Month: January 2014

  • Why didn’t we just listen to Krugman?

    JDN 2456679 PDT 18:22.

    End This Depression Now! is an excellent book, very easy to read, that gives clear and unambiguous explanations of how we could fix the economy in the US and Europe. I’ve recommended other books about the Second Depression in the past; even if you never get around to reading those ones, at least read Krugman.
    Krugman is, without a doubt, the greatest economist alive today. Nor is it a coincidence that he derives most of his ideas from the greatest economist ever, namely Lord John Maynard Keynes. Along with a select few others—Stiglitz, Kahneman, Ariely, Reich—Krugman is a beacon of sanity in an insane world; if we would simply listen to him, most of these crises could be prevented. And don’t take my word for it; studies have shown that Krugman’s economic predictions are the most accurate in the US media today. Moreover, Krugman and Stigilitz both predicted the 2008 crisis before it happened, while meanwhile Bernanke and Greenspan were cheerfully oblivious—and then Greenspan had the audacity to claim “No one saw this coming.” Actually, we did; you just weren’t listening.
    End This Depression Now! doesn’t go into a lot of detail about what caused the crash or who was responsible for it, but that’s because Krugman considers another objective far more urgent: What do we do to fix it? His answer is really quite simple: We need more government investment. Solar panels and maglevs, bridge repairs and electrical grid modernization. We need to spend trillions of dollars now, so that we don’t suffer trillions of dollars in lost productivity later.
    Won’t that put us further into debt? Yes, Krugman admits; but it’s well worth it, just as it was well worth it when we spent a comparable amount (inflation-adjusted) in World War 2. He carefully addresses the sound-byte “How can you fix debt with debt?” by pointing out that the key is always whose debt to whom; the government owing money to the American public is quite different from the American public owing money to a crime syndicate of multinational banks.
    Most of Krugman’s recommendations are surprising for how non-radical they are; in the 1960s and 1970s they were basically standard, mainstream economic policy—and they worked pretty well. Unfortunately, the people who called themselves “Keynesians” didn’t understand cost-push inflation or the OPEC cartel, so their failure to predict the Nixon stagflation discredited unrelated actual Keynesian ideas. Actually we might have avoided the whole thing if Carter had stayed in office and continued his program of investment in solar power; when OPEC jacked up the price of oil, we could have just stopped using oil and given OPEC the middle finger.
    If the book has any shortcomings, it is in being a bit too optimistic about our political system. Krugman thinks—or at least hopes—that if we just keep saying the truth often enough, people in power will begin to hear it. I fear it may take something more drastic than that.

  • Apparently I’m not the only SF author/economist.

    JDN 2456678 EDT 22:41.

    Neptune’s Brood by Charles Stross is an interesting book. It’s oddly compelling, but for reasons I can’t quite articulate. The world he builds is so odd and perverse—and yet as far as I can tell, absolutely nothing in it violates any known laws of nature. It is one of the hardest pieces of science fiction I have ever read, and yet it literally involves a mermaid being hunted by pirates as she searched for ancient treasure beneath the sea. (It makes sense in context… sort of.)

    The reason I say I must not be the only SF author/economist is that Stross fills the book with a wide array of economic in-jokes, culminating in the fact that the ancient treasure is an abstract financial instrument that basically amounts to Bitcoin. Other examples include the fact that people can buy put options on just about anything, including other people; and the fact that people are literally born into debt. I’m honestly not sure how well people who aren’t economics-savvy would appreciate its dry sense of humor.

    And people who don’t understand relativistic physics won’t appreciate it at all, which brings me to my one major problem with the book: It’s full of long sections of worldbuilding exposition that get grating after awhile and really don’t need to be there. You don’t need to give us all the details about how the nanotechnology and body modifications work. You don’t need to list the seven different types of nuclear rocket engine. The book is mostly about financial instruments (like I said, most people may not appreciate it), but even then I’m not sure we needed the level of detail we got about those financial instruments. We don’t need to know, and you probably got it wrong anyway—after all, if you knew how to make functional nanotechnology, you’d be silly to make your money writing fiction! In one of my (admittedly unfinished) novels, I simply say “nanotech bodymods”, and I figure that’s enough. What’s important is not exactly how these technologies work: It’s how they affect our lives. Great science fiction isn’t about science—it’s about the impact science has on human beings. Even robots, aliens and metahumans are really ways of commenting on the experience of humans—I write the Terlaroni not to predict some actual race of felinoids on Tau Ceti (if we found such things I’d be as shocked as anyone), but to project a different perspective on what it means to be a human on Earth.

    In short, Neptune’s Brood suffers from the problem Mark Rosenfelder noted in “If All Stories Were Written Like Science Fiction” (which is hilarious and essential reading by the way); this is why people still don’t think of SF as “great literature”, and when a book is so great that people have no choice but to recognize it as literature, they stop calling it SF—think 1984, Brave New World, Slaughterhouse-Five. This is because great literature is about the human experience, and most SF foolishly isn’t.

  • Blunt to the point of rudeness, but that doesn’t make him wrong

    JDN 2456675 EDT 23:23.

    A review of Griftopia by Matt Taibbi

    From his writing style, Matt Taibbi seems like he’d be fun to be around if he likes you, and absolutely insufferable if he doesn’t. He is beyond blunt, and his language will make your head spin as he uses words like “fucking bullshit” and “synthetic derivative” in the same sentence—indeed he may actually say “fucking bullshit synthetic derivative” at some point. He does not hesitate to call some of our world’s most powerful leaders criminals and their corporations criminal enterprises. He despises Alan Greenspan at a level that cannot be psychologically healthy. Yet his journalism is impeccable—literally some of the best I’ve ever read in America—and his facts all check out. He calls them criminals—and then documents their crimes.
    His anger is palpable, but coming out of reading it, the question is not why Matt Taibbi is angry; the question is why everyone else isn’t. Think of everything you’ve heard Occupy Wall Street accuse banks of doing: Most of that has been documented as indisputable fact. The one I always bring up, simple because it is so blatant and terrible, is the fact that HSBC laundered money for terrorists. LAUNDERED MONEY FOR TERRORISTS. In this post-9/11 world in which our airports are fortresses and the NSA is reading this right now, one of the world’s largest banks can be caught red-handed working directly with actual terrorists and end up paying a fine.
    Maybe Matt Taibbi isn’t the best man to deliver this message—his bluntness and salty language get grating after awhile—but he is actually delivering it, which is better than I can say for most other so-called “journalists”.