Digital Musings

Stiglitz's Crusade: Rescuing Hostages from International Capital Markets

Here is an interesting video of Nobel Laureate Joseph Stiglitz. Stiglitz is well-known for his contribution to the microeconomics of information, adverse selection and moral hazard.

After having been a World Bank official and receiving the Nobel distinction he embarked on a crusade against international finance and the big players thereof.

According to him, Argentina (and Brazil for that matter) was cursed. Indeed, financial markets decided that Argentina was risky despite the fact its debt to GDP ratio was no worse than most European countries. No matter what Argentina would do right, its fate was carved in stone from outside: Thumbs down as if international financial markets were a large Roman crowd asking for the wounded gladiator's death.

Frankly, I find it hard to swallow. I fail to get the full picture. As always the devil lies in the details. It was a time when Stiglitz had a passion for details (see his insurance and banking papers). It seems that this time is over and leads him to gross oversimplification which is sad for a man of his stature and responsibility.

I leave you the task of judging:

Stiglitz Explains International Finance
Uploaded by madmundo

Scientific Commons: Hunting for Academic Treasures

I have just discovered a genuine "digital" treasure island.. This is the site entitled Scientific Commons . The site is still in beta but does already contain true pearls.

Scientific Commons is reminiscent of the famous "tragedy of commons".  This tragedy refers to pastures that were left available for free to farmers. They could leave their cattle there. Guess what happened. Since nobody had a property right on the pastures, nobody cared to maintain them properly. The cattle exhausted them. It died and farmers ended up starving.

According to the founders of Scientific Commons (University of St Gallen and Institute for Media and Communications Management), academic research is radically different: It starves if there is no easy way to access it and share it:

"The major aim of the project is to develop the world’s largest communication medium for scientific knowledge products which is freely accessible to the public. A key challenge of the project is to support the rapidly growing number of movements and archives who admit the free distribution and access to scientific knowledge. These are the valuable sources for the ScientificCommons.org project. The ScientificCommons.org project makes it possible to access the largely distributed sources with their vast amount of scientific publications via just one common interface. ScientificCommons.org identifies authors from all archives and makes their social and professional relationships transparent and visible to anyone across disciplinary, institutional and technological boundaries. Currently ScientificCommons.org has indexed about 10 million scientific publications and successfully extracted 4 million authors out of this data."

I urge you to go hunting. I did find  Robert C. Merton 's PhD dissertation at MIT. I am sure PhD students will give Scientific Commons a high five!