Our Epistemological Depression — The American, A Magazine of Ideas

Levy Rivers's personal annotations on this page

Oldude59 bookmarked on 2009-04-04 economy crisis bailout

This time, too, there is an underlying commodity bubble, namely in housing. But it has had much wider ramifications, because financial institutions have become interconnected in two unprecedented ways. First, once distinct financial services became interconnected: banking, credit, insurance, and the trading of derivatives have become interlinked because they are conducted by the same companies. Second, financial institutions are more connected across national borders, so that there are entities across the globe that invested in toxic American-made instruments and are suffering as a result (including municipalities in Norway that invested tax revenues in American collateralized debt obligations, now worth 15 percent of their face value).
There were governmental errors: monetary policy that was too loose; government monitoring agencies that were too lax; and government policies specifically intended to encourage home ownership among African-Americans and Hispanics that had the unintended but quite anticipatable effect of extending mortgages to those who lacked the ability to repay them. There were perverse alignments of market incentives, incentives that put personal interests at odds with corporate interests, and corporate interests at odds with the public interest. There were principal-agent problem within firms, where traders were remunerated with bonuses for selling collateralized debt obligations without regard to the long-run viability of the underlying assets. Rating agencies were corrupted because they were paid by the sellers of the goods they rated, offering unreliable evaluations that redounded against the purchasers of mortgage-backed securities. Large profits were made by companies that packaged and sold mortgages and mortgage-backed securities without needing to be concerned with their ultimate viability.
These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.)

This link has been bookmarked by 30 people . It was first bookmarked on 06 Feb 2009, by Morris Pelzel.

13 Jul 09

David Lee
18 Apr 09

ahughes2 Hughes
07 Apr 09

Robert Lent
1. performance based pay led to extremes (contrast with union managed pay)
- Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know
- That would mean avoiding firms that are “too complex to manage”
- 2 more annotations...
- - economic actors believe that other economic actors don’t know what they’re doing
  - a system that creates bad assets because of misaligned incentives and the fog created by opacity and pseudo-objectivity
05 Apr 09

Bill H
Post
- For the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand.
- it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances.
04 Apr 09

Jerry Monaco
- or the errors of ideological tone made during the 1930s,
- Unfortunately, initial conditions are too different from case to case to simply apply some historical template that would permit us to fully understand what is currently happening, let alone how to deal with it. Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past.
Rick Deitchman
economics crisis
Levy Rivers
economy crisis bailout
- This time, too, there is an underlying commodity bubble, namely in housing. But it has had much wider ramifications, because financial institutions have become interconnected in two unprecedented ways. First, once distinct financial services became interconnected: banking, credit, insurance, and the trading of derivatives have become interlinked because they are conducted by the same companies. Second, financial institutions are more connected across national borders, so that there are entities across the globe that invested in toxic American-made instruments and are suffering as a result (including municipalities in Norway that invested tax revenues in American collateralized debt obligations, now worth 15 percent of their face value).
- There were governmental errors: monetary policy that was too loose; government monitoring agencies that were too lax; and government policies specifically intended to encourage home ownership among African-Americans and Hispanics that had the unintended but quite anticipatable effect of extending mortgages to those who lacked the ability to repay them. There were perverse alignments of market incentives, incentives that put personal interests at odds with corporate interests, and corporate interests at odds with the public interest. There were principal-agent problem within firms, where traders were remunerated with bonuses for selling collateralized debt obligations without regard to the long-run viability of the underlying assets. Rating agencies were corrupted because they were paid by the sellers of the goods they rated, offering unreliable evaluations that redounded against the purchasers of mortgage-backed securities. Large profits were made by companies that packaged and sold mortgages and mortgage-backed securities without needing to be concerned with their ultimate viability.
- 1 more annotations...
- - These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.)
Manuel Rodriguez
Economics
03 Apr 09

Michael Feher
gerassimos arsenis
Muller financial crisis ethics
Dewey Rochester
Gary Myers
more economic data
Martha Platt
2009
- These factors have received a good deal of attention. But they are not the whole story, and certainly not the most original part of the predicament. What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.) That is, a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing. Most heads of ailing or deceased financial institutions did not comprehend the degree of risk and exposure entailed by the dealings of their underlings—and many investors, including municipalities and pension funds, bought financial instruments without understanding the risks involved. We should keep this in mind when we chastise government agencies such as the SEC for failing to monitor what was going on. If the leading executives of financial firms failed to understand what was taking place, how could we expect government regulators to do so? The financial system created a fog so thick that even its captains could not navigate it.
- A good deal of our current economic travails can be traced to this increasing valuation of purportedly objective criteria, so denoted because they can be expressed and manipulated in mathematical form by people who may be skilled at such manipulation but who lack “concrete” knowledge or experience of the things being made or traded. As Niall Ferguson has put it, “Those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.” The paradigm—and the precursor of our current crisis—was the rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management, founded by two of the fathers of quantitative options financing, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton. Knowing a great deal of math, but not very much history, they developed trading models that radically underestimated the risk entailed in their financial speculation, leading to a dramatic collapse of the company in the summer of 1998. But the phenomenon is more widespread. Attaching a number creates a belief that the information is more solid than is actually the case. That is what I mean by “pseudo-objectivity.” In each case, it is a response to what (to recoin a phrase) one might call alienation from the means of production, the attempt to substitute abstract and quantitative knowledge for concrete and qualitative knowledge.
Rushdy Ahmad
Brooks writes about this article in a NYTimes Oped: "Jerry Z. Muller wrote an indispensable version of the stupidity narrative in an essay called “Our Epistemological Depression” in The American magazine. What’s new about this crisis, he writes, is the central role of “opacity and pseudo-objectivity.” Banks got too big to manage. Instruments got too complex to understand. Too many people were good at math but ignorant of history."
Brian Gaerity
As this crisis matures, we are starting to see more thoughtful and useful meditations on its origins. The views expressed in this essay I wholeheartedly endorse. I have believed since the beginning that the crisis resulted primarily from opacity, not greed or underzealous regulators. Muller's thesis of "financial episemology" is a great insight that enriches our understanding not only of this crisis but of capitalism and humanity, and is a sound basis for reestablishing rules to prevent overly complex, large and interrelated financial institutions.
Mark Fichman
Richard Wanek
Economy
09 Feb 09

