The Tyranny of Political Economy

By endogenizing politicians’ behavior, political economy disempowers policy analysts. It is as if physicists came up with theories that explained not only natural phenomena, but also determined which bridges and buildings engineers would build. There would then scarcely be any need for engineering schools.

→ Project Syndicate

Pope Benedict XVI and the Leadership Issue No One Wants to Talk About

Because we want to believe, on some very romantic level, that leaders are born. That they’re superhuman. That they’re cut from special cloth, that they’ve descended from Mount Olympus to help all of us. We want to believe that because it gets us excited about signing up to work with them. It kindles our hope that people with power have a sense of great responsibility and have answers that we don’t see.

→ Harvard Business Review

The Importance Of Excel

This is why the JPMorgan VaR model is the rule, not the exception: manual data entry, manual copy-and-paste, and formula errors. This is another important reason why you should pause whenever you hear that banks’ quantitative experts are smarter than Einstein, or that sophisticated risk management technology can protect banks from blowing up. At the end of the day, it’s all software. While all software breaks occasionally, Excel spreadsheets break all the time. But they don’t tell you when they break: they just give you the wrong number.

→ EconoMonitor

How Uptown Money Kills Downtown Art

But it wasn’t really until serious business journalists took note and came running to document the next hot market for High Net Worth Individuals that the art world took stock of its new situation. And what became clear to the more experimental, contrarian critical community was that what passes for fusion among uptown’s financial giants is uranium poisoning for everybody else.

→ Village Voice