Download the Building a Smarter Financial System Podcast (mp3)
I haven't written much on the financial crisis lately, because I don't feel I have anything particularly interesting to say about how we're going to solve the problem. It's a mess, and getting things back to normal is as much a psychological problem as anything else. We have to make projections about future psychological states of other people -- Keynes' beauty pageant problem -- which makes things particularly tricky. There are plenty of "experts" (especially from a particular profession) speaking and writing authoritatively about possible solutions, as if they knew with high confidence the consequences of a particular policy or plan. See this earlier post on intellectual honesty for what I think about them. See here for an excellent discussion by two honest economists, Russ Roberts and Robin Hanson, about the general dilemma of extracting "truth" from complex systems. (Comments there are worth reading as well.)
Building a Smarter Planet blog:
It can't be a good sign that complex financial topics have begun to dominate dinner-table conversations. But the dire situation in which we find our economies extend far beyond the inner circles of the finance elite.
In this episode of the Building a Smarter Planet podcast series, we focus on the financial services industry and interview Stephen Hsu, professor of physics at the University of Oregon, Jeanne Capachin, an analyst at Financial Insights, Carl Abrams, financial services business manager within IBM Research, and Keith Saxton, global director in IBM's financial markets industry. ...
