My Next Book, some thoughts

As some of you may have gathered from my "experiment in chronology" last week, I'm giving a lot of thought to how I will organize my next book.

This is going to be the more scholarly re-working of my last book that I've mentioned both in that book and in some of my responses to critics.

But it won't simply be Gambling with Borrowed Chips with end-notes and a bibliography added. It will be different in important organizational respects.

A narrower chronological focus, in particular. I won't be going back over the Renaissance and Reformation.

I probably won't even be going as far back as 1990, last week's "experiment" notwithstanding. I may start in 1994, when a lot of remarkably pertinent things happened.

The above photo, BTW, is of a 1994 Ford Ranger.

Anyway, my book would distinguish between the big picture items one first thinks of when thinking of a year, and the little pictures. It would discuss the little pictures in four groupings: accounting rules, monetary policy, computerized and high frequency trading, ever more exotic derivatives. Subsidiary theme, housing policy and subsidies.

1994, Big Picture, Nelson Mandela becomes Prez of South Africa, Newt Gingrich becomes Speaker of the House, US.
1994, Little Pictures
          Jan. 1, China devalues the yuan from 5.32 to 8.7 to a US dollar
          Collapse of Askin Capital's Granite funds
          Influential study of NASDAQ spreads by Christie and Schultz
          FASB retreats on the options-expensing rule
          Mexican peso crisis, second Greenspan put
          Throughout this year, and beginning of next, increases of Fed Fund rate, reaching 6%
          American Express spins off Lehman Brothers
          Orange County, CA files for bankruptcy

1995, Big Picture, UN charges Bosnian commanders with crimes against humanity, domestic terrorists bomb the federal building in Oklahoma City.
1995, Little Pictures
          Michael Steinhardt shuts down his HF operations
          In June, Prez Clinton announces a plan to increase home ownership in the US, adding 8 million homeowners over 5 years.
          NSDNET decommissioned, leaving the internet wide open to commercial use
          Over the last five years, the amount of money in 401(k)s has doubled.

1996, Big Picture, Russian President Boris Yeltsin negotiates cease fire with Chechen rebel. IBM creation "Big Blue" defeats chess champion Garry Kasparov.
          Little Pictures, in December Alan Greenspan uses the phrase "irrational exuberance" regarding asset prices.

1998, Big Picture, Suharto forced to resign in Indonesia, financial/currency crisis continue to roil east Asia, Pakistani nuclear tests, Monica Lewinsky scandal dominatges US politics.
          Little Pictures
          LTCM meltdown forces Fed to knock together the heads of counter-parties.
          Richard Fuld barnstorms Lehman's creditors, saving the company in the wake of the LTCM exposure.
1999, Jim Johnson, long Fannie Mac's CEO, retires. Replaced by Franklin Raines.

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge. We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a maj...

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John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere. At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak...

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I've written about Nassim Taleb on earlier occasions in this blog. I'll let you do the search yourself, dear reader, for the full background. The short answer to the question "who is Taleb?" is this: he is a 57 year old man born in Lebanon, educated in France, who has been both a hedge fund manager and a derivatives trader. He retired from active participation from the financial world sometime between 2004 and 2006, and has been a full-time writer and provocateur ever since. Taleb's writings for the general public began where one might expect -- in the field where he had made his money -- and he explained certain financial issues to a broad audiences in a very dramatic non-technical way. Since then, he has widened has fields of study, writing about just about everything, applying the intellectual tools he honed in that earlier work. As you might have gather from the above, I respect Taleb, though I have sometimes been critical of him when my own writing ab...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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