Central Banking 101, Joseph Wang (Self-Published, 2021) The greatest gift bestowed by admittance to elite institutions is that you stop being overawed by them. For instance, there was a time when upon hearing “so-and-so is a Rhodes Scholar”, I would have assumed that so-and-so was a very impressive person indeed. Nowadays I know quite a lot of former Rhodes Scholars, and have seen firsthand that some of them are extremely mediocre individuals, so meeting a new one doesn’t phase me much. My own
Wonderful review. My experience in econ academia matches your experience well: many will admit they have no idea what is going on, and that there is no real theory anyone can point to to make sense of the decisions.
Awesome review as ever. I happen to have this book though haven’t read it yet.
On CBDC’s, which you mention in the footnotes, I happen to work w a fintech company involved in this doing their comms, and just in the past few months the messaging has gone from Tech-Panglossian boosterism to *highly* sensitive as regards the sentiments of ordinary people and their privacy fears etc. They’re being v careful not to appear to be the minions of central banks etc.
One of the ironies of so much Tech messianism is that it justifies itself on the grounds of ‘financial inclusion’ but in fact gives the powerful extra means to spy on people and debank them if they don’t approve of them for whatever reason.
> There is another view of the world, one which I prefer. The financial system is a game of Nomic played between human beings with inconceivable amounts of money on the line. The rules and meta-rules allow for essentially unbounded emergent complexity, like a Turing-complete programming language, or the axioms of Peano arithmetic. Most of the specific mechanisms involved in later financial crises didn’t even exist during earlier ones.
This actually seems... desirable? I agree that, if financial systems weren’t adaptive and reflexive, we’d want something with more structured rules like a true engineering discipline. From a certain point of view, it seems only natural that all of these gigantic agencies are basically run by people who are making it up as they go along. Some interesting questions occur: what is the alternative? Is there a better set of people you’d want making it up as they go along?
The answer to the second is sometimes yes, especially if idealogical capture is ruining outcomes, but it seems like in many cases, there’s only a very small set of people that could do the job at all.
Wonderful review. My experience in econ academia matches your experience well: many will admit they have no idea what is going on, and that there is no real theory anyone can point to to make sense of the decisions.
Great review. Don't want to be pedantic, but it's "faze" not "phase."
Awesome review as ever. I happen to have this book though haven’t read it yet.
On CBDC’s, which you mention in the footnotes, I happen to work w a fintech company involved in this doing their comms, and just in the past few months the messaging has gone from Tech-Panglossian boosterism to *highly* sensitive as regards the sentiments of ordinary people and their privacy fears etc. They’re being v careful not to appear to be the minions of central banks etc.
One of the ironies of so much Tech messianism is that it justifies itself on the grounds of ‘financial inclusion’ but in fact gives the powerful extra means to spy on people and debank them if they don’t approve of them for whatever reason.
> There is another view of the world, one which I prefer. The financial system is a game of Nomic played between human beings with inconceivable amounts of money on the line. The rules and meta-rules allow for essentially unbounded emergent complexity, like a Turing-complete programming language, or the axioms of Peano arithmetic. Most of the specific mechanisms involved in later financial crises didn’t even exist during earlier ones.
This actually seems... desirable? I agree that, if financial systems weren’t adaptive and reflexive, we’d want something with more structured rules like a true engineering discipline. From a certain point of view, it seems only natural that all of these gigantic agencies are basically run by people who are making it up as they go along. Some interesting questions occur: what is the alternative? Is there a better set of people you’d want making it up as they go along?
The answer to the second is sometimes yes, especially if idealogical capture is ruining outcomes, but it seems like in many cases, there’s only a very small set of people that could do the job at all.
It’s my one defence against conspiracyitis - in reality no one knows wtf is happening, or why, or what to do about it. Hopefully, there is a god.