In the blogosphere this week: sunshine and Vegas
Gambling Falkenblog has a post called: Why Do People Gamble? This includes the often-stated “problem” that the same people both: pay for insurance pay to gamble Maybe I’m being thick, but I don’t see...
View ArticleFinancial instability
Instability in the economy seems to be the zeitgeist of the week. Counter-intuitives Science Daily has a story on a mathematical model of extinction. Apparently a key finding is that the most effective...
View ArticleInflexible regime, inflexible prices
There is a deep connection between political mechanisms and economic mechanisms, at least according to Ajay Shah. Price flexibility Ajay Shah has a post called Jittery regimes fix prices. It is well...
View ArticleThe ecology of collateral haircuts
New Scientist has an editorial that points to “Complexity, Concentration and Contagion” out of the Bank of England. The paper describes some experiments with a network calibrated to look like the UK...
View ArticleSargent and Sims Nobel Prize
Thomas Sargent and Chris Sims won the 2011 Nobel Prize in economics. In a nutshell Sargent won for dynamic learning of economic agents and Sims won for championing vector autoregression and impulse...
View ArticleReview of “23 Things They Don’t Tell You about Capitalism” by Ha-Joon Chang
Executive Summary Simple but not simplistic explanations of several big ideas in economics. Surprises Thing 4 The washing machine has changed the world more than the internet has. We are used to...
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Governors and stability
Last night at the Royal Institution’s 14-10 club George Cooper gave a talk based on his book The Origin of Financial Crises. One of the analogies was between James Clerk Maxwell’s analysis of...
View ArticleTwo sentences from John Kay
A semantic confusion leads us to use the word market to describe both the process which puts food on our table and the activity of gambling in credit default swaps. Perhaps the “something nicer” which...
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Review of “The Origin of Financial Crises” by George Cooper
The subtitle is “Central banks, credit bubbles and the efficient market fallacy”. Executive summary This is much too important of a book to remain as obscure as it is. Besides, it is quite a fun read....
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Review of “Money, Blood and Revolution” by George Cooper
How Darwin and the doctor of King Charles I could turn economics into a science. Executive summary If you are confused by economics, then you should read this book. If you are not confused by...
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