Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

  Were I to list the five best business books of recent years, (let us say, of the new millennium) I might offer this, in chronological order, without any imputation of relative priority.  Robert Bryce, PIPE DREAMS (2002). There were a lot of books above the rise and fall of Enron published around the time this one was. But this one holds up better than others of the herd.  Michael Lewis, FLASH BOYS (2014). A fascinating look at exchange structure issues, such as how exchanges collaborate with high-speed traders to allow them an advantage from their trading velocity. Who benefits? Who loses? What are those who would otherwise be losing, doing about it?  Brian Arthur, COMPLEXITIES AND THE ECONOMY (2015). Chaos theory, its spin-off in complexity theory, and whether they help us understand the business world.  Gary Sernovitz, THE GREEN AND THE BLACK (2016). About the petroleum industry, fracking, and related matters.  Mervyn King, THE END OF ALCHEMY (2016)....

Yes, I know 'Nobel season' is over, the articles (and blog posts, including a couple here) that it regularly generates have been written and for the most part forgotten, though they might be taken out of drawers again next October when related cogitations come into play. But I want to revisit the institution of the Nobel Prize for a second, in the process harkening back to 1977. The Nobel Prize in Chemistry that year went to Ilya Prigogine "for his contributions to non-equilibrium thernodynamics, particularly the theory of dissipative structures." The fascinating thing is, not only that Prigogine's contribution was fallacious, but that it was known to be such (by researchers on the cutting edge of chemistry, if not to the members of the Nobel committee) before the prize was awarded. What is non-equilibrium thermodynamics? Well, let's take that mouthful apart. Thermodynamics is the study of heat and its relationship to matter. In chemistry (as distinct...

I watched a boring movie recently. Through DVD sent through the snail mail by Netflix (by now a very old-school system) I watched a fantasy about time travel. There is nothing wrong with fantasies about time travel. H.G. Wells', THE TIME MACHINE is a classic novel and gave rise to an equally classic movie of the same name. More recently, the Harry Potter novels/movies had time travel elements, as did the Terminator films, etc. The movie I saw last night, ABOUT TIME (2013) was an effort to do something different from all of that, to make time travel a plot device within a romantic comedy. The closest analog would be THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT (2004). There too, the story was about the multiple paths possible in the life of an apparently ordinary person who can travel back in time to correct what he sees in retrospect as his mistakes. But in BUTTERFLY, the emphasis is on how efforts to fix the mistakes of the past keep backfiring, so each time line seems worse than the ...