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10 Aug 09

Lucas roundtable: Ask the right questions | Free exchange | Economist.com

But all the tools in the world are useless if we lack the imagination needed to build the right models. Models are built to answer specific questions.

www.economist.com/...s_roundtable_ask_the_right.cfm - Preview

economics macroeconomic recession failure model questions modeling

  • We need to take a close look at how the sociology of our profession led to an outcome where people were made to feel embarrassed for even asking certain types of questions. People will always be passionate in defense of their life's work, so it's not the rhetoric itself that is of concern, the problem comes when factors such as ideology or control of journals and other outlets for the dissemination of research stand in the way of promising alternative lines of inquiry.

    I don't know for sure the extent to which the ability of a small number of people in the field to control the academic discourse led to a concentration of power that stood in the way of alternative lines of investigation, or the extent to which the ideology that markets prices always tend to move toward their long-run equilibrium values caused us to ignore voices that foresaw the developing bubble and coming crisis. But something caused most of us to ask the wrong questions, and to dismiss the people who got it right, and I think one of our first orders of business is to understand how and why that happened.

Filling the Financial Regulatory Void « The Baseline Scenario

I would argue that the fundamental flaw in financial regulation is that it is based on the assumption that regulators are not self-interested individuals like the rest of us. We think about regulation only in terms of how to engineer the incentives of the regulated and ignore the fact that regulators themselves rarely have a stake in doing their job well, which in any other occupation would limit the motivation and types of individuals a position attracts.

baselinescenario.com/...-the-financial-regulatory-void - Preview

government regulation regulatory-capture reform failure banking finance financial-services incentives

  • It is unlikely that consumers will ever hold much influence over the realities of the financial regulatory process because they are not organized in comparison to the financial industry, which concentrates significant resources in the creation of inefficient regulators. By and large, consumers are not well-informed about what they have at stake in the regulatory process and, even if they were, that would not be the sole determinant of how they define themselves politically.


    Adding another layer of guards to guard the existing guards ultimately results in an infinite regress. I do not think it is cynical to suggest that, absent an actual paradigm shift with respect to accountability in the financial industry, we are just going to have more of the rent-seeking that has gone on to date and the economic calamities that ensue. For my part, I would propose opening up financial regulation to a small group of social entrepreneurs. Let people establish for-profit companies that can compete for government contracts to stress test the holdings of financial institutions independently and audit their records.

Op-Ed Columnist - Is Obama Punking Us? - NYTimes.com

  • Yet there is real reason for longer-term worry in the form of a persistent, anecdotal drift toward disillusionment among some of the president’s supporters. And not merely those on the left. This concern was perhaps best articulated by an Obama voter, a real estate agent in Virginia, featured on the front page of The Washington Post last week. “Nothing’s changed for the common guy,” she said. “I feel like I’ve been punked.” She cited in particular the billions of dollars in bailouts given to banks that still “act like they’re broke.”
  • As Democrats have pointed out, the angry hecklers disrupting town-hall meetings convened by members of Congress are not always ordinary citizens engaging in spontaneous grass-roots protests or even G.O.P. operatives, but proxies for corporate lobbyists. One group facilitating the screamers is FreedomWorks, which is run by the former Congressman Dick Armey, now a lobbyist at the DLA Piper law firm. Medicines Company, a global pharmaceutical business, has paid DLA Piper more than $6 million in lobbying fees in the five years Armey has worked there.
09 Aug 09

Sustainability : The Book of Trogool

When even scholars wanting to do the right thing and hand off their work to a responsible party cannot find anywhere to go, when enabling digital communication and the preservation of its results is an altruistic act in libraries instead of the bedrock of our mission, when worthy digital projects die because we in libraries do not notice and reach out to them, when we ourselves can't see our way clear to sustaining digital materials… we have a serious systemic problem.

scienceblogs.com/...sustainability.php - Preview

digital-library data-curation archive repository sustainability failure memory science

Overcoming Bias : How Wrong Can We Be?

This all seems to add up to a consistent expert consensus that humans quite often, perhaps even usually, just don’t know why they do what they do. And this is extremely disturbing, as it calls into question our own opinions about why we do what we do.

www.overcomingbias.com/...how-wrong-can-we-be.html - Preview

reason reasoning bias model economics failure cognitive-science mistakes cognition

  •   Thus the practice of academic economics implicitly accepts that people often, perhaps even usually, do things for reasons other than the reasons they give.


    Consider also that something similar holds in sales and marketing.  The rationale a marketer gives for why an ad or other product strategy works usually differs quite a bit from the reasons people give for why they like an ad or a product.  Similarly, the reasons dating and other relation consultants give for why their suggested strategies help people like or respect you are often quite at odds with the reasons people give for why they like or respect others.

