Archive for February, 2008

This article from the NYT today highlights “art anxiety,” the inability for wealthy folks to purchase real art for fear that they will either pay too much, or be outed as having poor taste. There’s interesting stuff here, though I’ve mostly given up on the Times’ feature articles nowadays (good gracious they’ve moved from...
Read more »

Once was my favorite movie of 2007 (perhaps not the best, but my favorite), and if you can’t be happy for Hansard and Irglova for winning best song, I don’t even want to know you. And on an unrelated shmoopy note, my darlin’ re-arrived from HI yesterday, and for a small window of time I’ll...
Read more »

With Brayden upping the ante, Lena suggests a table, but I feel that this may confuse more than illuminate. Welp, only one way to find out: Markets Are Culture   Yes No Markets Have Culture Yes The missing synthesis! Complementary View of Culture No Constitutive View of Culture Neo-classical Economics I also realize it’s tacky to stick neo-classical economics in the low/low box. And the yes/no...
Read more »

I still haven’t addressed the payoff question, but here’s more of my thinking about culture and economic sociology, in pictorial: The constitutive group, which does in fact tend to study the ’settlement’ (a loaded term, yes, but think of it more like a butterfly alighting temporarily than obdurate institutions) of markets, treats the market itself...
Read more »

Having trouble finding a common time to set a meeting? Problem solved! Pass this handy-dandy sheet along to all the member of the committee, and let the matchy-matchy begin! I guarantee that, unless someone is out of town, you will be able to nail down a time within an absolute maximum two-week window. Make-a-meeting
Read more »

Not on markets, and a little outside my own expertise as an economic sociologist, and yet: This blog has gotten a lot of attention lately, cataloging the things that White People Like. It is funny and pointed, in a really interesting way, and some of the reactions – ie the 1300 comments on Unfogged, are...
Read more »

this: “ talks on the campaign trail about high school advisers who tried to dissuade her from applying to Princeton because they thought her scores were not good enough. (She graduated with honors in sociology in 1985.)” and this: “The man who opened fire on students in a lecture hall at Northern Illinois University...
Read more »

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, wrote about it in an in-process manuscript, and I’m just trying to work out the argument out loud for a bit. Bear with me, it’ll probably be a few posts. Limitations on how we think about markets and culture. This is two parts a limitation of our...
Read more »

Put it on your radar screens, the next big thing is going to be XBRL. It stands for extensible business reporting language, and it is meant to commensurate business reporting via standardization. So instead of entering text into an annual report, companies, governments, NGOs, anyone who would like to comply with governmental mandate will...
Read more »

I’ve taken issue before with Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s black swan thesis, that high-impact, low-probability events are responsible for market crises and accidents. The more general implication is, as Taleb and Pilpel note: What matters in life is the equation probability × consequence. This point might appear to be simple, but its consequences are not. Suppose...
Read more »

…and it is the blissful taste of the Cara Cara Navel Orange. Also, there is a blog by Steven Jenkins, Fairway’s buyer. For all my complaining, there is quite a bit to say for living in Manhattan.
Read more »

I was speaking about context with a colleague, specifically about Gbenga Akinnagbe, who plays Chris on the Wire (he’s on the left), but also plays Jimmy in the Savages. I was remarking about how scary he looks in the Wire. But this is quite possibly about me, I think, and the belief that more...
Read more »

This would be an interesting opportunity for someone who would like to learn, network, discuss: From Bodies to Black-Scholes: A Two-day Workshop on Performativity and the Social Studies of Finance Organized by Daniel Beunza (Columbia U.) and Yuval Millo (LSE) Columbia Business School, New York, 28-29 April 2008 The Social Studies of Finance (SSF) is one of the...
Read more »

You may have missed the news that mass market games such as Guitar Hero and Wii Games are doing well against traditional video games such as Bioshock, Halo 3, and the Orange Box. But what you shouldn’t miss is the discussion about critics and art nestled pretty far into the article: …as video games become...
Read more »