Oh dear!

And to think he is opening on Broadway soon in Waiting for Godot.

He certainly has the bases covered, culture-wise!

Hey, @moodonia, is Godot's chair still there?

>> ^pyloricvalve:

That's a good summary of the Keynesian response. I guess my answer would be that even supposing the 10% unemployed were neatly then employed in building these weapons this would just be temporary. Later they will eventually all be unemployed again having wasted time and money in training for "fictional" work.

It seems to me that building real military spaceships would require real skills, real work, real factories, real technology, and there's no particular reason why if the demand for military spaceships evaporated, that they wouldn't just pivot into trying to serve a different market, like, say, commercial spacecraft.

That's the kind of adaptation free markets are supposed to be good at, right?

>> ^pyloricvalve:

Even if that work had some beneficial side effects, making unnatural economic growth will still be a net cost to the economy versus spending time finding real jobs. These are what they really 'should' in some sense be doing. To do this would surely be better unless you claim the 10% will continue unemployed permanently.

There's no reason to think additional idleness accelerates the process of someone finding their "right" job. That also presupposes that there's a right and a wrong job, and that there's inherently some economic damage being done by seeing someone doing real work producing real goods rather than having them stay idle and wait for Godot.

>> ^pyloricvalve:

These arguments can be seen in the two Hayek/Keynes rap videos. There are two inconsistent models of the economy. How can we decide which one is right? This argument is very old so I guess it's not that easy... Maybe look at long run growth in more and less interventionist countries? I suspect growth will be faster in the less interventionist nation.

Actually, it's not really a persisting argument amongst actual trained economists. The Austrian theory of economics has been invalidated time and time again by facts, but it lives on because it's a branch of economics that appeals to the ideological right.

That's not to say everything Hayek ever said was wrong, but the Hayekian idea that Keynesian fiscal and monetary policy will inevitably lead to utter ruin has definitely not been borne out by the facts. Also, no country that has followed a Hayekian prescription for recessions (keep money tight, and implement fiscal austerity) has ever done anything but deepen their recession and prolong their recovery.

No Man's Land (Bosnian: Ničija Zemlja) is a war drama that is set in the midst of the Bosnian war in 1993. The film is a parable with a tone of ironic black comedy. The film marked the debut of writer and director Danis Tanović. The film is a co-production between companies in Bosnia-Herzegovina, Slovenia, Italy, France, Belgium and the UK.

No Man's Land has been compared to The Good Soldier Švejk, Catch-22, M*A*S*H and Waiting for Godot for containing equal parts of irony and futility.

* Best Foreign Language Film, 2003 74th Annual Academy Awards
* Best Foreign Language Film, 2002 Golden Globe Award
* Best Screenplay, 2001 Cannes Film Festival

No Man's Land won Prix du scénario at the Cannes Film Festival, followed by numerous awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 2001, while in competition with French Amélie. Tanović was presented the Oscar by John Travolta and Sharon Stone. Briefly after, Tanović thanked everyone who worked with him on the film and supported its creation. He ended his acceptance speech by saying, "This is for my country".

In total, No Man's Land won 42 awards, including the Oscar for Best Foreign Film, the European Film Academy Award for Best Screenplay, the César Award for Best Debut in 2002 and the Golden Globe Award for Best Foreign Language Film in 2002. It is probably the most awarded first feature film in a history of film making.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0283509/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Man%27s_Land_%282001_film%29

I did love reading the first few weeks of comment threads on this site. A dag/James Waiting for Godot.