Thursday, October 16, 2008

Oh Eric... This book was awesome!

Well as Eric said, I as one of his liberal classmates loved this book. Krugman's effective use of economic theory in layman's terms made the book a very enjoyable read. The whole time I was reading this I kept thinking: "What would it say if it were written now?" I believe his points would hold even more truth. When he talks about the massive discrepancies between the income of the rich and the poor and points out the old theory that the rich are rich because they exploit the poor no longer works because while the poor may only have had a 5% drop in income the rich have had a 12 fold increase. His attribution of such a discrepancy to the evolution of financial markets seems to hold even more weight now over ten years later. When he gets to his section on Financial Follies, I know a key fourth example would be the events of the past year. Of course like a good liberal he shows how the Savings and Loan crisis was the result of government deregulation and I think he would rightly observe the exact same fault in the current situation. For myself his discussion on the actual importance of the G7 meetings for the US reinforces my belief that such meetings are pretty much nothing more than expensive photo ops. But at least the look of global economic progress is better than nothing?

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