Paul Krugman is an outstanding academic, Nobel Laureate and a phenomenal public intellectual.
In an opinion article in today’s NYT, Prof. Krugman make the most lucid and accessible argument that illuminates the debt and deficit conundrum. Krugman’s essay assails the simplistic and wrongheaded arguments put forth the GOP controlled House of Representatives and buttressed by right wing economists, which rabidly advocate for tax cuts, and broad austerity measures.
I think this article is an absolute must read for anyone who is looking for a non-technical common sense argument for deficit spending to get economies out of recession or depression.
Paul Krugman makes an important point about the choice of experts or advisors by politicians or lobby groups when he mentions the Heritage Foundation. I think what is disconcerting is how evidence-free governance and decision-making has become.
Here is Paul Krugman’s “Nobody Understands Debt”
Published January 2 2012 in NYT
“In 2011, as in 2010, America was in a technical recovery but continued to suffer from disastrously high unemployment. And through most of 2011, as in 2010, almost all the conversation in Washington was about something else: the allegedly urgent issue of reducing the budget deficit.
This misplaced focus said a lot about our political culture, in particular about how disconnected Congress is from the suffering of ordinary Americans. But it also revealed something else: when people in D.C. talk about deficits and debt, by and large they have no idea what they’re talking about — and the people who talk the most understand the least.
Perhaps most obviously, the economic “experts” on whom much of Congress relies have been repeatedly, utterly wrong about the short-run effects of budget deficits. People who get their economic analysis from the likes of the Heritage Foundation have been waiting ever since President Obama took office for budget deficits to send interest rates soaring. Any day now!
And while they’ve been waiting, those rates have dropped to historical lows. You might think that this would make politicians question their choice of experts — that is, you might think that if you didn’t know anything about our postmodern, fact-free politics.
But Washington isn’t just confused about the short run; it’s also confused about the long run. For while debt can be a problem, the way our politicians and pundits think about debt is all wrong, and exaggerates the problem’s size.
Deficit-worriers portray a future in which we’re impoverished by the need to pay back money we’ve been borrowing. They see America as being like a family that took out too large a mortgage, and will have a hard time making the monthly payments.
This is, however, a really bad analogy in at least two ways.
First, families have to pay back their debt. Governments don’t — all they need to do is ensure that debt grows more slowly than their tax base. The debt from World War II was never repaid; it just became increasingly irrelevant as the U.S. economy grew, and with it the income subject to taxation.
Second — and this is the point almost nobody seems to get — an over-borrowed family owes money to someone else; U.S. debt is, to a large extent, money we owe to ourselves.
This was clearly true of the debt incurred to win World War II. Taxpayers were on the hook for a debt that was significantly bigger, as a percentage of G.D.P., than debt today; but that debt was also owned by taxpayers, such as all the people who bought savings bonds. So the debt didn’t make postwar America poorer. In particular, the debt didn’t prevent the postwar generation from experiencing the biggest rise in incomes and living standards in our nation’s history.
But isn’t this time different? Not as much as you think.
It’s true that foreigners now hold large claims on the United States, including a fair amount of government debt. But every dollar’s worth of foreign claims on America is matched by 89 cents’ worth of U.S. claims on foreigners. And because foreigners tend to put their U.S. investments into safe, low-yield assets, America actually earns more from its assets abroad than it pays to foreign investors. If your image is of a nation that’s already deep in hock to the Chinese, you’ve been misinformed. Nor are we heading rapidly in that direction.
Now, the fact that federal debt isn’t at all like a mortgage on America’s future doesn’t mean that the debt is harmless. Taxes must be levied to pay the interest, and you don’t have to be a right-wing ideologue to concede that taxes impose some cost on the economy, if nothing else by causing a diversion of resources away from productive activities into tax avoidance and evasion. But these costs are a lot less dramatic than the analogy with an overindebted family might suggest.