Peter Klausner
08 Feb 09

wolf hesse
economics finance philosophy psychology opinion essay capitalism recession
07 Feb 09

Mark Alexander
recession epistemological-depression
JimC Rast
subprime mortgage crisis opacity diversity
06 Feb 09

Chris Lott
"This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression. (Epistemology is the branch of philosophy that deals with the nature and limits of knowledge, with how we know what we think we know.) That is, a large role was played by the failure of the private and corporate actors to understand what they were doing."

economics politics epistemology artlinks
Morris Pelzel
finance
- the history of socialism is one of fundamental failure, a failure to provide incentives and an inability to coordinate information about supply and effective demand. The history of capitalism, by contrast, is the history of dialectical failure: it is a history of the creation of new institutions and practices that may be successful, even transformative for a while, but which eventually prove dysfunctional, either because their intrinsic weaknesses become more evident over time or because of a change in external circumstances.
- Instead of explaining why this recession (or depression) is just like the others, we should attend to what is new and especially problematic about the current downturn and why it may not respond to policies modeled on avoiding the errors of the past.
- 11 more annotations...
- - Major recessions typically begin with a rapid change of prices in the market for some asset or commodity; that price decline then affects financial institutions (banks), leading to a decline in the availability of credit, and then to a decline in commercial activity. Usually, then, localized crises in capitalist societies are reflected in the financial sector. When the crisis reaches the financial sector, it becomes a more general crisis.
  - once distinct financial services became interconnected: banking, credit, insurance, and the trading of derivatives have become interlinked because they are conducted by the same companies
  - financial institutions are more connected across national borders
  - intermediation of risk reduces the incentives for adequate risk management: so long as risk is intermediated, from a mortgage loan broker to a commercial bank to an investment bank to an investor, there is really no incentive, at each stage of the game, to have adequate risk-managing policies in place.
  - What seems most novel is the role of opacity and pseudo-objectivity. This may be our first epistemologically-driven depression.
  - There was a belief in the financial sector that diversification of assets was a substitute for due diligence on each asset, so that if one bundled enough assets together, one didn’t have to know much about the assets themselves. The creation of securities based on a pool of diverse assets (mortgage loans, student loans, credit card receivables, etc.) meant that when markets declined radically, it became impossible to determine an accurate price for the security.
  - the more areas you are involved in, the less you know about them, and the more subject you are to unexpected and unanticipated shocks, especially when the assets decline in tandem.
  - A good deal of our current economic travails can be traced to this increasing valuation of purportedly objective criteria, so denoted because they can be expressed and manipulated in mathematical form by people who may be skilled at such manipulation but who lack “concrete” knowledge or experience of the things being made or traded. As Niall Ferguson has put it, “Those whom the gods want to destroy they first teach math.” The paradigm—and the precursor of our current crisis—was the rise and fall of Long Term Capital Management, founded by two of the fathers of quantitative options financing, Myron Scholes and Robert C. Merton. Knowing a great deal of math, but not very much history, they developed trading models that radically underestimated the risk entailed in their financial speculation, leading to a dramatic collapse of the company in the summer of 1998. But the phenomenon is more widespread. Attaching a number creates a belief that the information is more solid than is actually the case. That is what I mean by “pseudo-objectivity.” In each case, it is a response to what (to recoin a phrase) one might call alienation from the means of production, the attempt to substitute abstract and quantitative knowledge for concrete and qualitative knowledge.
  - shibboleth of linking pay to performance, which put a premium on schemes that purported to measure performance. This tended to produce “hard” numbers that seemed reliable but were not. It created tremendous incentives for CEOs, executives, and traders to devote their creative energies to gaming the metrics, i.e. into coming up with schemes that purported to demonstrate productivity or profit by massaging the data, or by underinvesting in maintenance and human capital formation to boost quarterly earnings or their equivalents.
  - reformulation of something like the Glass-Steagall Act, which would separate savings banks, investment banks, insurance and brokerage from one another.
  - crisis of financial epistemology
29 Jan 09

Manny C
economics psychology philosophy