Krugman and Animal Habitat Models

[John Gelles <jjgelles@xxxxxxxx>]

		OBJECTIVE ECONOMIC MODELS OF HOMES, TOWNS
		CITIES, NATIONS AND WORLD MARKETS, THAT
		AVOID ALL POLICY FOUNDATION

	Although policy is my middle name **, I do value PKT
	for its academic and technical discussions on occasion.
	     **(Not "policy" as a synonym for the numbers racket
	in NYC, but "policy" as in "wonk"),

	Paul Krugman published a book in 1995; and Barkley
	Rosser has reviewed it and offered that review to
	PKTrs.  The review makes me eager to learn more of
	PKTrs views on the above title -- (assuming it can be
	translated into valid academic language.)

	From Barkley's review I gather there is economic
	research that sees us all from an orbiting spaceship
	on board which are aliens with no knowledge of our
	language.  They study from there, with powerful
	lenses, prairie dog downs, ants, bees, even
	colonies of earth's bacteria.  They have all the
	mathematical skills of our best modelers.

	And they study human beings in isolated homes,
	towns, cities, regions, nations and world markets,
	to predict future development and future decline.
	
	Although the behavior of species below our own
	includes no money, politics or religion, it does
	include competition, privation, savagery, advance
	and decline.  So policy wonks cannot reject whole-
	sale models of economic development that avoid all
	policy considerations and seek a kind of object-
	ivity found in zoology.

	Of what interest are such models to PKT?  It seems
	at first blush that most of these models predict
	exactly what PKT seeks to modify, if only slightly
	in some cases, to arrive at civilization.

	     John Gelles     -     jjgelles@xxxxxxxx

	P.S.  Rosser's review is also concerned with
	the an accurate genealogy of economic thought
	as it is preserved by "mention" of where you got
	ideas that emerge when you write them down.
	It must be incumbent on researchers who would be
	viewed in history as discoverers to mention on
	whose shoulders they are standing, and mention
	as well, if possible, others who worked parallel
	but not underneath them.  Ah for the day when this
	thankless task of "mentioning" will be performed
	for researchers by agent software that tracks and
	reports everything they read or hear and every
	parallel effort with which they compete.  Then
	honor may be bestowed fairly, like wealth is among
	market players NOT.