Dr. Stranglove’s Game

I’m sitting in the train station of Brussels, have just missed my train, and the next is not for 3 hours. I thought this was the 21st century, but, somehow, I must be mistaken. So I bought hideously expensive internet access *you probably can guess by now that I am not an entirely happy cookie*, read my emails and then thought, why not share with you a very interesting and amusing book:

Paul Strathern.  Dr. Strangelove’s Game: A Brief History of Economic Genius.  London: Penguin, 2001.

Here are some of my favorite quotes from it:

“Instability would appear to be fundamental to any such [financial] system, and it is arguably the very nature of how it works.”

Interesting when you view it from a complexity theory standpoint, I think. We cannot know everything about it, but we must still try and keep the international financial system from crashing somehow.

From Robert Owen, the founding father of the British trade unions who was one of the first to find out that happy and educated workers are more productive:

“Marriage is an unnatural crime [which] destroys the finest feelings and best powers of the species, by changing sincerity, kindness, affection, sympathy and pure love into deception, envy, jealousy, hatred and revenge…”

For those who wonder why I like this statement, remember I went to school in Berkeley … and, like Owen, I am married …

and on a more serious, discursive note:

“Money did not have a self, it had a function. Money wasn’t pieces of gold, or even the things for which they could be exchanged. It wasn’t a thing, it was a action … Money should be regarded as a verb, not a noun.”

(This is Stathern taking about John Law, the person to invent paper money)

Have fun with these…

Kirsten

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