Nobel Economist: Now Is No Time to Give Up on Markets | Hacker News Reader

Nobel Economist: Now Is No Time to Give Up on Markets

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22 pointsjwb11925 comments

I think you couldn't give up on markets even if you wanted to. You can pretend there are no markets, ala communism, but you can not eliminate markets unless you invent a limitless supply of energy.

> you can not eliminate markets unless you invent a limitless supply of energy.

Even inventing a limitless supply of free energy would not eliminate markets because limitless free energy would not eliminate all scarcity.

Wouldn't it? Given limitless energy, you can literally create matter out of thin air (E=mc^2) ...

You could create new planets, replicas of anything, etc. Hell, you could even distort time to fit your needs.

Granted, it would take more energy than exists in the universe - and a little technology that we haven't tried outside the lab yet. But we already have the fundamental tech to make that happen - it would just take a bit more scaling up and fine tuning.

Hey, he did say limitless

Yes I think you are right. Solve energy, most other problems will the solved from that. (the only thing holding back would be the side effects or fear of the side effects of accessing that energy).

Non-material things like status or reputation can be still scarce even with limitless energy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whuffie

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Post_scarcity#Unavoidable_scarc...

> You could create new planets, replicas of anything, etc.

On which of those planets is Jessica Alba going to get me a mojito?

I think cool air would become a scarcity pretty quick. Instead, we'll have meters that tell us how much heat we're paying for.

That's nice. It was Merton and Scholes --- two Nobel economists --- who convinced LTCM and its customers that it was safe to place 15-30:1 leveraged bets on market volatility; that time, we only lost single-digit billions.

the economics "nobel" is not a real Nobel. it's a bogus prize. just saying. see here -> http://www.opendemocracy.net/article/nobel_by_association_be...

It's traditional to hype the Nobel prizes of Economists you agree with, and mention that it's not a "real Nobel" when it's given to someone you don't like.

The correct name is Nobel Memorial Prize.

It is not a "bogus" prize - I can assure you that you have to be pretty smart to earn one.

Smart is a nebulous idea.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long-Term_Capital_Management

you don't have to be "smart", you have to fit in. economics is a self-referential discipline. there is no real standard of truth or verity or validity of a theory and hence a lot of bickering even about fundamental questions. and so, there are "schools" of thought. whichever is the current flavor of the month (or rather decade) will carry one of its own to the "highest prize". in terms of hard to get, i'd argue the so-called clark medal is harder. anyway, economists try to act all "science-y" and serious but the fact is, those who arguably understand economics very well (say a soros) and those who win fake nobels are not the same people...

> you don't have to be "smart", you have to fit in. economics is a self-referential discipline. there is no real standard of truth or verity or validity of a theory and hence a lot of bickering even about fundamental questions.

The closer a theory fit to practice (e.g. economic modelling) the better it is.

> those who arguably understand economics very well (say a soros)

There is a difference between understanding macro economics and a person doing dubious and unethical things to get money (e.g. Soros). Soros was involved in many dubious financial transactions and was found guilty of insider trading in France. What he did in Hong Kong may not be entirely illegal but it certainly is completely unethical.

Also - their is a difference between macro-economics and things such as stock trading or currency speculation.

On the other hand - most people have a problem with a lot of economists because of what their results are (i.e. not progressive).

As if the 'real' Nobel prices are sacrosanct..

How could Nobel set a prize for every field that depends on mathematics but not mathematics itself?

Meh. The Nobel prize for economics is bogus when they rewarded people from different school of economics with opposite view on how the economy work in many respect.

Hayek got rewarded for his work on ABCT theory and the recent nobel prize winner Paul Kugman basically disagree with ABCT.

Some of what Einstein said goes completely against what Newton said. They were both geniuses.

If Newton were to meet Einstein, he'd accept Einstein's adjustments after a few hours (days?). If Hayek were to meet Krugman, they'd be ruthlessly arguing months later.

I don't think Hayek's prize was due to his work on the Business Cycle. It was primarily for demonstrating how market pricing serves as a communication mechanism allowing an emergent system, a distributed "cloud" (in today's terminology), to efficiently allocate goods. (of course these concepts are interrelated)

Agreed, now let's go back to hacker news, not economics/politics.

Agreed, head over to http://newmogul.com if you're interested in this stuff.

Did you guys read the article? I thought there were quite a few things hacker-ish about the subject and his views.

Did you read the title? It sounded like politics!

I think there was an intriguing question towards the end: How DO you shrink special interest groups?

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