Andrew Lo On Financial Crisis Reads: 'After Each Book I Felt Like I Knew Less'

NPR:

A while back, the MIT economist Andrew Lo set out to review a couple books about the financial crisis. Those books led to a couple more books, which led -- you see where this is going -- to 17 more books.

Read the whole story: NPR

Comments

[addisonsteele]

02:41 PM on 02/07/2012

This just emphasizes the fact that economics is not a science and that, despite the use of mathematics by economists, it is a form of philosophy (all economics was once called "political economy"). Adam Smith believed that he was writing moral philosophy, as did people like David Ricardo and James and John Stuart Mill.

[falco]

01:00 PM on 02/07/2012

What this tells you is that there is a shadow economy. One that runs behind the scenes, not for public view. We will never get answers if we are not privy to the behind the scenes machinations. It's a billionaire boys club and unfortunately, the overseers and media are complicit. Same players. And to top it off, anyone who points this out is ostracized as tin-hatter.

[DXM]

11:02 AM on 02/07/2012

"His dream is for economists to look at the crisis the way climatologists look at climate change."

And so what IF economics could have the predictive power of a more concrete science like climatology. If predictions made by the overwhelming majority of economists do not align with the ideology of the Right, they will be ignored. Sound familiar?

[frank day]

11:24 AM on 02/07/2012

Sounds precisely correct.

Milton Friedman and the Chicago school are the High Priests of Conservatism.

Economics has been used to justify greed.

[addisonsteele]

02:42 PM on 02/07/2012

Friedman and his Chicago acolytes were bought and paid for by right-wing donors, who wanted them to generate economic theories that supported their greed.

[nothingchanges]

10:53 AM on 02/07/2012

I'm no economist.

In fact I don't claim to be particularly well educated, at least not in the formal definition of that term.

The internet is a vast source of information, for those willing to wade through all the garbage seeking a kernel of wisdom.

I have been unable to find a general consensus of how we got out of the Great Depression. At least not something that "economists" agree on. The closest I can come to that, is that MOST seem to agree that it was the extraordinary expenditures and needs of WW2, that finally ended the worst economic malaise in U.S. History.

Personally, I think the whole situation could be pretty well summed up in just two sentences by one of our greatest presidents ever. Abraham Lincoln.

"These capitalists generally act harmoniously and in concert, to fleece the people."

and

"America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and lose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves."

I think those two remarkably astute observations pretty well cover what went wrong, and worse, how this nation will eventually die.

When the Greeds of the few, outweigh the Needs of the many, there's no place to go but down.