Mandelbrot climbs atop his favorite hobby-horse and works toward a theory of financial markets (and more importantly, financial panics) based on fractal geometry. The initial motivation (and something that seems quite covincing by now) is to debunk the “classical” view of financial markets enshrined in Modern Portfolia Theory and the Captial Asset Pricing Model (CAPM).
George Mason economist Garrett Jones makes the case that we would get better policy outcomes if we could be slightly less democratic. I do appreciate that he broadcast his thesis clearly in the title instead of going with something like “Against Democracy” as this isn’t actually an argument against democracy in general. I took the argument to have two main pillars:
Review of Frank Ramey: A Shee Excess of Power
Review of Frank Ramey: A Shee Excess of Power by Cheryl Misak
I really need to stop reading books like this. Frank Ramsey died at age 27 in 1930. By that time he had been appointed to a Fellowship at Trinity College Cambridde, made fundamental contributions (some of which decades ahead of their time) in philosophy, mathematics, and economics. He had established himself as a peer of the intellectual giants of the 21st century (JM Keynes, Wittgenstein, GE Moore, Bertrand Russell, Veriginia Woolf…), He was married with two kids, had a mistress (known…
