Propheteers: The Future of Wall Street’s False Prophets

Along with legitimate scholars and creative geniuses, the art and science of forecasting has always attracted opportunists eager to exploit people’s anxieties about the inherently uncertain future.  On Wall Street, propheteers today enjoy a fantastically favorable climate for their craft.

Homo Economicus is a Psychopath?

I typically wouldn’t expect a distinguished magazine like The Atlantic to publish a superficially provocative article wrapped in a playfully hostile thesis.  Yet, that’s exactly what I found here: another gratuitous attack on Homo Economicus, another regurgitation of boilerplate arguments about the menace of “maximizing shareholder value.”  Alas, Atlantic, you disappoint me.  Feel free to beat up the Economic Man, but understand that this blood sport started decades ago. Lenin wrote The State and the Revolution in 1917. We already know that behavioral finance has humbled Home Economicus into a diminished posture.  The idea that corporations should do more than serve the economic interests of their shareholders is also very old.  How does this article advance the narrative or accomplish anything besides allowing the author to promote his book?

Is Corporate Creativity Becoming an Oxymoron?

In a recent IBM survey of 1,500 CEOs from 60 countries, the majority of the respondents pointed to creativity as the most crucial factor for future success.  Over the past decade or so, we’ve heard this sentiment reiterated in countless speeches by politicians and in the vast scholarly literature and blog chatter on the decline of U.S. creativity and innovation.  Everybody seems to agree that the animal spirits of invention urgently need a shot of adrenaline.