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2013 | Buch | 2. Auflage

Morals and Markets

The Dangerous Balance

verfasst von: Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill

Verlag: Palgrave Macmillan US

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Friedman and McNeill draw on recent research in evolutionary game theory and behavioral economics to explore the relationship between our moral codes and our market systems. They show how imbalance between morals and markets is at the root of the recent corporate scandals in the US as well as the global financial crisis the world continues to face.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Frontmatter

Prologue: A Tale of Two Tilts

Prologue: A Tale of Two Tilts
Abstract
Mikhail Gorbachev was relaxing in his lavish villa in the Crimea at 4:50 pm on August 18, 1991, when he learned he had visitors. One was a secret police official. He picked up his phone to see who the others were, but the line was dead. He tried others. They were all dead. He had heard murmurings of a coup before taking this vacation, but had waved them away. Now he gazed around at his palace, with its marble stairways and escalator down to the Black Sea, and felt dread.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill

Two Halves of the Balance

Frontmatter
1. The Savanna Code: What Good Are Morals?
Abstract
Dawn can be cool and quiet in Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania. The hyenas cease wailing and thorn bushes on the canyon’s brink tremble in the breeze. Soon, the sun will light the gray strata of the ravine, and eventually it will rise higher in the blue sky and oppress the land with heat. Tourists will arrive from all over the globe, snapping photos and uploading them to their Facebook pages.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
2. The Rise of Wealth: How We Became Civilized and Started Shopping
Abstract
In 25,000 BC a few people at Dolni Vestonice, now in the Czech Republic, lived in shelters made of rocks, wood, and mastodon bones. Most tribes back then dwelt in caves or temporary huts, and some on the European steppe made torches by burning animal fat in the bulbs of mammoth femurs. From the era of Homo habilis through 10,000 BC, total global wealth was near zero.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill

Worlds Out of Kilter

Frontmatter
3. From Melqart to Zombieworld: Adventures in Imbalance
Abstract
Loops feed back. We began with two stories: the heist of Russia’s economy itself and the torment in Greece. But we told you chronicles, almost fairy tales. Great events occurred, but they just seemed to happen. In fact, neither makes sense without the moral background. In both cases, markets and morals were disastrously misaligned. And these are just two examples. Let’s look deeper into these and several others.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
4. Madness, Lies, and Crashes: When Prices Run Free
Abstract
Financial Armageddon hit Wall Street early Monday morning September 15, 2008. Following a damp weekend filled with ominous rumors, anyone tuning into the morning news heard that venerable Lehman Brothers had filed for bankruptcy, and that Merrill Lynch, stock broker to millions of ordinary investors, had collapsed into the arms of an obscure North Carolina bank that had, a few years earlier, hijacked the Bank of America name.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
5. Blundering Back to Balance: TARP and Tear Gas
Abstract
Western economies crawled for years after 2008. Riots lit up Europe even as a gray miasma settled on household confidence. Citizens began speaking of finance as a predator, and scandals like the rigging of the Libor interest rate kept coming. Once-remote moral issues were now on everyone’s lips.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
6. China: Morals and the Rush to Wealth
Abstract
In 1976, China seemed in ruins. The ten years of strife called the Cultural Revolution had torn society apart, turning kids against parents, emptying schools and universities, and paralyzing the national government. The economy was a wasteland, and both the United States and the Soviet Union seemed poised to take advantage. Yet somehow the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) managed to renew itself and put China on a path of astonishing economic growth.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill

Life Around Us

Frontmatter
7. From Hudson’s Bay to eBay: Why Some People Like Going to Work
Abstract
In 1805 the venerable Hudson’s Bay Company was sinking fast. Since 1670 its Royal Charter had given it a monopoly on the best trade routes to Europe for fine Canadian furs, but the lucrative business had recently attracted a new firm, North West. Its trappers and traders had to haul furs an extra 1,500 miles in birch-bark canoes, often over killing portages. Despite that huge cost disadvantage, North West had somehow managed to snare over 80 percent of market share, and Hudson’s Bay’s stock was in free fall.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
8. Markets and Sin: Murder, Megacasinos, and Drug Wars
Abstract
Victorian philosophers confidently predicted that crime and vice would fade away as the human species evolved. That hasn’t quite happened. For example, the State of California used to spend twice as much on universities as jails, but now the two are almost equal—though students enrich the economy and prisoners sap it. The War on Drugs cost US taxpayers about $15 billion in 2010, down from S40 billion in the Bush era, and it has been about as effective as Caligula’s war against the sea.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
9. Underworlds: The Tao of Gangs
Abstract
In a year early in this century, you could have seen a small group of men hauling a TV set and a satellite dish up into the beige, bush-speckled mountains around Khost, Afghanistan. Their leader had asked for this equipment for reasons unknown to them, but they trusted him. Yet once in camp, the TV gave nothing but white noise. They aimed the dish at every part of the sky, but all was static. The outside world wasn’t reaching them. Finally someone turned on a radio.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
10. Cooling the Earth: The Preservation Markets
Abstract
Just off New England’s coast, the cold, mineral-rich Labrador Current mixes with the warm Gulf Stream over a series of underwater plateaus, called banks, and nurtures a startling variety of marine plants, animals, and birds. Some, like pollock, lobster, and scallops, are quite valuable commercially.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
11. The World Ahead
Abstract
We evolved in terrain of grassland and scattered trees so different from our present-day housing tracts and glass towers that we’d have trouble surviving in it—as our ancestors might in ours. The miracle is that our savanna genome made us so adaptable that we could move from hunting antelopes to trading CDSs and building global webs of finance.
Daniel Friedman, Daniel McNeill
Backmatter
Metadaten
Titel
Morals and Markets
verfasst von
Daniel Friedman
Daniel McNeill
Copyright-Jahr
2013
Verlag
Palgrave Macmillan US
Electronic ISBN
978-1-137-33152-6
Print ISBN
978-1-137-28258-3
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331526