Clueless winner of phony Nobel Prize pins tail on donkey

A comment on:

   Nobel-winning economist warns: Rising inequality a problem

         By John Christoffersen, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
         http://www.telegram.com/article/20131015/NEWS/310149727
..........................

Alfred Nobel specified that no new categories of prizes would be added to the ones he established. One field set up a prize named after Nobel anyway, Economics. After firing large numbers of economics professors in the '50's, just about everyone that made any sense, the survivors and their patrons urgently needed to do something to make themselves and their profession look smart and important.

This article about Robert Shiller caught my attention with its headlining of Schiller's claim that rising inequality is a problem. Does he mean that it's not just a moral or political problem but an economic one? Reading this article I see no indication that he has a clue as to why that would be so or how he came to that conclusion.

Worse, it appears that Shiller is clueless about pretty much everything - except maybe "empirical analysis of asset prices" - and honestly, I'd take a good look under the hood before I bought even that from him. Perhaps this article misrepresents him, but from it he seems blissfully unaware that our financial system and the dollar itself are teetering at the edge of the abyss, discounting the danger posed by the US flirting with a default on the debt.  He suggests the stock market (being kept alive by the Fed openly pumping a trillion dollars a year of funny money into it) is "moderately overpriced" but "no big deal".

And he can say - apparently with a straight face - that "regulated properly, finance is 'at the core of our civilization'."

But now he can make inane and ignorant pronouncements like this and get taken seriously - because he is a Nobel Laureate, just like President Obama!