ksraines

Nice.

No, your criticism is worthless. Insofar as you are correct in pointing out where I am correct, I give you some credit. But you fail to appreciate the full scope of my correctness and thus miss the whole point.

1. Consider: who would actually be so buffoonish as to call for the creation of a financial bubble at the peak moment before said bubble was about to burst - particularly when the bubble had reached an historical scale. Krugman is silly, but not that silly.

2. As it turns out, he was calling for the bubble at that crucial moment in history which we now recognize as the actual creation of the bubble. http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/Median_and_Ave...

Let me spell it out for you: he got what he asked for, when he asked for it.

3. Given that he called for the creation of a bubble, I am willing to assume that perhaps he didn't mean for it to get so over-inflated. But that puts the burden on you to find an article circa 2004 for him saying: stop, I meant only inflate it a little ...

Of course he did not call for the creation of the bubble just before it popped. In fact, it is much worse: he called for the inflation of the bubble just as it was getting started.

We all know how that ended ...

Point taken. However, Krugman's comments were a little stronger than what you suggest. He explicitly called for the creation of a housing bubble (see my other response below).

Please don't take the link as a blanket endorsement of libertarianism; it was just the first link that came up as a result of my google search. I remembered reading up on Krugman's predictive failures many months ago ...

Krugman stopped being an economist a long time ago and is now a political hack - regardless of whether or not he has a point in this particular instance. I imagine that you didn't need Krugman to tell you that the raters were issuing ridiculous ratings ...

Please see my comment above. You are evidently confused about the history of the housing bubble: it was beginning just as Krugman was making these comments and writing the article I link to below.

The burden is, in fact, on you to find a link from circa 2004-6 by Krugman calling for restraint of the bubble whose inflation he advocated so fiercely. See above for a more detailed exposition of this point.

Anyways, here is another article from 2002. I don't know how you can get any more incriminating:

Quoting Krugman: To fight this recession the Fed needs more than a snapback; it needs soaring household spending to offset moribund business investment. And to do that, as Paul McCulley of Pimco put it, Alan Greenspan needs to create a housing bubble to replace the Nasdaq bubble.

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/08/02/opinion/dubya-s-double-dip...

BTW, asking for a quote from 2004 calling for the creation of a housing bubble is a bit ridiculous: by then the housing bubble was in full bloom.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/c/c1/Median_and_Ave...

As you can see, late 2002 (when the above article was written) would have been just at the beginning of the disaster.

(sorry for the delayed reply; at work all day.)

Let's not forget that Krugman was one of the chief advocates of the housing bubble (before it popped) and that his "berating of the raters" should begin with an apology.

http://blog.mises.org/10153/krugman-did-cause-the-housing-bu...

If you said no - and meant it - then you are wasting it. (Or perhaps we just interpret the question differently.)

Who goes to the gym just to lift the lightest weights?

It is perhaps easy to overlook the fact that the modern standard of "fair" is far subtler than the ancient standard of "fair". Social mobility, human rights, effective medicine, myriad technological comforts all make our lives unbelievably more "fair" than contemporaries of Seneca would have ever likely imagined.

And yet you suppose that Seneca was unaware about the "unfairness" of the universe. Ah, but you misinterpret the essay. The point is not to convince you that your life, or all human life, is unequivocally "fair" - as certified by some mystical fairy God dancing in the Cosmos - but to convince you that the only way to maximize the "fairness" of your own life is by the action of the individual, by the application of correct concepts of human morality: by proper ethics.

As pertains to the subject of this essay, this means to act as if your life is of sufficient measure for you to fulfill yourself only if you do not waste it.

Moreover, to respond to your general dismissal of the essay, Seneca is writing on a particular instance of "unfairness" - the shortness of life, not all "unfairness" (e.g. being born with a genetic disorder). Of course, the Stoics were keenly aware of this type of "unfairness" as a defining characteristic of the human condition. Indeed, much of their philosophy is devoted to it. But a discussion of this would take us much too far afield and I'm afraid you would not be interested ...

Apart from the tortured logic, the most egregious part of the e-mail was the Prof.’s elementary math error.

Question: A student goes to three classes, each for approximately the same amount of time. He arrives at the third course approximately an hour after the first one started – how long was the student in each of the first two classes?

Professor: 15-20 minutes!

(He mistakenly divided 1 hour by three and tried to account for travel time. Of course he should have divided by two.)

In combination with his grammatical skills, I’d say the Prof needs to get HIS shit together!

But seriously, the student was justified to walk in, but not justified to complain about being thrown out. The Prof's e-mail was bizarre but the closing paragraph was well-spoken.

Unfortunately this article overlooks the "startup" costs for developing and deploying the requisite technologies for harvesting the profits (which are significant enough to preclude privatization, IMO).

And there is another more grievous oversight in the article which pertains to the sinister slight-of-hand on the administration's policy: they intend to slough off the cost of developing and deploying what portends to be mankind's greatest engineering feat, while planning to reap the profits: do you really think for one second that good old Uncle Sam will not find away to skim away a hefty share of these (potential) profits? do you think that such asteroids will be corporate or "social" property (read government)?

Tying together one last point, does anyone really believe that this administration has a new found faith in the free markets - or is all of this pandering and innuendo just a red hearing to keep us from sobering up to the cold fact that the promising Constellation project was just killed?

In my view, the article is backwards.

Let me ask a very honest question: what does one actually have to gain, personally, from making a fundamental contribution to physics? Consider that it takes at least a decade for prizes to be distributed. So at best, you are looking at a cushy professorship at a nice University for your efforts, and maybe - if you are lucky - in your forties someone will send you a plaque and a modest check for your efforts.

Wouldn't any rational young man prefer something a little more tangible for a decade of his youth? Especially given the accessibility of such rewards in other fields?

Hence the fundamental issue addressed in the article is not actually addressed at all: the young and brilliant are simply not interested - and for good reason (IMHO).

Let me add one more thing. Compared to a century ago, the young physicist has much more to learn before he even has the knowledge to make fundamental contributions, hence the prospects starting out are much more daunting.

Funny. I thought this was Obama's data:

http://www.realclearpolitics.com/epolls/other/president_obam...