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Politics : View from the Center and Left -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (142231)	8/9/2010 9:44:07 AM
From: epicure	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542015

Government- ARPA dei.isep.ipp.pt en.wikipedia.org the government can create huge spinoffs- when it manages to work (and there aren't obstructionist morons ruining it). Yes, Virginia, we can thank the government for both computers and the internet.

To: Steve Lokness who wrote (142231)	8/9/2010 2:02:30 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 542015

On the internet issue, Phelps was not talking about demand at that point but about innovation. And made the obviously wrong comment that government cannot provide innovation that creates jobs. Perhaps you don't know the history of the origins of the internet. If not, wikipedia has a decent one; there are much better ones, though, in print. en.wikipedia.org. The wikipedia version backgrounds the fact that it's all government all the time in those early years. Read the material on Robert Taylor and you'll begin to get an idea. As for your points about the housing market, it's not a good argument against Krugman. He was well out in front on that one, writing gloom and doom stuff well before most. As for the Nobel prize certifying Krugman's views, I don't think I ever said such. Certainly shouldn't have. I certainly don't believe it. What I did say, was that one should not be perfunctorily dismissive of his thoughts because, among other things, he was extremely well respected in the discipline, a genuinely very smart guy, and a Noble prize winner. And I think that was in the context of one of Paul Smith's posts in which someone who knew no economics was dismissing Keynes and Krugman, just out of hand. Best word for that was anti-intellectualism. Where is Richard Hofstadter when we need him.