This year, I had my undergraduates read the whole Engine, Not a Camera book! I just gave the midterm today, so we’ll see what happened. We spent a lot of time this year on financial markets, more than usual. 4 class periods, over two weeks, on how markets work and how to think about them sociologically. Mainly using commensuration, embeddedness & and performativity as the key concepts, and having them try to think about markets in these terms.

E.g., I taught them that the Value at Risk (VAR) concept, via Black-Scholes-Miller formula, became a big commensuration machine, transforming qualitatively different objects into comparable forms of risk. Whether they got it, dunno.

This is more ‘primary’ teaching than I’ve done in the last 5 years. In the past, I have spent much much more time doing ‘secondary’ teaching, teaching them what the lay of the land is and acting as a kind of safari guide for economic sociology (on the left, some elephants, over on the right Zelizer’s critique of separate spheres, on that hill Abolafia’s work on rationality). By contrast, this semester is a lot of my own ideas, obviously completely informed by the great work of lots of others in the field.

Second, which part of MacKenzie do you have your classes read? I’m curious, as I haven’t gotten too far past MacKenzie and Millo (2003), and his chapter in “Do Economists Make Markets?” Do you read a selection from “An Engine Not a Camera”?

Lastly, does anyone else think that Taleb and Jim Cramer should do some sort of crazed talk show together?

The thing is that economists and risk managers are anything but morons, and the best of them are obviously aware of the limitations of financial economics as risk management tools.

I just had my class read MacKenzie (which meant I re-read it), and the telling part for me was the opening half regarding ‘positive’ economics. James March and supporters knocked the financial economists early and often for unrealistic assumptions, but the view that won out was an assumptions-simplified worldview that traded off realism for explanatory power.

In class, I likened it to a (US) ‘The Office’ episode where the car’s GPS system said ‘take a right’ and they drove directly into a lake. Sometimes map != road

heh