To Recover, Emphasize Innovation
We should look to the new, not the old, for the path to a better economic future.
On the Newsstand:Financial Crisis
What’s Up With Kishore Mahbubani?
By many measures, Kishore Mahbubani is one of the leading public figures in Asia. He is currently the Dean of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy in Singapore, a man with an enormous intellect and an illustrious career that few can compare with. From January 2001 to May 2002, he held the position of president of the United ... Read More
Elizabeth Warren and Moral Hazard
HuffPo is reporting that Tim Geithner has expressed opposition to Elizabeth Warren’s nomination to head the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau — a department that she helped create. The article isn’t sourced well — it comes from an unnamed “source with knowledge of Geithner’s views” — and in response to the report Michael Barr, Assistant Treasury Secretary and one of the ... Read More
Weighing In: The Big Short
I just finished Michael Lewis’ wonderful book The Big Short. In it, Lewis recasts the financial crisis as a tale of heroism, where three rogue investors peer through the fog of moral recklessness and embarrassing incompetence that was the financial service sector circa 2008, and decide to short the market. They were right, of course, and they make away with ... Read More
The Quants Revisited
I reviewed Scott Patterson’s book The Quants for our summer issue, and I’d like to expand upon my conclusion. I wrote: The professors are the new barons of Wall Street, and they appear poised to accrue even more power. They are like “civil engineers … after a bridge collapse,” Patterson writes: they’re to blame, but they’re also needed for the ... Read More
John Dewey and Modern Economics
The New Republic has reprinted a wonderful Depression-era essay by John Dewey about the collapse of what he calls the “romanticism of business”: But it was just at this point that the new romanticism of business so cleverly came in. Human imagination had never before conceived anything so fantastic as the idea that every individual is actuated in all his desires ... Read More
At Least We’re Not Greece Yet
So today the European Union issued its long-awaited statement on whether or not it would bail out Greece. The answer was a clear and unambiguous signal to global financial markets: maybe-kinda-sorta-let’s-see-where-it-goes-from-here-and-then-we’ll-talk. For those who haven’t been keeping score at home, Greece is in quite a bit of financial trouble (much like California), due to government revenue dropping dramatically and spending ... Read More
The Sociology of Mankiw
The notion that economics can explain everything about everything (re: Freakonomics) is something that I’ve always regarded as silly and kinda gross. The basic economic model — the super-rational individual relentlessly seeking out his own material self-interest — is almost embarrassingly inadequate. If you want to deal with something like the Global Financial Crisis then, yes, you do have to ... Read More
