Category: blog

All our fashions, in those days, were imported from America.

South Africa is multi-talented in the sporting field, from women’s 800m runners to football, and I have been catching up on the latest in the…

I had a fantasy in which the Fed and the TSA (Transportation Security Administration) switched roles. If a bank failed at 9 a.m. one morning…

The Eastern philosophers are transcendental; the English seem rational and scientific; but the Germans seem to combine the two, which I like. Here is Goethe:…

Watching cricket, it seemed to me that there is something about American sports that is in contradiction with American character. American society is fluid. But…

The SA Communist Party, still taken seriously here in South Africa and in the midst of many political spats, though, I’m told, many ANC officials…

For The Financial Crisis I don’t understand the nature of money, but one thing is clear to me: the urge to acquire and hoard money,…

Cape Town, like all of South Africa, is in the throes of preparing for the World Cup in June. Everything is much more spruced up…

The Hemlock Society Updated Alexa Joel, according to newspapers in South Africa where I currently am, tried to kill herself with an overdose of homeopathic…

I am very persistent and have very high standards, and so it took many days and nights of visions and revisions, no kidding about the…

Talk delivered at Bloomberg on Tuesday Nov 24th, 2009^: Fischer Black and the Financial Crisis: Rising Above The Noise On Fischer Black: Intuition is a…

A few years ago someone insisted to me in a conversation that “feelings” didn’t mean the same as “emotions”. I thought about this for a…

Rationalists think that to be a good scientist you cannot be religious. I am not sure I believe in God but there is something transcendent…

Symmetry is supposed to be aesthetically beautiful, in newborn babies and in beautiful people, though sometimes a slight asymmetry is charming and attractive. In physics…

I promise this is my last post about the droid, whose inadequacies only I care about. I can only repeat that it is a very…

I may well be wrong (about anything and everything) but my first reaction is that it’s an ethical mistake and a foolhardy one too to…

I was on a jury in 1980. At the start the judge cautioned everyone not to discuss the case with their family or friends each…

Well, always an early adopter if it’s Mac compatible, I gave in and traded up from a Treo 700p to a Motorola Droid. I’ve had…

I was always puzzled when people raved about Australia. Growing up in South Africa, one far corner of the British ex-colonies, I never had any…

They’ve been moving in tandem for months as I have been watching, and this afternoon the price in dollars of an ounce of gold just…

An Australian man I know referred the other day to the GFC, and I didn’t know what it was. I was once embarrassed to when…

Nicholas Wade in the NY Times reviews Richard Dawkins’ new book, The Greatest Show on Earth, about evolution. The review is at www.nytimes.com…… Wade spends…

Prizes are just things handed out by a bunch of people, not by God. God’s ones don’t come with announcements, are harder to identify, even…

I walk around tired a lot and I was trying to figure out why. I think this is why. At the end of the day…

By Monday, Obama could be the first person in history to win both the peace prize and the economics prize in the same year, outstripping…

If you want some solace from the tedium of news about financial troubles, presidents working on spiral-bound pitchbooks for investment committees, and politicians and friends…

Enough with the bailout and Lehman. The papers keep writing about it but they have nothing more to say. Let me rather think about consumer…

The anniversary of the sinking of USS Lehman has produced a spate of articles, including this one in the New Yorker by James B. Stewart,…

Last night I held a panel at Columbia about the economic system and the principles that should govern it. One interesting question raised but not…

From time immemorial envelopes have had a flap that seals on the back, and stamps and an address that go on the front. Fedex and…