You say you have 'consideration for my tender feelings'. If so, why not preface your remarks with some emollient collocation or merely courteous form of words?



Your answer may be- quite properly- that if a flabby person exposes a flabby portion of their anatomy which it is normative to hide, then a swift kick in the nether regions is socially salutary- tender feelings be damned, there's such a thing as public decency I'll have you know.



However, if this be your- perfectly reasonable- view, it is at Stiglitz you must direct your ire.



I have not equated 'real wages' with 'standards of living' because, unlike Stiglitz, I consider Arrow-Debreu to be nonsense. Knightian Uncertainty alone has salience- unless Evolution is nonsense and we are all the meat puppets of an Occassionalist- and idiotic- God. Hannan Consistency- i.e. regret minimization- is what constitutes Econ as other than an availability cascade or specious type of rhetoric.



Saudi wealth of any kind would be non-existent if Ibn Saud hadn't been one smart dude. A British official- the father of the spy Kim Philby- defected to the founder of the Saudi State and made the Brits pay him a subsidy while he struck a very profitable deal with the Americans.



I've known a whole bunch of very very smart people- some of whom Stiglitz himself praised and helped into positions of influence- who, at the end of the day, realised that the guys in the robes outsmarted them completely. Why? Those guys were trained in Shapley Value mental arithmetic! They were applied Game theorists avant la lettre!



It is tempting to say that peeps wot iz rich are stooopid coz guys like u & me gotta fix their toilets or audit their holdings etc. But, when from generation to generation them guys stay mega-rich and our sons, despite getting into the best schools, can't even get married and own a house and start a family at the same age as we did ourselves, then, surely, we've got to admit that our faith in the Stiglitzs of our intellectual infancy was misplaced.



Lovely man. A true mensch. I personally gotta lot of love for Ackerloff & his wife Janet Yellen. Indeed, I love them all. But Aumann is my Rabbi. We need alethic public signals so as to establish better correlated equilibria.



That's where Stiglitz falls down. Even if, by some arbitrary intervention of Divine Providence, he wasn't making the most foolish policy prescription ever, still it would be a halakah vein morin kein. Knowledge of this jurisprudence forbids your applying it.