Saturday, July 10, 2010

Federalist Society Journal on the 2008 Crisis

The Spring Issue of the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy has many good articles on the economic crisis of 2008. It's pretty good. I really liked Arnold Kling's article, which argues the crisis was the result of a cognitive error--that home mortgages weren't risky irrespective of obligor risk--due to a confluence of factors: complexity, good intentions, regulations, simple carelessness.

Yet, he states this "may be our first epistemologically‐driven depression [ie, they didn't understand what they were doing]". I'm not so sure. The internet bubble of the 1990's also contained a lot of pervasive misconceptions that with hindsight are obvious.

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