TW: Paul Samuelson is a liberal economist, Nobel Prize winner in economics and still dishing it out at age 94.
From Paul Kedrosky:
"A few more quotable quotes from that new interview:
On Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke
The 1980s trained macroeconomics -- like Greg Mankiw and Ben Bernanke and so forth -- became a very complacent group, very ill adapted to meet with a completely unpredictable and new situation, such as we've had.
On Robert Lucas and his acolytes (TW: Lucas is also a Nobel winner from U. of Chicago, a conservative)
Those guys were useless at Federal Reserve meetings.
On Alan Greenspan
But the trouble is that he had been an Ayn Rander. You can take the boy out of the cult but you can't take the cult out of the boy.
On Milton Friedman
He was a libertarian to the point of nuttiness.
On bubbles
And I'm not sure most of the people that get caught up in the middle of a bubble can be described as irrational. It seems pretty rational to buy a house and flip it in the next few weeks at a profit when that's been happening for along time. It works both ways.
On the dollar:
I think it's almost inevitable that, with a billion people in China wide awake for the first time, and a billion people in India, there's going to be some kind of a terrible run against the dollar. And I doubt it can stay orderly, because all of our own hedge funds will be right in the vanguard of the operation.
On economic history: what would you say to someone starting graduate study in economics?
Well, I’d say, and this is probably a change from what I would have said when I was younger: Have a very healthy respect for the study of economic history, because that’s the raw material out of which any of your conjectures or testings will come. And I think the recent period has illustrated that. "
No comments:
Post a Comment