In his latest book, Engineering the Financial Crisis, the brilliant political scientist Dr. Jeffrey Friedman rebuts conventional wisdom about the causes of the crisis and puts forth an original theory of it that he constructs on the basis of the idea of radical ignorance. Friedman has produced the most compelling, theoretically sound, and empirically robust account of the most important economic event of our times. And tonight (March 29: 8pm EST), during his free SFL webinar, he will be discussing the central arguments of his book. Register here: https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/854883546
If you miss this event you can watch a similar presentation that he gave at the Cato Institute:
-
The Myth of the Greedy Bankers: What Really Caused the Financial Crisis, and What It Says about Capitalism:
The conventional wisdom about the financial crisis overlooks its demonstrable cause: the Basel regulations covering banks’ investments. These rules penalized banks that did not invest in mortgage-backed securities. Ironically, these regulations made sense when they were enacted. But they suppressed the heterogeneous investing strategy that unregulated banks might have pursued. An important and neglected merit of capitalism is that it diversifies an economy. This is the only safeguard against human ignorance. A regulated economy imposes one view of best practices on the entire system, and if the regulators, being human, are mistaken, the entire system is put at risk.
Where? On your computer at 8pm EST!
Jeffrey Friedman is the founder and editor of the Critical Review. He received a BA from Brown University in history and philosophy in 1983, MA in History from University of California at Berkeley and PhD in Political Science from Yale in 2002. He has published introductions to editions of Locke’s “Two Treatises of Government” and Mill’s “On Liberty”; edited The Rational Choice Controversy: Economic Models of Politics Reconsidered (Yale Univ. Press, 1996); edited What Caused the Financial Crisis? (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010); and is coauthor of Engineering the Financial Crisis: Systemic Risk and the Failure of Regulation (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). He has taught Consitutional law, contemporary political theory, democratic theory, social-science methodology, and the history of political thought at Yale, Dartmouth, Harvard, and Barnard College, Columbia University. He is currently a visiting scholar in the Department of Government, University of Texas at and the Max Weber Fellow at the Institute for the Advancement of the Social Sciences, Boston University.