>I recommend a recent Twentieth Century Fund paperback on security market
>"reform" of a few years ago. Many of us know that the Fund got its start
>with Filene (as in basement) money during the depression as a way of
>promoting the humanization of capitalism, so the topic is logical. Tobin
>(the model for Star Trek's Q?) himself contributed and ended-up having to
>defend his tax in a special dissent because the other vaguely liberal
>finance people (robert J. Shiller etc.) just couldn't swallow it.
>Their arguments against are remarkable for their shallowness, fear, or
>synchophancy (take your pick) and are worth reading just for that. The
>title escapes me, but I think you can find it under Schiller's name in
>books in print. And, it has the virtue of being written in english.
It's called Who's Minding the Store? It was the product of a moment of U.S. ruling class thinking a few years back that worried that Wall Street capitalism was dangerously short-termist. It was always a minority view within the elite, and has now almost entirely been effaced by the present mood of triumphalism. There was a great Wall Street Journal front-pager just after Asia blew saying that the crisis proved that short-termism was the one true way.
The book is a wonderful example of a certain kind of liberal thinking. It consists mainly of a long essay by Shiller on the excessive volatility of financial markets (excessive, that is, relative to underlying fundamentals). The implication was that basing real investment decisions on such a fickle guide would be extremely risky. But, having made this rather serious diagnosis, all they savants collected by the Twentieth Century Fund could recommend was the cultivation of a spirit of patience among portfolio managers. Even Tobin's modest tax proposal was considered too radical.
Doug