Tag Results
2 posts tagged economics
It’s not every day that someone writes down an equation that ends up changing the world. But it does happen sometimes, and the world doesn’t always change for the better. It has been argued that one formula known as Black-Scholes, along with its descendants, helped to blow up the financial world. Black-Scholes was first written down in the early 1970s but its story starts earlier than that, in the Dojima Rice Exchange in 17th Century Japan where futures contracts were written for rice traders. A simple futures contract says that I will agree to buy rice from you in one year’s time, at a price that we agree right now. (via BBC News - Black-Scholes: The maths formula linked to the financial crash)
Source 
Many of the bestselling business books of the past decade, such as “Freakonomics” and “The Undercover Economist”, started with an implicit, fundamental premise: “If it can’t be quantified or calculated, it can’t be true.” These books often reduced baffling and complex scenarios — everything from global warming to why there are so many Starbucks stores in your neighborhood — to simple explanations supported by basic economic thinking. Sometimes these explanations contained charts, graphs and little diagrams that made the world appear neat, tidy and orderly. A decade ago, in fact, Google made news when they hired UC Berkeley economics professor Hal Varian as their first in-house economist. Varian was charged with modeling consumer behaviors and consulting on corporate strategy. The announcement further projected the belief that, in short, economics was the key to market success. Today, Google should be looking for a prize-winning neuroscientist. (via Is neuroscience the new ‘Freakonomics’? - Ideas@Innovations - The Washington Post)
Source 