22 Jul 09

Head in the Clouds | Open The Future | Fast Company

Cloud computing fails because it centralizes instead of creating resilience.

www.fastcompany.com/...head-clouds - Preview

cloud computing centralization failure resilience

21 Jul 09

Stumbling and Mumbling: Macroeconomics & the black box

Macroeconomics has traditionally ignored the inner workings of all companies. It has seen non-financial firms as mere production functions, transforming inputs into output in a stable (and smoothly differentiable) way. Regarding banks as black boxes for converting savings into loans is a natural consequence of paying insufficient heed to institutions.

stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/...roeconomics-the-black-box.html - Preview

economics macroeconomic failure institutions

  • Herein, though, lies a quirk of history. There’s one significant figure who cautioned against this error - Marx. In Capital (ch 6) he criticized orthodox economists for ignoring “the hidden abode of production.”
    But mainstream economists - including Keynes - ignored him. They did so, in large part, because they were not especially interested in Marx’s question of how income was distributed between profits and wages.
    So, could it be that a by-product of a lack of interest in this question has been “black box” thinking that’s proven very costly for mainstream economics? The amazing thing is that macroeconomics managed so well for so long with this omission.







19 Jul 09

The Drum Beat of a New Nation | Corrente

The truths outlined here: that a cold peace has descended, the mandate of 2008 is expended, and the results are a pathetic failure of wit, wisdom, and will -- stand by themselves. That the coalition of catastrophe is gathering, preaching burn and churn as its new policy -- burn carbon, churn land --- is evident to anyone who can read Dick Morris' new book, or watch MSNBC. Hooverism hovers close. Don't believe me, believe Paul Krugman.

www.correntewire.com/drum_beat_new_nation - Preview

politics failure progressive republicans democrats business-as-usual change about(BarackObama) future

08 Jul 09

Jonathan Wolff: Greed is good (sometimes); but regulation is better | Education | The Guardian

But suppose you are buying meat that won't be supplied for 20 years? Still want to rely on the greed of the butcher? Thought not. By the time you have found out if he is cheating you, it will be too late to switch supplier. When there is a substantial time lag between purchase and consumption, as there is for pensions, savings schemes and sub-prime debt, the market loses its magic and the purchaser is vulnerable.

www.guardian.co.uk/...jonathan-wolff-recession-marx - Preview

market-failure markets free-markets time failure capitalism

03 Jul 09

How the Mighty Fall: A Primer on the Warning Signs - BusinessWeek

excerpt from book by Jim Collins - How the Mighty Fall and why Some Companies Never Give In

www.businessweek.com/...b4132026786379.htm - Preview

business success failure

29 Jun 09

America’s Corporate Shell Game « Jon Taplin’s Blog

They make no attempt to hide the bad news for the U.S. Economy–“return on assets for U.S. companies has steadily fallen to almost one quarter of 1965 levels,at the same time that we have seen continued, albeit much more modest, improvements in labor productivity.” The meaning of this is staggering–any productivity gains from the digital revolution have been more than wiped out by our corporate (as well as personal) addiction to debt.

jontaplin.com/...americas-corporate-shell-game - Preview

economics investment debt leverage failure trends

25 Jun 09

Joe Bageant: My union brothers are lazy, complacent

The point I'm making here, Mr. Bageant, is that some of the reason the middle class worker is going downhill is due to bad memory and laziness. Yes, laziness. They just want to go home after work and sit in front of the TV. The idea of supporting their local union, ONE NIGHT A MONTH, is unthinkable.

www.joebageant.com/...thers-are-lazy-complacent.html - Preview

unions labor middle-class failure economics work money

23 Apr 09

The Hearing - Timothy Geithner Doesn't Get It

Geithner’s concerns reveal that his focus is not on the health of the economy; not on inflation; not on the growing tax burden facing Americans; and certainly not on whether the government will be repaid the hundreds of billions of dollars it has transferred to the financial industry. Rather, the Treasury secretary’s principal concern was the fact that major financial institutions have reported unprecedented losses.

voices.washingtonpost.com/...y_timothy_geithner_doesnt.html - Preview

economics banking crisis government failure

  • Geithner is not only declining to force banks to repay the bailout money they have received from the government, he is forbidding them to do so. Claiming, farcically, that his “basic obligation is to make sure the system as a whole...has the ability to provide the credit that recovery requires," Geithner is going to allow the banks receiving bailout funds to have the best of both worlds. They get to keep the government money and they also get to claim to an outraged public that they would pay it back if only they could. No private sector creditor would behave so outrageously as to refuse to be repaid by its debtors, particularly debtors in such fire financial straits as these big companies.

Information Arbitrage: The US Government: Over-engineering for Under-performance

And recent bank earnings are only one shining example of why we are now locked into a painful, protracted process of false hope, failure and rebirth, when we could have chosen quick, deep pain, and transitioned to real hope and rebirth in a much shorter time-frame. But the US Government does not believe the US citizen can withstand such pain; they'd rather take the path of least resistance, delay the inevitable, buy time and pray that we - the collective "we" - get bailed out.

www.informationarbitrage.com/...ring-for-underperformance.html - Preview

economics crisis bailout government failure gloom-and-doom politics

11 Apr 09

Asleep at the Wheel of Creative Destruction - Umair Haque - HarvardBusiness.org

But the little-discussed converse is also true: venture investors have systematically underinvested in economic creation. Here's a simple question. How many new industries or markets have venture funds created in the last decade? By my count, exactly two (search and cleantech - and cleantech is still a maybe).

blogs.harvardbusiness.org/...at_the_wheel_of_creativ_1.html - Preview

economics innovation creativity venture-capital failure investment

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