by Laura Conaway

Uri Shwed listened to Niall Ferguson on our podcasts this week. He writes:

You guys are doing a great job. My evening commute is much sadder, because I already listened to you in the morning. BUT. . .

 

Perhaps you guys should step a little outside of econ and finance departments? follow the your own spirit of "coffee-line-in-bklyn-is-a-better-indicator-than-Dow". There are many smart sociologists, anthropologists, and others who study the questions you are dealing with. People have been asking what money and wealth is before the current crisis. They may be way more to the point than economists, who basically see their world views collapse and still cling to it.

All this is an introduction to the huge plagiarism you guys let Niall Ferguson go through with..."Money is a relationship"? how about "Capital is a social relation" (Karl Marx, "Wage Labour and Capital", 1847)?

Of course, there's nothing wrong in taking something someone said 150 years ago and make a career out of it,. But you need to maintain two things: give credit where its due, and understand what you are talking about. Money is a relationship, so the answer to the second question (Where did the money go?) is very simple - it went to where our trust went. If and when we reconstitute the social relationships that enabled the over valuation of resources in 2007, then we would really have these values again.

The more general point is that there are so many interesting views out there that are not apologetic economists....Why is it you guys maintain the view that people need "economist house calls"? isn't our current situations related to the fact that we delegated a little too much to economists?

Still the best show on the economy around. Keep up the good work, but google "economic sociology". You brought an MIT professor to tell how he figured out something every undergrad in sociology gets in social theory 101.