And that’s why nations with stable, responsible governments — that is, governments that are willing to impose modestly higher taxes when the situation warrants it — have historically been able to live with much higher levels of debt than today’s conventional wisdom would lead you to believe. Britain, in particular, has had debt exceeding 100 percent of G.D.P. for 81 of the last 170 years. When Keynes was writing about the need to spend your way out of a depression, Britain was deeper in debt than any advanced nation today, with the exception of Japan.
Of course, America, with its rabidly antitax conservative movement, may not have a government that is responsible in this sense. But in that case the fault lies not in our debt, but in ourselves.
So yes, debt matters. But right now, other things matter more. We need more, not less, government spending to get us out of our unemployment trap. And the wrongheaded, ill-informed obsession with debt is standing in the way”.
Monday, January 2, 2012
Saturday, December 31, 2011
Reflecting and Looking Forward
2011 will go down as momentous. Economies tumbled, dictators fell and Kim Jong Il died.
2012 will be will be eventful. We will have consequential elections in China, Russia and the United States of America.
As always we will have to deal with range of disasters, both natural like earthquakes and man made like famine. More dictators will fall and more economies will spin into turmoil.
At a personal level we all will have our moments of triumph, deep hurt and grief. And for some of us we will come close or encounter our own mortality.
And to you all, here is 2012 with some tears and lots of laughter.
But it is a wonderful world, and its all we have.
2012 will be will be eventful. We will have consequential elections in China, Russia and the United States of America.
As always we will have to deal with range of disasters, both natural like earthquakes and man made like famine. More dictators will fall and more economies will spin into turmoil.
At a personal level we all will have our moments of triumph, deep hurt and grief. And for some of us we will come close or encounter our own mortality.
And to you all, here is 2012 with some tears and lots of laughter.
But it is a wonderful world, and its all we have.
Sunday, December 25, 2011
Roman Politics and the Triumph of Christinity
For Christendom, it is that time of the year, again.
There was no room in the Inn and behold a child was born in a manger. Wise men and humble shepherds bowed in adoration. But with the birth of a child, an empire was threatened and a King sought to commit murder.
For many centuries, the Romans worshipped legion of deities – gods and goddesses. Many of these deities came from the lands conquered through the ever-expanding Roman empire.
Two religions, Christianity and Judaism refused to honor “Roman gods” and idolize Roman emperors. As a result, Jews and Christians endured much hardship and relentless persecutions for centuries. Famous Christian martyrs of this period include Saint John and Saint Peter.
In the 4th century, God sent a vision of light at midday and an Emperor was converted to Christianity. Emperor Constantine adopted God’s symbol (the intersection of the Greek letter chi and rho) and wore it against every hostile power he faced.
After his vision, he immediately declared Christianity legal in the Edict of Milan. He completely abandoned paganism and put his full force of favor towards advancing the cause of the Church of Christ. He commissioned the construction of several grand cathedrals and emboldened Christians to worship openly in ancient Rome.
Constantine also made Sunday an official Roman holiday so that more people could attend church, and made churches tax-exempt.
He made December 25th, the birthday of the unconquered pagan Sun god, the official holiday. Today we celebrate the days as Christmas –the birthday of Jesus. His mother, Helen, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and began excavations to recover artifacts in the city. This popularized the tradition of pilgrimages in Christianity.
There was no room in the Inn and behold a child was born in a manger. Wise men and humble shepherds bowed in adoration. But with the birth of a child, an empire was threatened and a King sought to commit murder.
For many centuries, the Romans worshipped legion of deities – gods and goddesses. Many of these deities came from the lands conquered through the ever-expanding Roman empire.
Two religions, Christianity and Judaism refused to honor “Roman gods” and idolize Roman emperors. As a result, Jews and Christians endured much hardship and relentless persecutions for centuries. Famous Christian martyrs of this period include Saint John and Saint Peter.
In the 4th century, God sent a vision of light at midday and an Emperor was converted to Christianity. Emperor Constantine adopted God’s symbol (the intersection of the Greek letter chi and rho) and wore it against every hostile power he faced.
