Random Musings

As everyone ponders why could we not have seen the financial crisis one line of thought is can physics help us and so the rise of the new field called econophysics - the use of tools of physics in economics. However Rick Bookstaber thinks no . Nice post around this newest avataar. Excerpts " during an earthquake things shake around and fall, and during a market crisis things shake around and fall. Seismology predicts the former, so why not the latter? " "...fledgling discipline of econophysics. The reason it persists is first of all, there are not many jobs for physicist in physics, and most of finance is child’s play once you have gone through the rigors of a physics degree, so a lot of physicists end up in finance." :-) " while physics can generate useful models if there is well-parameterized uncertainty, where we know the distribution of the randomness, it becomes less useful if the uncertainty is fuzzy and ill-defined, what is called Knightian uncertainty....

Nice talk by Michael Sandel on markets and morality. And how the 2008 subprime crisis illustrates our drift from a market economy to a market society i.e everything is a market even if it is at the expense of others... Some of the good things in life are corrupted or degraded if we turn them into market commodities. So when we decide when to use markets, it’s not enough to think about efficiency. It’s not even enough to think about market freedom. We also have to decide how to value the goods in question, be they health, education, national defense, criminal justice, environmental protection, and so on. These are moral and political questions, not merely economic ones. And to decide them democratically we have to debate them, case by case, just as we have begun to do here, the moral meaning of these goods and the proper way of valuing them. This is the debate that we didn’t have in the age of market triumphalism. And as a result, without quite realizing it, without ever deciding to do...

How many of these you still see today... a lot Ponzi from Strike Anywhere on Vimeo .