This episode of On Point with Tom Ashbrook is an interview with James Gleick author of the book The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood.

A quote from the prologue of the book might give you a hint as to why you might be interested in listening to the interview.

The bit is a fundamental particle of a different sort: not just tiny but abstract—a binary digit, a flip-flop, a yes-or-no. It is insubstantial, yet as scientists finally come to understand information, they wonder whether it may be primary: more fundamental than matter itself. They suggest that the bit is the irreducible kernel and that information forms the very core of existence.

After listening to the interview, you may want to read the book. You may also be interested in my previous blog post about an earlier work by James Gleick, Chaos: Making a New Science.

Thanks to RichardH for telling me about this episode of On Point.

Paul Krugman wrote the post The Great Experiment in Spending.

World War II was the great natural experiment in the effects of large increases in government spending, and as such has always served as an important positive example for those of us who favor an activist approach to a depressed economy.

As he pointed out at the end of the article:

I hear from various sources — and see in comments — that there’s an apparently concerted campaign to take this post and use it to accuse me of wanting a war. And the worst of it is, some people will believe it.

For the people who don’t understand the point of posting this information, you need to be more explicit.  The explicit point is that people are able to see the need for such spending to fight a war.  The  possibly unintended effect of this spending is to get people employed.  Those of us who, like Paul Krugman, point to the example of war as proving the theories of Keynesian Economics wonder why the economic deniers cannot see this clearly enough to put people back to work without having to wage war.

The war example points out that stimulative spending can get people back to work.  Wouldn’t it be more beneficial to society to recognize its power to stimulate the economy without the need for going to war as an excuse?  Imagine if all that productivity could be used for something to help humanity rather than just taking the fruits of that effort and blowing them up, not to mention the death and destruction caused by these explosions.

In mathematical circles the war example is called “an existence proof”.  There are many indirect ways to prove that something exists, but providing just a single example of the object in question is enough to prove that it exists.  People who use logic no longer say that the object has not been proven to exist after they have been shown an existing example of the object.

Counter to this idea is that the lack of an example is not proof that it does not exists.  It only means you may not have found the example yet. To erase all doubt, you only need to find one example.  That is why it is always easier to prove something exists than it is to prove that something does not exist.

When confronted with this evidence that stimulus can fix the unemployment problem, I have people ask whether or not you could really do this without a war.  I just cannot understand what is holding back their imagination after they have been brought so close to seeing the possibility.  The only thing that seems to be holding us back from stimulating the economy without a war is the inability of enough voters to imagine the possible.

Here is an email I just received. You may want to sign up as I have.