After his vision, he immediately declared Christianity legal in the Edict of Milan. He completely abandoned paganism and put his full force of favor towards advancing the cause of the Church of Christ. He commissioned the construction of several grand cathedrals and emboldened Christians to worship openly in ancient Rome.
Constantine also made Sunday an official Roman holiday so that more people could attend church, and made churches tax-exempt.
He made December 25th, the birthday of the unconquered pagan Sun god, the official holiday. Today we celebrate the days as Christmas –the birthday of Jesus. His mother, Helen, made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem and began excavations to recover artifacts in the city. This popularized the tradition of pilgrimages in Christianity.
Friday, December 23, 2011
Towards a breakthrough in Science Education
In this week’s editorial Bruce Alberts Editor-in-Chief of Science yearns for a breakthrough in teaching and learning of science. He writes, “perhaps, Science might one day be able to highlight the striking results of a large “clinical trial” in science education as our Breakthrough of the Year, reporting the clear benefits to students inspired by a carefully designed, hands-on, inquiry-based exploration of the world observes that we live in an age where “science denial” has become fashionable”.
Scientists and science education scholars have been hard at work grappling with the search for novel and innovative ways of teaching science. There is a broad consensus among scientists and teachers of science on the need for a scientific approach to science education.
Here is a snippet of what I consider frontier thinking that will deliver the yearnings of Bruce Alberts.
The practice of science is invariably an encounter of ill-structured problems that can have multiple causal paths and hence multiple approaches to solutions. To approach such problems, unscrambling through “higher-order” mental processes such as analysis, synthesis, and abstraction are vital. Creative thinking—the most complex and abstract of the higher-order cognitive skills can allow unscrambling of problems and produce solutions through unconventional non-classical insights.
However, we teach science in colleges and lower levels as if problems that require understanding and application of science fall neatly into a pre-ordained singular pathway to a correct solution.
We seldom think of science as a creative process and the scientist as a creative entrepreneur. There is therefore very little learning of any higher order cognitive skills.
In a sample of 77 undergraduate life sciences given by 50 different professors, less than 1% of items in the assessment required students to apply analytical, synthesis or abstraction skills. It is therefore not surprising that only circa one fourth of US college graduates possess the cognitive skills necessary to solve conceptual problems.
Admittedly, creativity is a complex, multi component construct and, therefore, is not easy to define or teach or assess, especially in the context of science. But creativity is at the heart of the advancement of science. As Albeit Einstein so elegantly put it, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science”.
However, there is evidence the cognitive operations required for creativity can be acquired through instructional strategies, which are relatively simple modifications of the active learning known to be effective for teaching abstraction and problem-solving.
In article recently published in Science, Robert L. DeHaan of the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University suggests that two broad categories of mental operations are needed to produce creative insight, namely: associative (divergent) thinking, where thoughts are defocused, intuitive and receptive and; analytical (convergent) thinking, which entails the capacity to analyze, synthesize and focus.
Associative thinking increases the probability of accessing weakly associated
Ideas. Convergent thinking involves unexpected recognition of novel relations through conceptual re-ordering or conceptual integration or blending of concepts or ideas.
A fundamental problem persists in science education: preparing undergraduates as scientists. This problem raises a persistent question: how do we structure teaching and learning of science to foster scientific curiosity, reasoning, and problem-solving to produce a generation of science undergraduates who think scientifically.
Robert L. DeHaan noted that while we expect science students to solve problems, we rarely refer to the creative aspects of the scientific discoveries that we teach. In an article published in Science in 2008, Sarah Miller and colleagues advanced the idea of scientific teaching. They argued that scientific teaching comprise methods that encourage students to construct new knowledge and to develop scientific ways of thinking. Carl Wieman, recipient of Nobel Prize in physics in 2001 believes that successful science education transforms how students think, so they can understand and use science like scientists.
According to Carl Wieman, fundamental institutional reform is necessary to deliver the needed reforms in teaching and learning of science.
