nemesis on man's speculative spirit. It would, they feel, be a victory for the Mammon of Unrighteousness if so much prosperity was not subsequently balanced by universal bankruptcy.

We need, they say, what they politely call a 'prolonged liquidation' to put us right. The liquidation, they tell us, is not yet complete. But in time it will be. And when sufficient time has elapsed for the completion of the liquidation, all will be well with us again.

I do not take this view. I find the explanation of the current business losses, of the reduction in output, and of the unemployment which necessarily ensues on this not in the high level of investment which was proceeding up to the spring of 1929, but in the subsequent cessation of this investment. I see no hope of a recovery except in a revival of the high level of investment. And I do not understand how universal bankruptcy can do any good or bring us nearer to prosperity...

I do not understand it either. But many people do. And I do not understand why such people think as they do.

I never thought I would live to see such a widespread outbreak of mass ignorance. The above is in the "science" of economics. I also see it among fundamentalist Christians who revel in their ignorance and belief it is a badge of honour. I swear the world is happily marching off to a new Dark Ages with its glorification of ignorance and stupidity. There needs to be respect for learning and expertise. There needs to be a burst of civilization like the founding of universities in the Medieval era along with the signs of civilization such as the great cathedral building of that era. There needs to be a blossoming of a new Renaissance, a new Age of Enlightenment.

Logic

I spent a decade of my life pursing formal logic. The following graphic pretty well summarizes all that I now know about "logic"...

Click to Enlarge

After many years of hard study I've learned an important lesson: the more you learn, the faster you forget.

Academic Treadmill

This brings back bad memories of being a graduate student...



The above is the Hui Zheng lab at Baylor, with their Gaga-esque production of Bad Project.

I got a chuckle from the video. At least they seem to be gelled as a group and willing to have fun and even poke fun at their laboratory lives. I did my graduate work in philosophy and remember it as a wasteland of isolation and indifference. There is a real rift between the two cultures. In the Humanities it is a solo flight. But in the Sciences you realize you are truly building on the giants who went before and you tend to work in teams.

Climate Models

Here is a fairly boring academic talk by Mike Hulme on climate models. It gives 4 measures of reliability and discusses the current climate models. From my perspective, it should give people some caution about swallowing "modeling results" holus bolus and without some skepticism.

Watch the video here.

Skip the first 18:00 minutes which include an introduction and some introductory remarks.

Having built computer models in my previous life, I watch this and chuckle at the careful terminology and tepid characterization of the climate modeling community's efforts. It is obvious that Hulme is highly constrained by a desire to keep his "academic standing" so his remarks end up being carefully hedged and qualified to ensure no academic reputations are threatened.

One oddity of this talk: why spend an hour talking about the need for reliability (on four different fronts) if there isn't an issue of reliability. You will notice that he never admits to any problems with model reliability. But he does give broad hints that this is badly needed. He sounds like a politician and not a scientist.

His only clear words are in the introduction where he talks about the origins of science and the need for experimental verification. This of course is completely impossible for "science" based on model predictions. Reading the tea leaves, it sounds like he is most keen on moving the modeling from the current "private" models jiggered in the back room to open platforms using open software standards where the modeling is released along with the model results to ensure that reliability can be evaluated by a wider public. This makes sense only if the current secretive modeling is in fact questionable (which it is). But he never clearly says "there is a problem which can be seen from this, and this, and this". Instead it is all airy fairy "we need reliable models and here are four directions in which you make models more reliable".

He mentions the UEA CRU e-mails but gives no indication of their relevance to a need to improve model reliability or indicate why the stench of scandal hangs over them. He admits that over the last "few years" there has been a decline in public acceptance of climate modeling "results". But he doesn't connect the dots.

Schizophrenia in the Intelligentsia

I find this bizarre. On the one hand you have the Economist magazine publishing an blog post worrying about automation taking over jobs and leaving people unemployed:

Now, it's quite possible that robotics may generate unemployment as the economy adjusts to the deployment of new technology. This is a common feature of economic history. New agricultural technologies displaced workers, many of which struggled, for a while at least, to find new work. Similarly, automation of manufacturing activity (including the use of robots) has pushed many workers out of the industry, some of which have had difficulty finding new work. But this unemployment goes away, as workers adjust and develop skills appropriate to sectors in which employment is rising.

