Burnishing a tarnished brand

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No, I'm not referring to Tiger Woods's recent return to golf. George Soros is trying to rebuild the economics profession from the ground up at the Institute for New Economic Thinking. The site has a ton of interesting videos, including the one below by Nobel laureate George Akerlof (of The Market for Lemons fame).

Akerlof takes on the efficient markets hypothesis and its role in the financial crisis with a few straightforward concepts requiring no higher-level mathematics: confidence, snake oil, stories, and the playpen problem. Akerlof comes to a harsh conclusion: "The view that deregulation should only go in one direction fails to appreciate the soft snake-oil underbelly of capitalism." My own musings on the hypothesis here.


Authors

Ryan Hahn

Operations Officer

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