Remembrance in Spacetime: The Personification of Devaluation

Friday, February 19, 2010

The Personification of Devaluation

Posted by TheBigHenry • LABELS: American cultural literacy, It´s all relative, LANL, People (and Other Work), Remembrance

Related Link » It's nonsense to say the U.S. is ungovernable
“And then, of course, there's the filibuster, the newest liberal bete noire. "Don't blame Mr. Obama," writes Paul Krugman of the president's failures. "Blame our political culture instead. [...] And blame the filibuster, under which 41 senators can make the country ungovernable". Ungovernable, once again. Of course, just yesterday the same Paul Krugman was warning about "extremists" trying "to eliminate the filibuster" when Democrats used it systematically to block one Bush (43) judicial nomination after another. Back then, Democrats touted it as an indispensable check on overweening majority power. Well, it still is. Indeed, the Senate with its ponderous procedures and decentralized structure is serving precisely the function the Founders intended: as a brake on the passions of the House and a caution about precipitous transformative change.”
— Charles Krauthammer, February 19, 2010 (WaPo)

“To punish me for my contempt for authority, fate made me an authority myself.” — Albert Einstein

“There are two kinds of people in the world: Johnny von Neumann and the rest of us.” — This quote is attributed to Eugene Wigner, a Nobel Prize–winning physicist. John von Neumann, whom people called Johnny, was a brilliant mathematician and physicist who also made three fundamental contributions to economics.

I have it on good authority (a professor of economics at North Carolina State University) that Paul Krugman was deserving of his Nobel in Economics. It is my considered opinion, however, that the Nobel is undeserving of its own devaluation as a consequence of Krugman's machinations beyond his legitimate discipline of former expertise.

There seems to be a populist tendency, even among some Nobel Laureates, that the Nobel prize brings not only fame and fortune, but cart blanche to pontificate on any and all subjects great and small. But as insightful people have always understood, no matter what the nature of a given categorization, there is expertise and there is expertise. Moreover, expertise in a given field does not, in the vast majority of cases, a polymath make.

Johnny von Neumann was a bona fide polymath.

Mr. Krugman, you ain't no Johnny von Neumann.