Carl Wieman identifies key challenges to delivering fundamental reform to science education: research universities and their faculty care little about teaching or student learning; introducing research-based teaching and learning in college science programs will require resources to develop and test effective pedagogical materials, supporting technology and providing for faculty development; the budget for R & D an the implementation of improved methods at most universities is nearly zero.
These challenges present a framework for a coherent call to action to deliver a breakthrough in science education.
Scientists and science education scholars have been hard at work grappling with the search for novel and innovative ways of teaching science. There is a broad consensus among scientists and teachers of science on the need for a scientific approach to science education.
Here is a snippet of what I consider frontier thinking that will deliver the yearnings of Bruce Alberts.
The practice of science is invariably an encounter of ill-structured problems that can have multiple causal paths and hence multiple approaches to solutions. To approach such problems, unscrambling through “higher-order” mental processes such as analysis, synthesis, and abstraction are vital. Creative thinking—the most complex and abstract of the higher-order cognitive skills can allow unscrambling of problems and produce solutions through unconventional non-classical insights.
However, we teach science in colleges and lower levels as if problems that require understanding and application of science fall neatly into a pre-ordained singular pathway to a correct solution.
We seldom think of science as a creative process and the scientist as a creative entrepreneur. There is therefore very little learning of any higher order cognitive skills.
In a sample of 77 undergraduate life sciences given by 50 different professors, less than 1% of items in the assessment required students to apply analytical, synthesis or abstraction skills. It is therefore not surprising that only circa one fourth of US college graduates possess the cognitive skills necessary to solve conceptual problems.
Admittedly, creativity is a complex, multi component construct and, therefore, is not easy to define or teach or assess, especially in the context of science. But creativity is at the heart of the advancement of science. As Albeit Einstein so elegantly put it, “To raise new questions, new possibilities, to regard old problems from a new angle, requires creative imagination and marks real advance in science”.
However, there is evidence the cognitive operations required for creativity can be acquired through instructional strategies, which are relatively simple modifications of the active learning known to be effective for teaching abstraction and problem-solving.
In article recently published in Science, Robert L. DeHaan of the Division of Educational Studies at Emory University suggests that two broad categories of mental operations are needed to produce creative insight, namely: associative (divergent) thinking, where thoughts are defocused, intuitive and receptive and; analytical (convergent) thinking, which entails the capacity to analyze, synthesize and focus.
Associative thinking increases the probability of accessing weakly associated
Ideas. Convergent thinking involves unexpected recognition of novel relations through conceptual re-ordering or conceptual integration or blending of concepts or ideas.
A fundamental problem persists in science education: preparing undergraduates as scientists. This problem raises a persistent question: how do we structure teaching and learning of science to foster scientific curiosity, reasoning, and problem-solving to produce a generation of science undergraduates who think scientifically.
Robert L. DeHaan noted that while we expect science students to solve problems, we rarely refer to the creative aspects of the scientific discoveries that we teach. In an article published in Science in 2008, Sarah Miller and colleagues advanced the idea of scientific teaching. They argued that scientific teaching comprise methods that encourage students to construct new knowledge and to develop scientific ways of thinking. Carl Wieman, recipient of Nobel Prize in physics in 2001 believes that successful science education transforms how students think, so they can understand and use science like scientists.
According to Carl Wieman, fundamental institutional reform is necessary to deliver the needed reforms in teaching and learning of science.
Carl Wieman identifies key challenges to delivering fundamental reform to science education: research universities and their faculty care little about teaching or student learning; introducing research-based teaching and learning in college science programs will require resources to develop and test effective pedagogical materials, supporting technology and providing for faculty development; the budget for R & D an the implementation of improved methods at most universities is nearly zero.
These challenges present a framework for a coherent call to action to deliver a breakthrough in science education.
Thursday, December 22, 2011
Clintonesque
Yes, there is such a thing as Clintonesque.
Politics has an inordinate share of the less elegant and more obtuse of our kind. However, politics can attract truly remarkable individuals.
In his book, the “Audacity of Hope”, Barrack Obama writes about the Clinton administration. He says that the reason he admired Bill Clinton is that he tried to grapple with and solve problems.
