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Comment by wjn0 | Hacker News Reader

I don't really see how "it doesn't serve any socially useful function" yields the statement "it should be outlawed." The former applies to many, many things that are still legal. Disappointing to hear such weak reasoning from someone who is lauded as one of the greatest minds of our time. I can't watch the video, so perhaps that particular statement lacks some context.

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When Stieglitz said:

  it doesn't serve any socially useful function

he was saying that in relation to:

  bitcoin is successful only because of its potential
  for circumvention, lack of oversight

So what he's really saying is that circumvention and lack of oversight are not socially useful functions. I'm no fan of bitcoin and I'm a huge Stieglitz fan but I'm going to disagree with him there. Privacy (lack of oversight) is a socially useful function. However, bitcoin only gives the appearance of privacy while giving the reality of lack of oversight.

Please don’t use codeblocks for quotes. Can’t read them on mobile.

They scroll on mobile devices... just swipe your finger.

Which is difficult, and in no way preferable to having them already word-wrapped.

> who is lauded as one of the greatest minds of our time.

Says who, really? A lot of Economics Nobel Prize Winners have been chosen because of their "compatibility" with modern politics, not for the merit of their work.

The economics prize wasn't even one of the orginal prizes that Nobel created. It was almost definitely invented to justify Western political ideology. I believe the other prizes largely serve a similar purpose these days too, just think of that Obama peace prize.

Please explain to me how the 2017 Nobel Prize for "developing cryo-electron microscopy for the high-resolution structure determination of biomolecules in solution" is meant to "justify Western political ideology." Or maybe the one for "decisive contributions to the LIGO detector and the observation of gravitational waves is easier." Or maybe "their discoveries of molecular mechanisms controlling the circadian rhythm."

Hard sciences are not without politicisation either. Just look at this wiki entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies#Phys...

There's definitely a trend of scientists from e.g. Russia claiming to have been the originators of ideas that others got prizes for.

Academia in general tends to be very Western-centric and so these kinds of issues - and all the other problems with Western cultural hegemony (patriarchy, racism etc.) - are pervasive in all facets of it.

Right, because non-western society has no racism or patriarchy. It's all just enlightenment and peace in the east.

While you certainly have a point, I never suggested that this wasn't the case. Just that these problems are not absent from certain institutions which many of us perceive as being "objective".

Did you even read the comment you are responding to? It was about the Nobel in _economics_

Yes, I read the comment. It said:

> I believe the other prizes largely serve a similar purpose these days too, just think of that Obama peace prize.

It was referring to the other Nobel prizes explicitly in that statement, and it was to that point that I was retorting.

Well the reference was pretty clearly made to mention non-scientific prizes, since he gave as an example the Peace Nobel Prize.

But isn't that level of ideological punditry what Stiglitz's is today all about?

Ideological punditry doesn't serve a useful purpose, so it should be outlawed.

Is he like the Ann Coulter of Economics/Finance? Genuine question.

I don't even hold it against him. He probably just realized that he can have a much more entertaining life (more speeches, more books sold, etc) by being more provocative and telling the New Yorker readers how wholesome their views are. I would myself certainly prefer that over a life spend between teaching Undergrads another decade the same models and fumble with statistics long enough to write another paper that explains the world.

what does it mean to be "the ann coulter of economics"? do you mean having a propensity to make inflammatory comments?

(wikipedia claims he supports the british Labour Party, so i'd wager their politics are quite different.)

I wouldn't go that far, though it's sort of a flawed analogy for comparison.

Economics generally is a field where lots of people hold on to their prior beliefs, and those beliefs are difficult to change, even in the face of new evidence and data. Even though most economists agree with each other about the basic sort of stuff that you learn in undergraduate classes, there's lots of disagreement when it comes to broader, value-judgement type questions. There's also a lot of disagreement about what data means that is difficult to resolve with more studies, and studies are hard because we can't do double-blind control trials of macroeconomic policy.

So, it's not necessarily unusual for economists to express crackpot-sounding opinions on matters of public interest without actually being crackpots within their field. Stiglitz has some weird ideas (I seem to remember he suggested the government should pay people to dig ditches and fill them back in to get out of the recession), and they may even be wrong (I myself don't really agree with him), but he's not a guy who just says stuff out of nowhere to provoke people like Ann Coulter.

His argument seems willfully ignorant, at best.

It's unfortunate that Stiglitz made such a lazy proclamation. First of all, BTC can be used with sufficient anonymity as to frustrate any meaningful enforcement mechanisms. But if we stipulate the notion of a successful prohibition of BTC, what about all the other cryptocurrencies out there? Should we ban them, too? If so, it seems to me that we'd have to ban most of technologies that underpin the modern internet.

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