Andrews Crisis (Just A.S.K. Book 3)

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He's given me a clearer understanding of our three values systems -- investor, consumer and citizen -- and has an interesting thesis about how the ba My eyes start to glaze over if I read too much economics and number stuff and the first two thirds of this book is mostly that, which is why it took me so long to read it. He's given me a clearer understanding of our three values systems -- investor, consumer and citizen -- and has an interesting thesis about how the balance of these should work. I think his idea of focusing more on citizen values and less on the other two makes a lot of sense, if only we could do it.

I think the book would be more interesting to the average person with less attention put on analysis and explanation and more on putting in play a push towards mitigating the possibility of a financial or environmental catastrophe. Sep 10, Stephen Hull rated it really liked it. A fascinating insight into why the world seems hell bent on self-destruction and what we can do about it. The author scrupulously avoids assigning blame even when it seems deserved and develops a set of perspectives which not only illuminate our modern world in fresh ways but also point to ways out of the cul de sac we are careering down.

The use of mathematics to understand value systems is particularly brilliant -- and not difficult to grasp for any math phobics out there. Well worth the read A fascinating insight into why the world seems hell bent on self-destruction and what we can do about it. Well worth the read -- in fact, I'm going to re-read it as soon as I get the chance. Here are two independently published reviews. The review in the well-respected Alternatives Journal may also be found here. But as he gradually began to see the connection between growing, multiple global crises and the lack of awareness surrounding the day-to-day human behaviour that produces them, he began to Here are two independently published reviews.

The value crisis referenced in the title is the conflict between our human value system, which is ancient, and our number-based value system, which has developed over time, most of it very recently.

Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by Andrew Wilson

This crisis of values is posited as the greatest challenge facing society and as the root cause of most of our environmental, economic and social ills. Welch traces the origins of the value crisis from the beginnings of numeracy and the invention of math, through theories of decision making and indicators of well-being, to the history of money, the workings of the global economy and the nature of corporations.

For instance, he explains the concept of exponential growth a phenomenon that is notoriously poorly understood , thoroughly and from several points of view. The examples are thoughtful and Welch relates them directly to the central premise of the book. The book is dizzyingly well researched, drawing on a wide range of contemporary scientific research, literature of all kinds and possibly more than one accounting textbook. It is also jam-packed with details, facts, quotes and equations. Fortunately, Welch seems to have an orderly turn of mind and his argument is well built and progresses logically.

He makes good use of headings and text boxes to remind the reader where she is going and where he has been. Each chapter begins with an anecdote to ground the topic and ends with a comprehensive summary. Anything less would have made the book quite hard to follow and not nearly as useful. At the end he has gathered all the boxed text in a separate section and included page references. There are many good reasons to read this book.

Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West by Andrew Wilson – review

For one thing, it will likely give you many excellent conversation starters. Did you know that capuchin monkeys make exactly the same poor financial decisions as humans? Or that if corporations really were people, they would be classified as psychopaths? Another reason is that this book is a great reference on the in and outs of economics, politics, finance and the human condition. But the best reason to read this book is for the basic background it can give the reader on how we got into our current environmental and social predicament — the historical and behavioural origins of a dysfunctional world.

We need to be careful not to overreact and reject finance when, instead, we really should be working harder to improve it. This book looks at some of the famous economists in history. Tell me a bit about why you like it and why you put it on your list as a way of understanding finance.

First of all, I should say that the list I constructed is ordered chronologically—not necessarily when the books were published, but rather when I first encountered them. The Worldly Philosophers was my very first exposure to economics and finance. Up until then, I thought the subject was about balancing your checkbook, which seemed pretty boring to me.

There are some things about the economic world order that we can understand. And not only can we understand them, we have the power to tap into the forces of self-interest and the profit motive to achieve certain goals.

That seemed incredibly exciting to me. Also, I had never really connected economic ideas with other sciences.

Ukraine Crisis: What It Means for the West

Fortunately, Malthus was mostly wrong in his predictions at least so far , but it was one of the first examples of connecting human biology to economic considerations. So The Worldly Philosophers was really my first exposure to economic science as a legitimate field of study, one that had some really important and challenging questions that could actually be answered through scientific means. Give me another example from the book, something that stuck in your mind and particularly grabbed you at the time.

