Food For Thought : Dunning–Kruger Effect || From the Vault

I learned this by observation, when people respect you they ask for your opinion, when they do not respect you they work on making you bow to theirs.

Today Food For Thought is Illusion Of superiority.

Paul Krugman’s Do You Know Who I Am?:

… academic credentials are neither a necessary nor a sufficient condition for having your ideas taken seriously. If a famous professor repeatedly says stupid things, then tries to claim he never said them, there’s no rule against calling him a mendacious idiot …


Conversely, if someone without formal credentials consistently makes trenchant, insightful observations, he or she has earned the right to be taken seriously, regardless of background.


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Eric’s contribution:

It's pretty basic, really. Up until the 16th Century and the Age of Enlightenment/Reason/Science, all knowledge was revealed Truth from God, revealed by those with Authority. With the discovery of natural laws and the application of cause and effect, a new paradigm developed: truth had to be proved; authority had to be earned. Modern minds accepted the new paradigm. Premodern minds refused to change, clinging to the Old Order. To maintain control, leaders knew they had to maintain their monopoly on Authority. Many today continue to follow those Old Orders, either due to indoctrination from a young age or natural inclination.

The great abolitionist and feminist, Lucrecia Mott summed it up best:
"Truth for Authority, not Authority for Truth."
You earn authority by speaking truth, rather than accepting truth just because it is spoken by authority.

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Dunning–Kruger effect (Wikipedia link)





This is my Blog, not my C.V. There is a great community of bloggers who share what they like/NO Nincompoop Posers
You are trying HARD to prove to yourself that you are superior to me. The good thing - all you end up reveling is your stupidity.

Stupid People || Conservative Intellectuals: Follow the Money | Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman : Conservative Intellectuals: Follow the Money



Conservative opinion-meisters know that the majority of the poor feel more the pain of the rich. It is no wonder that stupid people will fall for the ideia that dark skinned people and gypsies are welfare queens in Portugal. I have interacted with people full of envy to even suggest that it was them who paid for the materialistic junk i have gathered.

A General Theory Of Austerity? || Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman:

Simon Wren-Lewis has an excellent new paper (PDF) trying to explain the widespread resort to austerity in the face of a liquidity trap, which is exactly the moment when such policies do the most harm. His bottom line is that

austerity was the result of right-wing opportunism, exploiting instinctive popular concern about rising government debt in order to reduce the size of the state.

I think this is right; but I would emphasize more than he does the extent to which both the general public and Very Serious People always assume that reducing deficits is the responsible thing to do.

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… You can, it turns out, tax the rich, regulate the banks, and expand health insurance coverage without punishment by the invisible hand || Paul Krugman

• Paul Krugman's Presidents and the Economy (DEC 30 9:49 AM)

After I put up my post comparing private-sector jobs under Obama and Bush, a number of people asked me whether I believe that presidents have a large effect on economic performance. My answer is no — but conservatives believe that they do, which is why this kind of comparison is useful.
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Paul Krugman and Olivier Blanchard In Conversation

via Paul Krugman

• Paul Krugman
• Olivier Blanchard

The Big Farce || Avars, Arabs, And History by Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman's Avars, Arabs, and History:

The historian David Potter had a great letter published in the Financial Times, correcting the really bad history of the Dutch president, who suggested that migrants brought about the fall of Rome. (Bad history is all the rage these days.) Potter:

The “barbarians” who were “responsible” for the “fall” of the western Roman empire in the fifth century AD were not a wave of desperate migrants. They were a collection of disgruntled employees.

Yep — in fact, many of the groups who ended up invading the Roman Empire were originally clients, hired, subsidized, or bribed (hard to tell these apart) to serve the empire at a time when its own military capacity was waning. And this isn’t just a story about the western empire, or about Rome.

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Life … || Thought For Food || Paul Krugman

Murky Perception || Paul Krugman

• Paul Krugman's Rate Rage:

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But what we should be doing, I now realize, is focusing not on broad classes but on very specific business interests. In particular, commercial bankers really dislike a very low interest rate environment, because it’s hard for them to make profits: there’s a lower bound on the interest rates they can offer, and if lending rates are low that compresses their spread. So bankers keep demanding higher rates, and inventing stories about why that would make sense despite low inflation.


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Conservatism Is …

via: PK's The Reactionary Soul (AUG 26 7:13 AM)

Corey Robin:

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a reactionary movement, a defense of power and privilege against democratic challenges from below, particularly in the private spheres of the family and the workplace.



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The Fuckers!

the Guardian:

Secret documents show creditors’ baseline estimate puts debt at 118% of GDP in 2030, even if it signs up to all tax and spending reforms demanded by troika

Greece would face an unsustainable level of debt by 2030 even if it signs up to the full package of tax and spending reforms demanded of it, according to unpublished documents compiled by its three main creditors.

