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Where this blog stands
Various commitments on papers commissioned in French have kept me away from this blog. Reward is another factor: with an average of around 30 daily hits on the English blog and 2500 on the French one, vanity has been a powerful drive for concentrating on the French one. Dialogue is another one. If you’ve had…
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Foresight and Despair
A review of my just published book L’implosion. La finance contre l’économie: ce que révèle et annonce “la crise des subprimes” by Adrien de Tricornot in Le Monde, dated June 16th (translation by Jiro Tanaka – many thanks Jiro!)
Foresight and Despair (“Oracle, ô désespoir !”, pun on a famous line from Corneille’s play…
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Would an interruption of the Gulf Stream be reversible? And if so, at what cost?
I’m blessed with a very popular blog in French. One of the questions that came up lately in my dialogue with commentators is that of the reversibility of major ecological disasters induced by human activity and of the feasibility of reversing such disasters with the tools pertaining to our current technology.
This is a serious…
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The cunning of Reason
The very justification of a Human Complex System’s approach to the operation of human societies, implying a continuous explanatory spectrum from the individual (particle) to the cultural or societal levels (field), is offered by Hegel when he writes in Reason in History (*) that
… human actions in history produce additional results, beyond their…
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A population dynamics approach to the subprime crisis
One way of looking at the subprime crisis – and by this I mean only the properly real estate–based part of the unfolding drama – is in terms of population dynamics, in terms of three populations of borrowers who first entered the market and then left it in reverse order as the last to come…
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The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy
My new book called “The Implosion, Finance vs. the Economy – What the subprime crisis reveals and foretells” (L’Implosion, La finance contre l’économie – Ce que révèle et annonce la crise des subprimes) will be published on May 4th. The publisher is Arthème Fayard, one of the top French publishers who will realize here a…
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The reasoning artificial toddler
I was interviewed earlier today by Richard Adhikari, a journalist at TechNewsWorld, about an Artificial Intelligence project. I didn’t know anything about that project except what would be the title of the article: “AI Program Thinks Like a 4-Year-Old”.
There is an excellent summary of what I had told the journalist:
“I’m always…
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The end of trust in the subprime crisis and how to model it
The subprime crisis is often explained in terms of trust: one day trust between financial counterparties vanished and here was a crisis. Explanations in terms of “market confidence” refer in fact to two distinct phenomena, one being indeed trust and the other one being more plainly straightforward profitability. Let me start with profitability. Subprime loans…
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The subprime crisis at UCLA
I’m happy with the way things worked out yesterday, March 8th, at the UCLA Complexity Science Conference with my paper: The Subprime Crisis: A Human Complex Systems Phenomenon.
Of course, trying to squeeze the whole crisis into an hour (1 ¼ with John Bragin’s express permission), it turned out I had much too much…
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Pricing models: why the good ones are useless and the true ones, priceless
I’ve mentioned already in Agents using financial models and the “human cognitive cocktail” a number of pitfalls linked to the task of modeling the subprime crisis in a Human Complex Systems perspective, especially those related to agents’ partial understanding of the models they’re using or in errors they’re making when using them. I’ve…
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Agents using financial models and the “human cognitive cocktail”
I’m working on the paper to be given at the Human Complex Systems’ one-day conference on March 8th. I don’t want to divulge prematurely any scoop but at the same time I’d like to share some of my puzzlement as I go, and as if thinking aloud.
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