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Blind resentment of things as they were was thereby given principle, reason, and eschatological force, and directed to definite political goals
–Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology (1962)
Imagine a time before writing, when you would learn things from your hands and your elders. Spoken words were helpful, but the root and branch of education was one’s experience with things, not abstractions. Timothy Ferris fashioned exactly this idyllic world in Wired Magazine this week and enlisted the vanguard of scientists and engineers to invoke the old path of learning and bring us back to interrogating nature directly.
What, then, drove society off course? Read the rest of this entry »
So corporate profits do not drive economic growth — they’re just restless sums of surplus capital, ready to flood speculative markets at home and abroad. In the 1920s, they inflated the stock market bubble, and then caused the Great Crash. Since the Reagan revolution, these superfluous profits have fed corporate mergers and takeovers, driven the dot-com craze, financed the “shadow banking” system of hedge funds and securitized investment vehicles, fueled monetary meltdowns in every hemisphere and inflated the housing bubble.
–Professor James Livingston, Rutgers: via NYT
He got it right. Des Lachman put a stake down and predicted that Greece would default in May 2010. Today, it did.
Though some had talked about it, few were willing to stake their reputation on the probability of a Greek default. Lachman said, in testimony to a Joint Economic Committee of the Congress, “There is every prospect that within the next twelve to eighteen months Greece will default on its US$420 billion in sovereign debt.” Fifteen months later, the ECB arrived at a debt accord that would give holders of sovereign Greek debt a 50% haircut – more or less, a technical default. Read the rest of this entry »
optimism is highly valued; people and companies reward the providers of misleading information more than they reward truth tellers. An unbiased appreciation of uncertainty is a cornerstone of rationality — but it isn’t what organizations want. Extreme uncertainty is paralyzing under dangerous circumstances, and the admission that one is merely guessing is especially unacceptable when the stakes are high. Acting on pretended knowledge is often the preferred approach.
–Daniel Kahneman: via Bloomberg
overconfident professionals sincerely believe they have expertise, act as experts and look like experts. You will have to struggle to remind yourself that they may be in the grip of an illusion.
–Daniel Kahneman: via NYT
You’re a JD candidate. You expect it will provide for a predictable and lucrative career despite the massive price tag. However, law school hardly looks like the ticket it once was. With law firms shrinking around the country, clients insisting on flat rates, and a new wave of highly sophisticated outsourcers, both domestic and international, not only are there fewer jobs, those that do emerge are less stable and less remunerative. Whoops!
Then the news cycle begins. Expert networks, once an obscure service to a niche industry, find themselves in the middle of a string of insider trading investigations. Read the rest of this entry »
remembering the fact that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose
…your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life
–Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement, 2005
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law
Tho’ Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shriek’d against his creed
In memoriam – Tennyson
This is a story about outrage in the media. It starts with Rick Santelli, the on-air editor for CNBC’s business news, whose outrage would become the stuff of tea party legend. And it finishes with Alessio Rastani, an otherwise unknown “trader,” recently invited to share his thoughts with the BBC, whose stark admission to the profit-motive stumped his interviewer and outraged the lookers-on.
Where Santelli clothed his remarks in morality, Rastani appeared unconcerned with right and wrong – only profit and loss. They may appear worlds apart, but they were in fact two sides of the same view – one that defines competition as the organizing principle of society and markets. Read the rest of this entry »
