Tweet
There will be a repeat of a show called Fareed Zakaria GPS on CNN at 1:00pm in which Ken Rogoff will take part in a round table discussion. Conservatives may not enjoy this as much as Liberals because of those who take part (not referring to Ken Rogoff!).
-
-
Re: Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
September 8, 2016
Frederic Friedel has an article on the ChessBase site today entitled Ken Rogoff and the Curse of Cash.
http://en.chessbase.com/post/ken-rog...-curse-of-cash
Ken used to be a very strong chess grandmaster but abandoned chess to study economics. He gave a Munich lecture in November of 2014 on the curse of paper currency and now his book on the subject has come out.
These are the first two paragraphs of the article.
Munich lecture by Ken Rogoff
The Center for Economic Studies (CES), which is an independent institute within the Faculty of Economics of the University of Munich, invites visiting scholars to conduct their research in Munich, Germany, and to give a lecture series in return. In November 2014 their guest was Ken Rogoff, who received a prize and held a talk on a fairly controversial subject.
Here is the full lecture that Ken held in Munich at the end of 2014 at the ifo Institut – Leibniz-Institut für Wirtschaftsforschung an der Universität München e.V. It is a fascinating 42-minute talk you should reserve time to watch. The lecture is an early version of what Rogoff has laid out in his new book: that paper money has brought on a great deal of problems for humanity, and that possibly the time come for governments to start phasing out paper currency (cash), except perhaps for small-denomination notes, coins, or both. Miss this lecture at your own peril – with the publication of Curse of Cash the subject is going to become mainstream in a short time.
__________
Kenneth S. Rogoff, the Thomas D. Cabot Professor of Public Policy at Harvard University and former chief economist of the International Monetary Fund, is the coauthor of the New York Times bestseller This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton). He appears frequently in the national media and writes a monthly newspaper column that is syndicated in more than fifty countries. He lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Reposted September 26, 2016 -
Re: Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
September 26, 2016
From the English Chess Forum:
Monday 26th Sept: BBC Radio 4 - The greatest danger to the Global Economy is the slow down in China - quoting the (economist) Ken Rogoff.
My first B H Wood "bargain bail" CHESS bundle had an advert on the back cover, or near back inside page of another magazine, with a diagramed game score of a blitz game of K Rogoff v B Larsen, Zagreb (maybe Bled) 1970. A Sicilian Rauser, involving Bxf6, gxf6. White playing Bc4 - Bb3 - Black played an early Ne5 and Qb6, followed by the cheeky Rg8 -- the 0-0?? reply was met with Qxd4! (and 0-1).
Rogoff was normally much stronger, an exceptional junior. This was before his IM and GM titles.
Gary Kenworthy at:
http://www.ecforum.org.uk/viewtopic....189043#p189043Comment
-
Re: Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
Rogoff reminds me of Fine of whom, when he quit chess to become a Psychoanalyst some wag (Reinfield perhaps?) quipped something along the lines that this was a sad loss for both chess and psychoanalysis. Rogoff was clearly a loss for chess, but he is also the economist who published a paper claiming that a national "debt" ratio to GDP over 70% was bad and caused recessions, which paper turned out to be based on an incorrect formula entered into an Excel spreadsheet. When corrected the spreadsheet showed no such correlation. So a loss for chess and for Economics as well.Originally posted by Wayne Komer View Post
He believes that a government that has a monopoly on the creation of it's own currency can't pay back a debt denominated in that currency!Comment
-
Ken Rogoff (Economics, not Chess)
March 22, 2019
Fans of Ken Rogoff, the chessplayer and of Ken Rogoff, the economist, may be interested in his Harvard webpage at
https://scholar.harvard.edu/rogoff/pages/biography
The bit about chess:
CHESS
In many grade schools today, particularly in California and New York, chess is considered cool and on par with playing soccer. That sure wasn’t the case when I was growing up. (OK, it is true that chess was big among rock stars and movie stars at the time, and my best friend in chess, Kim Commons, could count people like Mel Brooks and the entire Jefferson Airplane band among his students.)
I learned the moves from my father at age 6, but took up the game in earnest when I got a chess set for my 13thbirthday. Although the epicenter of United States Chess has always been New York City, Rochester has a very good club that boasted a many-time New York State champion, Dr. Erich Marchand. There is no such thing as a pure prodigy in chess, and I worked very hard at it. By age 14, I was a U.S. master and New York State Open champion, and shortly thereafter became a senior master, the highest US national title.