But what if robots can do anything humans can do? Would there then be long-term technological unemployment? I'm sceptical. For one thing, labour-saving technology reduces demand for some workers but increases demand for others. If firms successfully deploy robotic labour, that will be good for robotics firms and the ancillary businesses that power them. It will likely give rise to complementary industries that are difficult to anticipate, but which would provide employment. And just as cheap robots would free labour resources for other uses, they'd also (since they're presumably providing some cost advantage) free financial resources that could then be directed to other industries. If a household can save lots of money by employing a robot to handle all its home health services at a fraction of the price of human labour, then it will have more money available to spend on other consumption goods.

But what if robots can do all of those other things, as well? What if they can design and build robots, and manage robotic firms, and run restaurants, and perform operas, and so on? What will be left for other humans to do?

On the other hand you have a blogger who posts:

French High School Students Rioting Over Increase in Pension Age

Police fired tear gas on hundreds of rioting high school students yesterday after they threw rocks and set fire to a car. The masked students were protesting the French governments plan to raise the minimum and maximum retirement ages to 62 and 67, a difference of two years from the current age limits.

Unrest at the high school a day earlier lead to the closing of the school, but students returned to continue their protests in what ended with a violent clash between the teens and authorities.

How strange. The "thought leaders are saying two diametrically different things:

1. Be frightened because jobs will disappear as productivity enhancement by robots replace many positions held by humans with machines


2. Be frightened because jobs must be lengthened by many years because the economy is in bad shape and the only solution is to have people work harder, longer, and for less until they drop dead in the traces.
   

Reality can't be at either of these extremes! The first implies we will all fabulously wealthy as machines deliver a cornucopia. The second implies that our ability to produce and feed ourselves is so degraded that we have no choice but to work longer and harder.

The doom-and-gloom crowd at both extremes are wrong! We will muddle through. The real world will be one in which machines do more wonderful things giving us more idle time. People will not have to work until they are 80 years old because of budget deficits and faltering governments. Those politicians who are pushing that line are coving up the fact that the ultra-rich have gotten fabulously wealthy by sucking up all the productivity gains of the last 20 to 30 years. If these were distributed among the whole population, retirement could come earlier, work weeks could shorten, the standard of life would increase, governments would have budget surpluses, and the economy would grow.

It is only when you let the top 0.1% pocket all the wealth that you discover that governments are broke, that people must be shackled to jobs watching the retirement date being pushed ever further into the future, and the level of poverty and homelessness grow and grow.

So how do you fix this problem? Tell the rich that they have to contribute to the economy. What does that mean? It means progressive taxation. Certainly back to the levels of Clinton. Maybe back to the levels of the 1970s, and if things truly are dire, then back to the levels of Eisenhower.

Instead of a public wringing of hands, with intellectuals moaning and weeping over the hopelessness of life, the times call for leaders with a vision who can call people to action and promote a positive agenda. Put simply: you need somebody to articulate a clear plan for how to get from here to there.

Technology and science are the promise of the future as they have been for a quarter of a millennia. Nobody I knows wants to go back and live the lifestyle of the 1750s. I'm not hearing 80% of the population stepping forward offering to die to get population levels down to what 1750s technology could sustain. I'm not hearing people wanting to give up indoor plumbing, centralized heating and air conditioning, modern transportation, food technology that gives us wonderfully fresh and tasty foods from around the world in and out of season. The solution is clear: we need leaders who can mobilize the resources of technology and science to deliver a better future.

The difference between today and 1941 is the difference between Donald Rumsfeld and FDR. Rumsfeld who had a year to prepare for the 2003 Iraq war met with troops over two years into the war and received their complaint about insufficient armour by saying "you have to fight the war with what you have". FDR didn't tell the American troops in 1942 that they had to fight with the pitifully outdated rifles, tanks, planes, and ships of the inter-war years. Nope. He shut down civilian production and geared up the massive industry of the US to produce weapons at a prodigious rate. That's the difference between a "fake" leader like Rumsfeld and a true leader like FDR. So where is today's FDR?

The Logic of Language

I've always been bugged by grammarians. They want to impose "rules" on language. But language is organic. It is conventional. And here's an excellent example of grammarians gone wild...



If an overwhelming majority of this generation of kids decide that the plural of octopus is "octopalooza" than within a generation that will be the correct plural despite what the grammarians say.

The nice thing about English is that grammarians have mostly been kept at bay. The language is omnivorous and continues to swallow up words and invite speakers from around the world.