Archive

The Emperor’s New Codes — Reputation and Search Algorithms in the Finance Sector

The study of search, be it by peo­ple like David Stark in soci­ol­o­gy, or econ­o­mists or oth­ers, I tend to sort of see it in the tra­di­tion of a real­ly rich socio-theoretical lit­er­a­ture on the soci­ol­o­gy of knowl­edge. And as a lawyer, I tend to com­ple­ment that by think­ing if there’s prob­lems, maybe we can look to the his­to­ry of com­mu­ni­ca­tions law.

Virtual Futures Salon: Beyond Bitcoin, with Vinay Gupta

Blockchain is in that space where we still have to explain it, because most of the peo­ple have gone from not hav­ing it around to hav­ing it around. But for kind of the folks that are your age or a lit­tle younger it’s kind of always been there, at which point it doesn’t real­ly need to be explained. It does how­ev­er need to be contextualized.

Postcapitalism

Neoliberalism is bro­ken. The eco­nom­ic mod­el of the last thir­ty years. It worked for a bit, dragged the bot­tom two thirds of the world’s pop­u­la­tion up the income scale dra­mat­i­cal­ly, facil­i­tat­ed the tech rev­o­lu­tion. But it’s stopped working.

Global Capital and Urban Land

For me a city…is a com­plex but incom­plete sys­tem. And in that mix­i­ty of com­plex­i­ty and incom­plete­ness lies the capac­i­ty of cities to have very long lives. Much longer lives than very pow­er­ful cor­po­ra­tions, which often are very closed systems.

Finance is not about Money

I think one first step is to dis­tin­guish between tra­di­tion­al bank­ing, which sells mon­ey it has (or it can bor­row very quick­ly, what­ev­er) and finance, which sells some­thing it does not have. And in that sell­ing what it does not have lies its cre­ativ­i­ty. It has to invent instru­ments. And secondly—and they go together—it has to invade oth­er sec­tors. Because it itself does not have what it needs to produce.

The Conversation #41 — John Fullerton

I actu­al­ly think you can trace many many of these big sys­temic crises to being symp­toms of the flawed idea that eco­nom­ic growth can go on indef­i­nite­ly, expo­nen­tial­ly, on a finite plan­et. That’s sort of my North Star. And then as a finance per­son, why do we think we need eco­nom­ic growth? Well, because the way our cap­i­tal sys­tem works is that cap­i­tal demands that growth.

The Conversation #33 — Priscilla Grim

I was at a par­ty one time where I was talk­ing to some guy who had been pro­filed by Adbusters because he was a big cli­mate change guy. And he basi­cal­ly told me…that I need­ed to be mak­ing my own food, I need­ed to be mak­ing my own clothes. So you’re telling me that as a work­ing moth­er going to school full-time, along with those respon­si­bil­i­ties in which I am at home study­ing most the time, I should be mak­ing my daugh­ter’s clothes. I should be whip­ping up meals from scratch. Um…no.

The Conversation #4 — Colin Camerer

We know very lit­tle about com­plex finan­cial sys­tems and how sys­temic risk, as it’s called, is com­put­ed and how you would man­age poli­cies. And if you look back at the finan­cial cri­sis, you can either say, as many econ­o­mists do, It all had to do with badly-designed rules,” which may be part of the sto­ry; it’s cer­tain­ly part of the sto­ry. Or it may have to do with the inter­ac­tion of those rules and human nature, like mort­gage bro­ker greed, opti­mism… And you see it not just in indi­vid­u­als who now have hous­es and fore­clo­sure, but at the high­est levels.