The documents, drawn up by the so-called troika of lenders, support Greece’s argument that it needs substantial debt relief for a lasting economic recovery. They show that, even after 15 years of sustained strong growth, the country would face a level of debt that the International Monetary Fund deems unsustainable.

The documents show that the IMF’s baseline estimate – the most likely outcome – is that Greece’s debt would still be 118% of GDP in 2030, even if it signs up to the package of tax and spending reforms demanded. That is well above the 110% the IMF regards as sustainable given Greece’s debt profile, a level set in 2012. The country’s debt level is currently 175% and likely to go higher because of its recent slide back into recession.

The documents admit that under the baseline scenario “significant concessions” are necessary to improve Greece’s chances of ridding itself permanently of its debt financing woes.

Even under the best case scenario, which includes growth of 4% a year for the next five years, Greece’s debt levels will drop to only 124%, by 2022. The best case also anticipates €15bn (£10bn) in proceeds from privatisations, five times the estimate in the most likely scenario.


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Greece would have received €15bn to meet its obligations until the end of November. The cash would have been handed over in five tranches starting in June (as soon as the Greek parliament approved the proposals) to cover Greece’s financing needs. However, 93% of the funds would have gone straight to cover the cost of maturing debt for the duration of the extension.



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Paul Krugman's The Awesome Gratuitousness of the Greek Crisis

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But doesn’t the ultimate cause lie in wild irresponsibility on the part of the Greek government? I’ve been looking back at the numbers, readily available from the IMF, and what strikes me is how relatively mild Greek fiscal problems looked on the eve of crisis.

In 2007, Greece had public debt of slightly more than 100 percent of GDP — high, but not out of line with levels that many countries including, for example, the UK have carried for decades and even generations at a stretch.

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So yes, Greece was overspending, but not by all that much. It was over indebted, but again not by all that much. How did this turn into a catastrophe that among other things saw debt soar to 170 percent of GDP despite savage austerity?

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Does Greece Need More Austerity? || Paul Krugman

Does Greece Need More Austerity?

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In truth, this has never been a fiscal crisis at its root; it has always been a balance of payments crisis that manifests itself in part in budget problems, which have then been pushed onto the center of the stage by ideology.

The Case For Cuts Was A Lie. Why Does Britain Still Believe It? The Austerity Delusion by Paul Krugman

The Case For Cuts Was A Lie. Why Does Britain Still Believe It? The Austerity Delusion by Paul Krugman



Just go there and read.
A Democracy is a juggler of interests. Imagine what happens when its equilibrium is slightly unhinged?

Hail To The Plutocrats And Their Minions Redux

Paul Krugman:

… I’m doing some more work on British austerity — the reality, and, even more important, the perception. It’s a strange story. For the most part, as we look across the advanced world, the intellectual arguments behind the great 2010 turn to austerity have collapsed — you don’t see people invoking invisible bond vigilantes to warn of imminent crisis unless you slash spending, you don’t see them invoking the confidence fairy to deny that spending cuts will hurt output. In fact, as Simon Wren-Lewis notes, you see efforts to rewrite the history and claim that nobody ever said the things they did, in fact, say to justify austerity.

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What do we learn from that experience, again?

So the real British story is one in which the government and the news media have misrepresented the actual history both of policy and of policy debates. Academic economists aren’t fooled: they overwhelmingly disagree with the pro-austerity narrative. But the public may never hear about that.

from 4.5.13

Snapshot, Book 4 by Andy Diggle and Jock

Europe’s Greek Test || Paul Krugman

• Paul Krugman :

In the five years (!) that have passed since the euro crisis began, clear thinking has been in notably short supply.
… Recent events in Greece pose a fundamental challenge for Europe: Can it get past the myths and the moralizing, and deal with reality …


First, about those myths: Many people seem to believe that the loans Athens has received since the crisis broke have been subsidizing Greek spending.

The truth, however, is that the great bulk of the money lent to Greece has been used simply to pay interest and principal on debt. In fact, for the past two years, more than all of the money going to Greece has been recycled in this way: the Greek government is taking in more revenue than it spends on things other than interest, and handing the extra funds over to its creditors.

Or to oversimplify things a bit, you can think of European policy as involving a bailout, not of Greece, but of creditor-country banks, with the Greek government simply acting as the middleman — and with the Greek public, which has seen a catastrophic fall in living standards, required to make further sacrifices so that it, too, can contribute funds to that bailout.

One way to think about the demands of the newly elected Greek government is that it wants a reduction in the size of that contribution. Nobody is talking about Greece spending more than it takes in; all that might be on the table would be spending less on interest and more on things like health care and aid to the destitute. And doing so would have the side effect of greatly reducing Greece’s 25 percent rate of unemployment.


