Monday, September 8, 2008

How to buy respectability

What's the chance of the New York Review of Books publishing a "thought piece" by a currency speculator who's gotten lucky a few times but otherwise would elicit yawns and rolled eyeballs from the kind of academic
luminaries the NYRB normally turns to?
Pretty good, apparently, if he's already spent a fortune to fight evil (as the NYRB sees it).

Here's Paul Krugman ripping Soros back when Soros was just another pretentious rich guy:

Someone should tell him it doesn't help his case to dress up fairly simple ideas in pretentious philosophical language. In particular, many people have argued that financial markets tend toward boom-and-bust cycles, that investors tend to engage in herd behavior, and that financial systems are subject to self-justifying panics. But such observations are not enough for Soros: For him they must serve as illustrations of the general principle of "reflexivity," which I take to mean that human perceptions both affect events and are themselves affected by them. Gosh, I never thought of that!


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