Academic Identity
I am assistant professor of Sociology at Barnard College. My book (and my dissertation research) is a comparative study of technology and futures trading, an ethnography of open outcry and electronic traders. My current research is on how art specialists price cultural commodities, particularly how categories and commensuration work in the secondary/resale fine arts market. I teach courses in economic sociology, organizations, and gender.
Professional Identity
I occasionally consult, focusing on organizational change, the future of technology and financial markets, and environmental markets. I do strategic assessments of markets, technology and organizational design, with qualitative and quantitative components. If you are interested, please email me.
Personal Identity
I grew up outside Chicago, and went to school(s) at Wesleyan University, USC, and Northwestern University. I currently live in New York, with a partner who is a marketing manager for an educational nonprofit. I love movies, like to cook, and I can do a mean lindy swing out. I am INTP.
April 3, 2008
Bubble bubble bubble
Filed under: Markets — Peter @ 4:11 pm
Josh Guetzkow, who has outed himself as that person who is reading my blog, is a professor at Arizona and works on income inequality and mass imprisonment (though he masquerades as a sociologist of sociology). He passes along an interesting article on bubbles and the new new real estate downturn. This is appreciated, and I think it’s his trying to make sense of his own decision to buy property at the top of the market my earlier half-assed attempt to explain housing CMOs.
As for the article, I have a sneaky suspicion that the author is full of it. His contention is that bubbles are preceded by legislation (this is similar to Neil Fligstein’s contention that legislative activity precedes merger waves), and:
That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.
The rest is an analysis of the dot-bomb and the new housing troubles.
I think it’s worth disentangling the housing bubble, which may well be what we are facing here, and the new global financialization, which is less well-understood. Greta Kripner is doing some work on this, with an emphasis on the US economy. For those ambitious graduate students out there, I would say that global financialization may be one of the most important master-narratives since modernity and the industrial revolution at the end of the 19th century (I’ve had this conversation with Ryon Lancaster as well, we may well be on the same page I think). And there were, you know, a couple of good books written about that earlier transformation.
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