Krugman is responding to accusations that he favors war as a solution to the Great Waste (sequelae to the Great Recession). He gives a smart response to dumb questions, but reading how major wars do Keynes better than politicians made me think about What Would the Market Do?
What do I mean? Well, consider this. Charlie Stross, one of my mind expanding writers included "
The story captured a sense I often have that the large, complex adaptive systems we live in are, seen from a certain angle in a certain world as real and unreal as our own, alive. Not smart like we are, but alive in a landscape dominated by very powerful amoebae.
In this worldslice Markets are entities with their own agenda -- mostly to eat and grow. Sometimes, though, the growing is slow. The Market has to find new food. It moves along a chemotropic gradient to a new source of nutrition.
War.
[1] I updated this paragraph thanks to a helpful comment.
2 comments:
I just read Accelerando: you have the right book, but Stross calls it "Economics 2.0."
In fact, Krugman mentioned Stross as one of his favorite sci-fi authors in a post a couple months ago, which is what motivated me to read Accelerando, since I don't normally read science fiction.
Thank you! I've updated my post to correct the error.
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