Plato in his “Republic” postulated the ideal of a state governed by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical capacity for applying it to concrete problems. Intellectuals can be described as individuals dedicated to the life of the mind.
Bill Clinton is a truly rare kind of politician.
In his latest book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy”, Bill Clinton posses the one question at the core of the US growth and stagnation conundrum, namely: How do we ensure America’s economic, political, and security leadership in the more competitive, complex, fragmented and fast changing world of the twenty-first century?
And to Clinton’s question, the template for action may be found in this quote from Abraham Lincoln, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present”.
Bill Clinton, I think, is the only political figure in America who can talk truth – unvarnished truth – to Americans about what ails the economy and polity and what could be done in an attempt to fix the problems.
Now here are excerpts (from Newsmax.com) of Bill Clinton on the Bill O’Reilly show.
In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton makes the case for changing the economic structure of America as only he can make.
Former President Bill Clinton said he doubts that the Supreme Court will repeal the national healthcare law, and it behooves America to have the reform in place.
“No other rich country in the world spends more than 12 percent of income to insure 100 percent of the people,” Clinton said Tuesday on “The O’Reilly Factor,” referring to the “17½ percent of income to insure 84 percent of the people” the United States spends. “And we don’t get better health outcomes. It’s terrible economics.”
The 42nd president, making a debut appearance on the popular Fox News show, also discussed the Obama administration, Guantanamo Bay, the Taliban, and the 2012 election. He is promoting his newest book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy.”
O’Reilly asked Clinton about the “class warfare” rhetoric that’s dominating the clash between Republicans and Democrats.
“I don’t look at it as class warfare,” Clinton said. “I don’t mind paying more taxes ... but that won’t solve the problem. That will help us balance the budget when there’s growth again. We have to change the whole job structure of America.”
On the topic of Guantanamo Bay, Clinton said, “I don’t believe I’d have ever opened it in the first place, but I’d like to see it closed. I think there are places [detainees] could be kept in America.”
He commented on Vice President Joe Biden’s recent statement that the Taliban is not a direct U.S. enemy by saying he would be "really concerned if they were to govern Afghanistan."
“One of the things that I would be concerned about, and always have been with the Taliban, is how miserable they made life for so many women and little girls,” Clinton said.
He said he respects Newt Gingrich and the former House speaker’s run for the Oval Office, but said, “I’m going to vote for Obama.”
“I believe in a whole different direction in energy policy,” he said. “I think the president’s done a good job with foreign policy, and I think he’s got a better economic strategy, now, going, than the one [Newt’s] likely to implement.”
Clinton said Obama has a better than 50 percent chance of winning in 2012.
“He’s out there running against himself now,” he said. “As soon as he gets an opponent, it’ll be, ‘For the next four years, who do you think is more likely to take us in the right direction?’”.
Politics has an inordinate share of the less elegant and more obtuse of our kind. However, politics can attract truly remarkable individuals.
In his book, the “Audacity of Hope”, Barrack Obama writes about the Clinton administration. He says that the reason he admired Bill Clinton is that he tried to grapple with and solve problems.
Plato in his “Republic” postulated the ideal of a state governed by intellectuals who combined comprehensive theoretical knowledge with the practical capacity for applying it to concrete problems. Intellectuals can be described as individuals dedicated to the life of the mind.
Bill Clinton is a truly rare kind of politician.
In his latest book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy”, Bill Clinton posses the one question at the core of the US growth and stagnation conundrum, namely: How do we ensure America’s economic, political, and security leadership in the more competitive, complex, fragmented and fast changing world of the twenty-first century?
And to Clinton’s question, the template for action may be found in this quote from Abraham Lincoln, “The dogmas of the quiet past, are inadequate to the stormy present”.
Bill Clinton, I think, is the only political figure in America who can talk truth – unvarnished truth – to Americans about what ails the economy and polity and what could be done in an attempt to fix the problems.
Now here are excerpts (from Newsmax.com) of Bill Clinton on the Bill O’Reilly show.
