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...

Searle: The Chinese Room

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...

The Lyrics of "Live Like You Were Dying"

Back in 2004 Tim McGraw recorded the song "Live Like You were Dying." As a way of marking the one-decade anniversary of this song, I'd like to admit that a couple of the lines have confused me for years. I could use your help understanding them. In the first couple of verses, the song seems easy to follow. Two men are talking, and one tells the other about his diagnosis. The doctors have (recently? or a long time ago and mistakenly? that isn't clear) given him the news that he would die soon. "I spent most of the next days/Looking at the X-rays." Then we get a couple of lines about a man crossing items off of his bucket list. "I went sky diving, I went rocky mountain climbing, I went two point seven seconds on a bull named Fu Man Chu." Then the speaker -- presumably still the old man -- shifts to the more characterological consequences of the news. As he was doing those things, he found he was loving deeper and speaking sweeter, and givin...

Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

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