I saw Margin Call today, the Zachary Quinto-produced ensemble drama about one day in the office of an investment firm back in 2008, just as the subprime mortgage crisis was about to explode into everyone's radar.

I don't think I will get around to reviewing it properly, although you can find some of my reactions on my Tumblr. But I do want to say ( Read more... )

Greg Downey, a Senior Lecturer in Anthropology at Macquarie University, Sydney, on Anthropology and the economic imagination:
"Graeber’s vision of anthropology-that the study of diversity around the globe and across evolutionary time helps us to see what is possible, especially when our social facts are so intimidating that we cannot imagine life ( Read more... )

Philip Mirowski in The Hedgehog Review, "The Great Mortification: Economists’ Responses to the Crisis of 2007-(and counting)" (via the Heterodox Economics Newsletter):
Lesson 1: This Is What Happens When You Banish History and Philosophy ( Read more... )

Five reasons why China will rule tech:
In 2008, Sony Corp. closed what was identified as the last television manufacturing plant in the U.S., in Westmoreland, Pa. It shifted work to an assembly plant in Mexico, but the vast majority of TVs' electronics components are made in Asia. (Dell sources $25 billion annually alone in components from China, ( Read more... )

The idea behind these ideas [in new institutional economics] is that a proper explanation of an economic phenomenon will reduce it to maximizing behavior of parties who are engaged in contracting, given the circumstances that surround the contract. The terms of the contract will be influenced by the access of the parties to information, by the ( Read more... )

It would be interesting, wouldn't it, to look at the United States' war on drugs and the narcotics trafficking between South and North America, and try to work out the extent that it was the product of the US's role in driving down prices of agricultural exports from the South (eg. sugar, coffee), often to below production cost, since the 1980s. ( ( Read more... )

Rereading Veblen's The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899), his wit never fails to make me laugh and also cringe in class guilt. Its message seems even more pointed in our current period of forced frugality. Excerpt from chapter 3, Conspicuous Leisure:
'[L]eisure in the narrower sense, as distinct from exploit and from any ostensibly productive ( Read more... )

As a former economics major with no love lost for smug professional economists, this article by Drake Bennett in The Boston Globe almost makes me wish the financial crisis had taken place before I began study in the discipline. Perhaps then I would have spent less time out of the last five years feeling angry and frustrated - like I've been banging ( Read more... )

Nouriel Roubini, professor of economics at New York University's Stern School of Business, on Charlie Rose (Oct. 14, 2008):

Click to view

Stephen Mihm, "Dr. Doom":
'On Sept. 7, 2006, Nouriel Roubini, an economics professor at New York University, stood before an audience of economists at the International Monetary Fund and announced that a crisis was brewing ( Read more... )

Bee Wilson in The New Yorker:
'In his “Essay on the Principle of Population,” of 1798, the English parson Thomas Malthus insisted that human populations would always be “checked” (a polite word for mass starvation) by the failure of food supplies to keep pace with population growth. For a long time, it looked as if what Malthus called the “dark ( Read more... )