But doesn’t Greece have an obligation to pay the debts its own government chose to run up? That’s where the moralizing comes in.

It’s true that Greece (or more precisely the center-right government that ruled the nation from 2004-9) voluntarily borrowed vast sums. It’s also true, however, that banks in Germany and elsewhere voluntarily lent Greece all that money. We would ordinarily expect both sides of that misjudgment to pay a price. But the private lenders have been largely bailed out (despite a “haircut” on their claims in 2012). Meanwhile, Greece is expected to keep on paying.

Now, the truth is that nobody believes that Greece can fully repay. So why not recognize that reality and reduce the payments to a level that doesn’t impose endless suffering? Is the goal to make Greece an example for other borrowers? If so, how is that consistent with the values of what is supposed to be an association of sovereign, democratic nations?

The question of values becomes even starker once we consider why Greece’s creditors still have power.

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I’ve read, listened to journalists telling lies, with the sole purpose of selling the European Union’s ( right-wing ) faulty view of the situation. No wonder the vast majority of europeans still think the crisis was caused by governments’ wrong doing.
The deceit boggles the mind.

Britain’s Success Story || Paul Krugman

Paul Krugman:

Simon Wren-Lewis asks how good British economic recovery — which is being touted as a wonderful success story — really has been. Not very, he says.

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But surely we’re also seeing the ideological bias of many in the news media. France is supposed to be a terrible failure, because it still believes in a strong welfare state — and so it is reported as a failure, never mind the numbers. Austerity in Britain is politically approved, so it is pronounced a success on the shakiest of grounds.


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Dishonesty Is A Weapon

A Weapon, to secure power, a position, to hide insufficiencies.



Paul Kruman’s The Oz Effect:

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But I now also suspect that the personality traits you need to be an effective entertainer on inherently not-so-much-fun subjects like health or monetary policy are inherently at odds with the traits you need to be even halfway competent.


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Fools, You Said?

Fly the Derpy Skies from ( OCT 21 9:13 AM ) by Paul Krugman

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Truly, we live in a world in which people feel entitled not just to their own opinions but their own facts.

Paul Krugman Talks About Defending Obama On His Rolling Stone Interview

charlieRoseDOTcom

Paul Krugman On Obama

More ABC news videos | ABC Entertainment News


More ABC news videos | ABC Entertainment News



Regarding the deficit, the journalist did not do his ( washingtonPost Link) homework.

Pandering To The Rich and Powerful Redux || Paul Krugman’s Depression Denial Syndrome

Paul Krugman:

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And here’s the thing: Lots of other influential people made the same bad call — and are still making it, over and over again.

The story here really starts years earlier, when an immense housing bubble popped. Spending on new houses collapsed, and broader consumer spending also took a hit, as families that had borrowed heavily to buy houses saw the value of those homes plunge. Businesses cut back, too. Why add capacity in the face of weak consumer demand?

The result was an economy in which everyone wanted to save more and invest less. Since everyone can’t do that at the same time, something else had to give — and, in fact, two things gave. First, the economy went into a slump, from which it has not yet fully emerged. Second, the government began running a deficit, as the economic downturn caused a sharp fall in revenue and a surge in some kinds of spending, like food stamps and unemployment benefits.

Now, we normally think of deficits as a bad thing — government borrowing competes with private borrowing, driving up interest rates, hurting investment, and possibly setting the stage for higher inflation. But, since 2008, we have, to use the economics jargon, been stuck in a liquidity trap, which is basically a situation in which the economy is awash in desired saving with no place to go. In this situation, government borrowing doesn’t compete with private demand because the private sector doesn’t want to spend. And because they aren’t competing with the private sector, deficits needn’t cause interest rates to rise.

All this may sound strange and counterintuitive, but it’s what basic macroeconomic analysis tells you. And that’s not 20/20 hindsight either.


… tried to explain the special circumstances of a depressed economy, in which deficits wouldn’t cause soaring rates and the Federal Reserve’s policy of “printing money” (not really what it was doing, but never mind) wouldn’t cause inflation. It wasn’t just theory, either; we had the experience of the 1930s and Japan since the 1990s to draw on. But many, perhaps most, influential people in the alleged real world refused to believe us.


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And that’s what makes the Bill Gross story interesting. He’s pretty much the only major deficit hysteric to pay a price for getting it wrong (even though he remains, of course, immensely rich). Pimco has taken a hit, but everywhere else the reign of error continues undisturbed.

Paul Krugman’s 2011 and All That:

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The difference is, of course, that Gross had actual investors’ money on the line. But you should not take that to imply that the profit motive leads to intellectual clarity; Gross has been forced out at Pimco, but I’ve seen hardly any press coverage tying that to his having the wrong macro model.