Via Arnold Kling, this Yale School of Management panel (video) on the financial crisis. In the audience are YSM students and other professors.
The opening comments by Gary Gorton are good, and the last 10 minutes are excellent as well -- it ends with a debate over mark to market accounting. Note Gorton's comments at 59:55 -- 9 minutes from the end :-)
Off-topic, but I thought you might find this particularly interesting:
ReplyDeleteBig things from Little b
(Computerworld)
Aneil Mallavarapu, the chief developer of the language and director of the Little b program at Harvard, has degrees in biochemistry and cell biology but now considers himself a computer scientist. "I learned that independently," he says. "My father gave me a computer when I was very young and the games were terrible, so I started programming."
As a graduate student in biology, he was unhappy with available research tools, just as he had been with computer games earlier. "My understanding of how software engineers handled complexity really made me start thinking about how biologists might handle it," he says. He says he designed Little b for cell biology but with the idea in mind that its basic concepts -- its core language idioms, symbolic math and object-oriented definitions and reasoning -- might also be applied to complex disciplines such as economics or ecosystems.
[Please feel free to delete this comment.]
PS: More from Ars Technica.
ReplyDeleteI'm sure you've come across the WSJ front page article on Gorton and academic irrationality?
ReplyDeleteWould recommend it.