Comic #8: Digression into economics

2012-05-29T05:20:45Z

I've been reading Krugman. Which one's he again? Economist with a Nobel Prize and a column in the New York Times. Oh, present-day.	He says that macroeconomists have forgotten all this stuff we learned from the Great Depression, and which was basic to the macro curriculum before 1970. In the 1970's, the academy became obsessed with this arcane theory that's supposed to be "elegant" and fix the minor holes in the old theory. But they keep forgetting the old stuff, which would be useful now. What's scary is that he himself wasn't convinced that the old stuff was important until he was studying Japan's long slump in the 1990's.			It's like... if medical schools discovered a new theory of the cellular structure and virology of blood, and stopped teaching basic blood chemistry. What would happen? They might notice after they killed a few hundred patients.

But what if, when someone comes along and says, 'This new procedure won't work, you're acidifying his blood too much.' they say, 'No, that can't possibly be a problem.' Or they just stopped worrying about the effect of their procedures on blood salinity. That'll kill you even surer. ...right. Well, that's so basic, I hesitate to make that comparison. Things aren't that bad, I hope.		...I hope. Well, in medicine you have multiple specialties, and doctors and nurses have different training. So each specialty's able to remember its own stuff better. No one's supposed to work outside their field if there's a specialist available in the appropriate field. Does macroeconomics have subspecialties, so, I don't know, say, one does money supply, one does international trade, another does labor theory?
			I don't know. Maybe? Not like medicine. Actually, yeah. Other economists dismiss Krugman as just an international trade guy—since his Nobel was in that—say he's getting out of his field.

	Well, there you go then. But his argument is that the stuff he's talking about is basic, like undergrad stuff everyone should know. And the other economists are pushing austerity, which only worsens a depression. Then it is 'that bad.' Like doctors forgetting about blood salinity.			...yeah. It is that bad.

I tried a new format, allowing for dialogue-heavy strips. Funny how long-winded I get when I can, neh? I briefly considered how easy it would be to become like Dinosaur Comics, and just do dialogue with simple images.

I have still presented the text as an overlay over the image, which is supposed to aid quoting and translation. But depending on your text size, it may display wrong.

comments

raspberryrain

Comic #8: Digression into economics