Humans aren’t rational. So why should financial theories assume that they are? That’s the question writer Chelsea Wald posed in Crazy Money, in the Dec. 12, 2008 issue of Science. It’s a reasonable question, she explains.
Even the experts seem bewildered by the current economic crisis. Quantitative analysts (quants)–the whiz-kid financial engineers whose algorithms have dominated Wall Street trading in recent years–have watched those algorithms fail. Former Federal Reserve Chair Alan Greenspan acknowledged in October that there was “a flaw in the model that I perceived … defines how the world works.” Continue reading