Well, the description of Marxism and the Marxian dialectic struck a chord. We take it for granted that Marx was a radical, a disruptive rabble-rouser who just wanted to see revolution occur. But when you read about the particular social, cultural and economic milieu in which he lived, you begin to understand how his ideas emerged quite naturally and justifiably. Marx was shaped by the some of the very negative social consequences of the Industrial Revolution, like the systematic and wholesale exploitation of children as a source of cheap labor. Heilbroner told fascinating stories of how all of these important ideas emerged, not randomly or out of the antiseptic world of academic theories, but from specific social and environmental contexts that were driving societies at the time.

So what were you studying at the time when economics suddenly became interesting to you? Were you already at college? No, I was in high school when I got my first taste of economics, and when I was actually dead set on a career in the sciences. The school was tuition-free for any New York City resident, but you had to pass an entrance exam to be admitted, so it drew a very diverse pool of students from all five boroughs who shared an interest in STEM. I really blossomed at Bronx Science and just assumed I would pursue an academic career in math, physics, biology, or possibly computer science computers were just becoming available at the time and we had a beautiful IBM mainframe to play with.

So that was the beginnings of my interest in economics. I read Worldly Philosophers as part of my social studies class, still planning for a career in STEM, but that spark eventually turned into a large wildfire that still drives me to this day. Tell me about this book and how it fits into your recommendations.

My plans were still squarely focused on STEM, but I needed to take a course to fulfill my distributional requirement in the humanities.

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

I just loved it. It was the first time that I developed a real appreciation for finance as an intellectual pursuit with some really subtle and important questions that you could answer using some fairly advanced mathematics.

After that great experience, I decided to take another economics course—this time with an even more charismatic professor, Sharon Oster—and that course put me over the edge, convincing me to major in economics and apply to graduate school for my Ph. At the same time, it provides some very sensible advice for investors about how to manage their own money. Tell me about the book and what you like about it.

He turned what otherwise could have been a rather dry and sterile subject into a living, breathing, all-too-human endeavor. By writing about the subject from the perspective of the individuals who invented these wonderful theories, he turned academic finance into a much more exciting and personal pursuit for me.

Does the book also explain the theories in a way that the average reader can understand? Bernstein describes the beginnings of financial market analysis by asking whether or not stock prices are predictable. He explains the random walk hypothesis and then introduces us to the various academics who attempted to predict the stock market using the fanciest statistical tools of their day and, ultimately, in the hopes of making money.

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And he also introduces us to those who lost money! So have a lot of the financial instruments used on Wall Street originated with finance professors?

The option pricing model of Black, Scholes and Merton is a good example. In that same year, Black and Scholes and, separately, Merton published papers describing how to price and hedge these exotic securities. Pretty much overnight, their papers turned these esoteric instruments into well-understood objects that could be managed quantitatively.

So was a pretty key year. Shortly thereafter, Texas Instruments introduced the very first programmable calculator, and one of the first things that these calculators were used for was to price options on the floor of the Chicago Board Options Exchange. So you have the confluence of new financial institutions, new financial theories, and new technology that all came together to get this market off the ground, a remarkable case of serendipity. These academic ideas played a central role in helping investors to value derivatives and, more importantly, to manage their risks.

But, in this instance, you had individuals without a lot of business experience, or interest in business, coming up with ideas that ultimately gave rise to multi-trillion-dollar global industries. This remarkably simple yet powerful model captures the intuition that there should be a trade-off between risk and reward.

We all have the sense that when you take on greater risks in the stock market, you need to get rewarded for bearing those risks. And because the risks of smaller startups are much higher, the average rates of return of those companies will have to be higher than those of IBM, otherwise who would want to invest in them?

Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount. Once you measure the risk of a project, you can calculate the required rate of return of that risk and then use that cost of capital to determine which project to take and which to avoid, all thanks to Bill Sharpe. This crisis situation will affect foreign affairs for the West for many years as we proceed down the road ahead.

Nov 23, Kerry added it Shelves: This book felt rushed in the effort to get the information out while still relevant; ideas were unpolished, the writing very "rough-draft" feeling. Some lines were painful to read: Western Europe at least became less martial and more post-modern, whatever that meant. Russia did not experience directly. Jan 04, Jerry Teipen added it. I cannot even give this book a star. I worked very hard to get past the first 20 pages, but it was far too painful. Choppy sentences, lack of a cohesive thought, typos Ur mom gae rated it it was amazing Jun 16, Marcus rated it really liked it Nov 30, M rated it liked it Nov 04, Msnkkii rated it really liked it Jul 06, Matt Turner rated it liked it Nov 14, Calvin rated it really liked it Nov 27, Chris rated it liked it Jan 16, Sengeset rated it really liked it Nov 03, Tarek Amer rated it really liked it Mar 27, Raymond Thomas rated it it was amazing Apr 30,

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