Hello all, First, let me introduce myself. My name is Andre Uratsuka Manoel and I am a Japanese-Portuguese-Spanish Brazilian from Sao Paulo, Brazil. I've been lurking here for a few weeks now, having met a few of the regulars of this list (including Udhay and Eugen Leitl) from other lists. I've always found their comments interesting and frequently insightful and so I am kind of following them here.
I own a hosting company in Brazil that is middle-sized for Brazilian standards. We also sometimes do software development. Due to a product my company created several years ago, that I tried to kill but was unable to, I also find myself frequently dealing with AI and cognitive sciences. My formation is in Engineering and Computer Science, but I am often interested in anything that you throw at me. On Sun, Feb 1, 2009 at 4:47 PM, J. Andrew Rogers <and...@ceruleansystems.com> wrote: > >> And the stimulus bill does make sense... > > No, it does not. Even the Keynesians (who are the economics equivalents of > creationists) have a hard time coming up with evidence, historical or > otherwise, that this "stimulus" will have a net economic benefit; it is the > Broken Window Fallacy writ large. I would disagree with you on the assertion about Keynesians. Actually, Keynesian theory is very much in the reality-based side of economics. I live in a country that lived under both camps and I have problems with the far left as much as I have problems with the far right, but the assertion on Keynesians seems to me to be very exagerated. Would you mind to explain that? On the stimulus package is necessary because it is better to throw the kitchen sink to restore positive expectations and a path to growth than to simply do nothing. The debt burden will end up high anyway because of deflation and deflationary expectations. The fight is against a depression, not a common recession, so to spend 10% of the GDP in preferably long-term infrastructure spending sounds better to me than to have the same 10% of the GDP chopped-off and then have nothing to show for it, but mass unemployment and reduced future potential GDP due to the destruction of infrastructure. Andre