In an interview with Bill O’Reilly, Bill Clinton makes the case for changing the economic structure of America as only he can make.
Former President Bill Clinton said he doubts that the Supreme Court will repeal the national healthcare law, and it behooves America to have the reform in place.
“No other rich country in the world spends more than 12 percent of income to insure 100 percent of the people,” Clinton said Tuesday on “The O’Reilly Factor,” referring to the “17½ percent of income to insure 84 percent of the people” the United States spends. “And we don’t get better health outcomes. It’s terrible economics.”
The 42nd president, making a debut appearance on the popular Fox News show, also discussed the Obama administration, Guantanamo Bay, the Taliban, and the 2012 election. He is promoting his newest book, “Back to Work: Why We Need Smart Government for a Strong Economy.”
O’Reilly asked Clinton about the “class warfare” rhetoric that’s dominating the clash between Republicans and Democrats.
“I don’t look at it as class warfare,” Clinton said. “I don’t mind paying more taxes ... but that won’t solve the problem. That will help us balance the budget when there’s growth again. We have to change the whole job structure of America.”
On the topic of Guantanamo Bay, Clinton said, “I don’t believe I’d have ever opened it in the first place, but I’d like to see it closed. I think there are places [detainees] could be kept in America.”
He commented on Vice President Joe Biden’s recent statement that the Taliban is not a direct U.S. enemy by saying he would be "really concerned if they were to govern Afghanistan."
“One of the things that I would be concerned about, and always have been with the Taliban, is how miserable they made life for so many women and little girls,” Clinton said.
He said he respects Newt Gingrich and the former House speaker’s run for the Oval Office, but said, “I’m going to vote for Obama.”
“I believe in a whole different direction in energy policy,” he said. “I think the president’s done a good job with foreign policy, and I think he’s got a better economic strategy, now, going, than the one [Newt’s] likely to implement.”
Clinton said Obama has a better than 50 percent chance of winning in 2012.
“He’s out there running against himself now,” he said. “As soon as he gets an opponent, it’ll be, ‘For the next four years, who do you think is more likely to take us in the right direction?’”.
Sunday, December 18, 2011
Academia and its Discontents
About four years ago I spoke with a friend, an academic from the US who illustrated the plight of professors and research scientist in a scary way. He told described how several of his friends had to pack and leave after they failed to make tenure because they could not secure grants that could get them graduate students and publications. He talked about scores of colleagues and friends from graduate school who abandoned their science/research careers because they could not earn their keep in an era of scarce grant resources and tight institutional budgets.
I came away thinking about life as a scientist and academic as nasty, short and brutish.
But there seems to be real crises Down Under.
Academics unhappy
“Australian academic researchers are rallying behind a report that laments their working conditions. The government-funded study, out in September, surveyed 5,525 academics across all career stages and fields at 20 universities. It found that nearly half of academics under 30 want to leave the country or the profession owing to low pay and lack of job security.
Researchers are frustrated by teaching obligations that cut into research time; low grant success rates; and 70- to 80-hour working weeks. Emmaline Bexley, a lecturer in higher education at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, says she hopes that her research will “help government and universities to work together to replenish the academic workforce”.
-AArticle published as in Nature Volume 478 pg 549, October 27 2011
I came away thinking about life as a scientist and academic as nasty, short and brutish.
But there seems to be real crises Down Under.
Academics unhappy
“Australian academic researchers are rallying behind a report that laments their working conditions. The government-funded study, out in September, surveyed 5,525 academics across all career stages and fields at 20 universities. It found that nearly half of academics under 30 want to leave the country or the profession owing to low pay and lack of job security.
Researchers are frustrated by teaching obligations that cut into research time; low grant success rates; and 70- to 80-hour working weeks. Emmaline Bexley, a lecturer in higher education at the University of Melbourne and lead author of the study, says she hopes that her research will “help government and universities to work together to replenish the academic workforce”.
-AArticle published as in Nature Volume 478 pg 549, October 27 2011
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