The Chicagoans Waterloo

I have always been a great estimator of Paul Krugman, this year Nobel Prize in Economics. My thesis started with a quotation of him and I liked the way he wrote, his style, quite unconventional to be an economist, although probably not in absolute terms, as my Canadian room mate Nathan - a sharp policy grad student highly trusted by the author of this blog when it comes to Anglo-Saxon culture - used to complain about his inability to write articles in a decent english...

However, for how much Krugman has criticized the Bush administration since he joined as op-ed the New York Times, I can't forget how much he was radical about the goodness of free trade and globalization when he was an academic, how he regarded it as always good for everyone no matter how, who and when you open to it. Something that could only be true if you see the world under the fundamentalist eyes of the Chicago School of Economics. Those eyes that do not have a clue about what is going on now with the financial crisis and worst of all do not have a clue about how to react. Exactly as the market orthodox elite stood silent and still after the crisis of the 1929.

As at that time it was an Englishman - John Maynard Keynes - who advised the then President of the United States Franklin Delano Roosevelt on how to get out of the mess, this time it was the British prime minister - Gordon Brown - who had the promptness to react firmly and rapidly to the crisis by showing so far the only possible - we can't know if it is the right one yet - emergency exit to the crisis. As the brand-new Nobel Laureate in economics neatly explains here. Probably, the editorial that eventually brought him to an early Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences.

Hopefully, a first of a long list to "unconventional" economists after a couple of decades of Chicago triumph.

Diego Rivera - Affresco Murario - Detroit Industry, Parete Sud 1932-33.

“In Detroit’s Institute of fine arts there is a remarkable room whose walls are painted with four stunning murals by Diego Rivera. The Rivera murals, completed in 1933, show in considerable detail the operations of Ford’s River Rouge industrial complex – a giant facility that combined at a single site blast furnaces, rolling mills, engine casting, body stamping, and assembly of complete automobiles. … Although Rivera’s murals were intended as a celebration of the power of modern industry (and also, to his patron’s dismay, a condemnation of its brutality), they now have a decidedly archaic feel. Part of that sense of old-fashioned industry comes from the very degree of integration that seemed so impressive at the time. What are all those desperate operations doing in the same facilitiy? Why are they not being done at specialized places scattered around the globe?”
Paul Krugman, “Growing World Trade: Causes and Consequences”, 1995