Recomiendo encarecidamente (editado) la lectura de esta entrevista (segunda parte aquí)a Paul Samuelson. Es una buena forma de ver qué tipo de intelectual público era samuelson, y también en parte qué tipo de economista. Lo dicho, echadle un vistazo.

Os pego algunos framentos:

Friedman had a solid MV = PQ doctrine from which he deviated very little all his life. By the way, he’s about as smart a guy as you’ll meet. He’s as persuasive as you hope not to meet. And to be candid, I should tell you that I stayed on good terms with Milton for more than 60 years. But I didn’t do it by telling him exactly everything I thought about him. He was a libertarian to the point of nuttiness. People thought he was joking, but he was against licensing surgeons and so forth. And when I went quarterly to the Federal Reserve meetings, and he was there, we agreed only twice in the course of the business cycle. .(…)

unlike someone like Milton, Greenspan was quite streetwise. But he was overconfident that he could handle anything that arose. I can remember when some of us — and I remember there were a lot of us in the late 90s — said you should do something about the stock bubble. And he kind of said, ‘look, reasonable men are putting their money into these things — who are we to second guess them?’ Well, reasonable men are not reasonable when you’re in the bubbles which have characterized capitalism since the beginning of time.

(…)

In my view behavioral science describes an extremely large and important part of the modern picture. However, whenever the economy turns in a very irrational way, that can create opportunities for very rational speculators to make a profit. So you can still get some approximation on the micro level of an efficient market. But there never has been a true macro efficient market. You just have to look at the record of economic history the ups and downs. Bubbles are self-generating.

This entry was posted on Sábado, Diciembre 19th, 2009 at 13:36 and is filed under ciencia recreativa . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.