SOPHISTICATED FINANCE

Some Good Books I Read in 2017

A few of the better books I read this year are shown below:

• Idea Makers, Stephen Wolfram (Wolfram's thoughts on some great thinkers)
• The Nature of Technology, W. Brian Arthur (every engineering student should read this book before starting their degree)
• An Introduction to Agent-based Modeling, Uri Wilensky and William Rand
• Chaos, James Cleick
• NEXUS: Small Worlds and the Groundbreaking Science of Networks, Mark Buchanan
• From Material to Life, Sara Imari Walker et al (quantum mechanics, evolution and information theory)
• Your Next Government, Tom W. Bell 
• Elinor Ostrom: An Intellectual Biography, Vlad Tarko (only woman Nobel Laureate in economics)

Best book was definitely From Material to Life, which I am going to teach in my Entrepreneurship, Design and Thinking course this spring.. Fantastic demonstration of how to approach an impossible problem--how did life emerge. 

Elinor Ostrom is a manual for how to live in a Blockchain directed government less world, although she researched for much less aggressive purposes.

Everyone interested in social problems should read about agent-based modeling. I believe we are on the verge of modeling social problems to derive real insight.

Not a year for much light reading, but a great year for learning.

Related articles

Entrepreneurship and Complexity

An observation on the role of information

The quote below is from Paul Heyne‘s 1982 speech “What Is the Responsibility of Business Under Democratic Capitalism?” 

"The primary problem that modern, industrialized economic systems must solve is the problem posed by the scarcity of information.  We are inclined to overlook these difficulties and to take their resolution for granted, because we take for granted the remarkable mechanism of social coordination through which we gather and disseminate the knowledge that is essential to the system’s functioning.  In overlooking the knowledge or information problem, we focus undue attention on a different scarcity, the scarcity of goodwill.  We erroneously suppose that goodwill can resolve problems that can in fact be resolved only through the accumulation of additional information.  Moreover, many of our proposals for increasing the amount of goodwill in the economy fail completely to attain their objectives, but do manage to subvert the crucial information system."

Increasingly I come to the conclusion that social problems are caused by the asymmetry of information. Rarely do I see approaches that take this idea into consideration.