By 16, I was U.S. under-21 champion and representing the United States in the World championships in Stockholm (picture). It was at this time that I first got to know the brilliant American player Bobby Fischer, who was shortly to become world champion, and is widely considered to be one of the couple greatest players of all time. Fischer actually wrote an article about one of my games from the 1969 US junior championship, one of the very few times he ever chose to write about someone else’s games. (Here is the article, from the 1969 issue of Boys Life.) Though it is not particularly a record chess players strive for or care about, my marathon game (from Stockholm 1969) against Britain’s Arthur Williams established a new record for the longest game ever played and was featured in the Guinness Book of World Records from 1971-73.
At that point, I decided to miss most of the last two years of high school, and move to Europe, which at the time had many more tournaments. I lived on my own, mainly in Yugoslavia (Zagrab and Sarajevo), supporting myself with my prize winnings. I supplemented my income by giving simultaneous exhibitions (where a master typically plays anywhere from 25-75 club players at the same time) and blindfold exhibitions (pictured), in which a master plays a smaller number of players (say 6-12) without any sight of the boards (my personal record was 26, in Rochester NY at age 15).
At 17, I played first board for the US team which won the world championship in Haifa, Israel (the world champion US team). I do not know what possessed me, but at age 18, I decided to completely buck the trend among my chess peers and apply to college. Happily, Yale University decided to ignore the many holes in my high school transcript, and admitted me to the class of 1975. Here I am as an 18-year old freshman at Yale against 20-year old Anatoly Karpov of the Soviet Union in the World Under 27 team championship in Mayaguez, Puerto Rico. (At this time, Karpov was on the cusp of his decade-long run as world chess champion, before eventually losing his title in a series of extremely closely contested matches with Garry Kasparov.) My game against Scotland’s David Levy (who was later to become one of the pioneers of computer chess) is featured in American Chess Masters From Morphy to Fischer by Arthur Bisguier and Andrew Solitis (MacMillan, 1974).
I became an International Master in 1974, and in 1978 I was finally awarded the title of International Grandmaster, the highest title in chess. (It is a life title; at the time, there were just over a hundred grandmasters in the world.) Back then, computer chess was in its infancy, but as MIT graduate student I had the privilege of playing a number of games against legendary hacker Richard Greenblatt’s chess program, which had already reached the level of a strong club player. As I write here, although I was able to beat it consistently, it was still a sobering glimpse into the future.
Because of conflicts with my studies, I ended up playing just over 300 tournament games lifetime, an unusually small number at the professional level where 100 – 150 games per year is the norm. Of these 300+ games, some 25 were featured in the weekly chess column of the New York Times during the period 1967-78. Here are some of them (there were losses too, but you will have to look at the microfilms on your own if you really want to see them). On the personal side, here is an article I wrote for Seventeen magazine, explaining a bit about the life of a chess player.
Even today, every once in awhile, my games are reprised in a chess magazine or newspaper. Here, for example, is a September 28, 2008, New York Times article, a March 2010 Chess Life article, and a February 2011 Financial Times article. And, of course, there are still articles that touch on my chess career without getting into actual games, for example The New York Times, July 4, 2010. For a more extensive interview on chess and a couple selected games see New in Chess, January 2011 (pdf). See also BBC World News "Economics and Chess", December 15, 2011, Chessbase "Ken Rogoff on Chess Addiction", December 15, 2011, and CNN Your Bottom Line "Solving the Financial Crisis: A Game of Chess", August 18, 2012.
In August 2012, I played a very casual exhibition rapid game against the world's highest-rated player, Magnus Carlsen of Norway. This game very temporarily ended a three-decade hiatus from playing any kind of chess. Here is an article (pdf) containing leading chess columnist grandmaster Lubosh Kavelek's notes. The game also featured in the Sunday October 14 New York Times Chess column by Dylan McClain (pdf).
I never met the great world champion Gary Kasparov on the chessboard, as my relatively brief career ended just as he was emerging. However, we did have a spirited debate at Oxford University on November 9, 2012, on whether technological stagnation is at the root of the post-2007 growth. My own views are summarized in my December 12 Project Syndicate column Innovation Crisis or Financial Crisis? And here is my take on the 2015 Hollywood film, "Pawn Sacrifice," on the life of Bobby Fischer, directed by Edward Zwick and starring Tobey Maguire. The Zwick film, of course, centers on the classic 1972 World Chess Championship between Fischer and Russian Boris Spassky.
In 2016, I had the honor of making the first move in game six of the world championship match between Norwegian Magnus Carlsen and Russian Sergey Karjakin, and I also did commentary in game 1 with Judith Polgar. Here is a January 2017 column for Chess Life magazine, My Best Move, where I chose a game from first board of the 1972 world under-26 team championship in Graz, Austria, where my opponent was then leading Russian grandmaster Vladimir Tukmakov, who is still very much involved with chess and very recently has started working with rising superstar Wesley So.
For some of my reflections on the state of chess today, see the March 23, 2018 Chessbase interview and December 4, 2018 CNBC Squawkbox.
Comment
Comment