Skip to main content

Food for thought about the financial crisis

I'm still letting classes swamp my time but wanted to share a couple quotes I found thought-provoking:

From Free Exchange, economist.com: "I find it condescending to presume that when a banker over-leverages himself he is being greedy and reckless, but when the average person buys a house they can not afford, they were misled and are the victim."

From Don Pedro, Economists for Obama: "[Treasury Secretary Paulson is] the former CEO of Goldman Sachs, and as Yglesias points out, he'll be unemployed in just 4 months time and presumably looking for a new job with a Wall Street company. How could Congress possibly give him $700,000,000,000 to buy bad debt of his choice from companies that will include his former and probably also his very-soon-in-the-future employers?"

And this is unrelated to the crisis but I just thought it was really cool: Project Implicit assesses whether your sub-conscious mind is in agreement with your conscious mind.
Labels:

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 23, 2008 at 1:25 PM

    About that first quote ...

    While I agree that the average home buyer shares some culpability,
    I find it disingenuous to imply that a banker, presumably educated, experienced, and well paid, whose life's work it is to know how to assess and manage risk, should be compared to the average home buyer, who trusts his broker and the system to provide reliable information and recommendations.

    ReplyDelete
  2. AnonymousSeptember 23, 2008 at 1:58 PM

    I ditto Jim's sentiment and think it's important to zoom out to the larger context, that the Friedman school of economics and neoliberalism is driving the insanity.

    I'll wager a dollar (real value unknown) that by the time I want to draw on SSI, circa 2030, it will be totally or partially privatized and crappier than our privatized health care system.

    Here's one of my big questions: If I understand momonomics correctly, we have accrued our national debt because we don't want to outwardly tax ourselves for the expenses we incur now.
    If that's more or less true, then wtf is up with the thinking in the United States that goes "I don't want to pay more taxes??" As if we pay so many to begin with?
    It reeks of the same thinking that says, "I don't want socialized [fill in the blank]." Few Americans perceive the military as socialism in action.

    So here's what it looks like from the clouds, it's ok to pay for healthcare for the war machine because they advance the agendas of the ilk of the Halibertons, Bushes and Paulsons. Everyone and everything else is dispensable.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Comments that contribute to the discussion are always welcome! Please note that spammy comments whose only purpose seems to be to direct traffic to a commercial site will be deleted.

Popular posts from this blog

When is an exam "too hard"?

By now, you may have heard about the biology professor at Louisiana State (Baton Rouge) who was removed from teaching an intro course where "more than 90 percent of the students... were failing or had dropped the class." The majority of the comments on the Inside Higher Ed story about it are supportive of the professor, particularly given that it seems like the administration did not even talk to her about the situation before acting. I tend to fall in the "there's got to be more to the story so I'll reserve judgment" camp but the story definitely struck a nerve with me, partly because I recently spent 30 minutes "debating" with a student about whether the last midterm was "too hard" and the whole conversation was super-frustrating. To give some background: I give three midterms and a cumulative final, plus have clicker points and Aplia assignments that make up about 20% of the final grade. I do not curve individual exams but will cu
3 comments
Read more

What was your high school economics experience like?

As I mentioned in my last post , I am asking my Econ for Teachers students to reflect on their reading by responding to discussion prompts. It occurred to me that it wouldn't be a bad idea for me to share my thoughts on those issues here and see if anyone wants to chime in. For this week, the students were asked to read the California and national content standards , an article by Mark Schug and others about why social science teachers dread teaching economics and how to overcome the dread, an article by William Walstad on the importance of economics for understanding the world around us and making better personal decisions (with some evidence on the dismal state of economic literacy in this country), and another article by Walstad on the status of economic education in high schools (full citations below). The reflection prompt asks the students to then answer the following questions: What was your high school econ experience like? What do you remember most from that class? How do
2 comments
Read more

THE podcast on Implicit Bias

I keep telling myself I need to get back to blogging but, well, it's been a long pandemic... But I guess this is as good an excuse as any to post something: I am Bonni Stachowiak's guest on the latest episode of the Teaching in Higher Ed podcast, talking about implicit bias and how it can impact our teaching.  Doing the interview with Bonni (which was actually recorded a couple months ago) was a lot of fun. Listening to it now, I also realize how far I have come from the instructor I was when I started this blog over a decade ago. I've been away from the blog so long that I should probably spell this out: my current title is Associate Vice President for Faculty and Staff Diversity and I have responsibility for all professional learning and development related to diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as inclusive faculty and staff recruitment, and unit-level diversity planning. But I often say that in a lot of ways, I have no business being in this position - I've ne
Post a Comment
Read more