Category: Economics

Algorithms Need Managers, Too


In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a soothsayer warns Caesar to “beware the ides of March.” The recommendation was perfectly clear: Caesar had better watch out. Yet at the same time it was completely incomprehensible. Watch out for what? Why? Caesar, frustrated with the mysterious message, dismissed the soothsayer, declaring, “He is a dreamer; let us leave him.” Indeed, the ides of March turned out to be a bad day for the ruler. The problem was that the soothsayer provided incomplete information. And there was no clue to what was missing or how important that information was.

Like Shakespeare’s soothsayer, algorithms often can predict the future with great accuracy but tell you neither what will cause an event nor why. An algorithm can read through every New York Times article and tell you which is most likely to be shared on Twitter without necessarily explaining why people will be moved to tweet about it. An algorithm can tell you which employees are most likely to succeed without identifying which attributes are most important for success.

→ Harvard Business Review

The Man Who Terrifies Wall Street

Bharara argues that publicizing criminal behavior is a public duty, for the purpose of deterrence. “It’s not my job to put out a ten-point program to fix corruption in New York State,” Bharara told me. “Prosecutors alone are not going to solve the problems. But we do want the problems to be solved. I can say that when you have an overabundance of outside income for legislators, when you have an overconcentration of power in the hands of a few people, and when you have a lack of transparency about how decisions are made and who makes them—that it is our job to point that out. We can give these issues a sense of urgency. A lot of people wake up to the possibility of better government when you start putting people in prison.”

→ The New Yorker

Disgraced Trader’s Struggle for Redemption

“It’s not necessarily about money, it’s about winning,” he told a visiting group of American college students. He told them that to understand trading, they needed to forget everything they learned in economics class and envision the amoral, take-no-prisoners world of “The Hunger Games.”

“The only time when people cooperate is to prolong their own lives,” he said. When rivals are no longer useful, “you stab them in the back.”

He told students he had accepted the fact that he was a rogue trader—but in his telling, it didn’t sound all that sinister.

A rogue trader, he said, “is a risk taker. It’s not a crime. It’s violating the mores established by the institution that you work for. It’s a rebellion against institutional controls that deny individuals opportunities for self-actualization.”

→ The Wall Street Journal

My Brief Carrer As An Indian Ocean Tax Pirate


In the end I let my offshore structure collapse soon after setting it up. Unlike some of my offshore counterparts I could not afford the annual £700 charge to maintain them.

My offshore empire was built at my kitchen table with just a few thousand pounds and Emily for help. I can only imagine what kinds of opaque and impenetrable structures could be created by those with the financial means large enough to be employing companies such as Mossack Fonseca.

→ Financial Times

The Warhol of Wall Street


We’re Not in Kansas Anymore is about the 2008 financial crisis that kicked off with the implosion of investment bank Lehman Brothers (for the record, Mr. Saiers thinks the government should have bailed them out). Braille-like lettering symbolizes the systemic blindness that created the crisis, he says—blindness of regulators to the realities of modern finance, blindness of ratings agencies to the real risks of pooled mortgage-backed securities—while circles and squares represent the problem of predicting how financial markets will behave. They reference the classic problem known as “squaring the circle,” which is the idea that you could make a square with the same area as a given circle. It is impossible, but you can get very close, Mr. Saiers explained—just as it’s impossible to anticipate financial markets, though you can make very smart guesses.

→ Observer