Welcome to the home of Noah Brier. I'm the co-founder of Variance and general internet tinkerer. Most of my writing these days is happening over at Why is this interesting?, a daily email full of interesting stuff. This site has been around since 2004. Feel free to get in touch. Good places to get started are my Framework of the Day posts or my favorite books and podcasts. Get in touch.

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The Risk Virus?

Highlighting some recent conversation and research The New York Times Economix Blog asks an awesome questions: “Could economic theory, historically dominated by men, possibly overstate the benefits of risk-taking and competition?”

They follow that up with the acknowledgment that it would be really tough to figure out an easy experiment to get at the answer, but it still seems worth thinking about. I admittedly don’t know much about economics (whatever you can learn from reading some blogs for about six months and a few books that are tangentially related at best), but it’s interesting to think about the role of economic education in the market. What if everyone who is trained in economics and managing massive amounts of money in the market is working off the same flawed view of risk? Crazy to think about a major inefficiency existing in the education system and therefore spreading itself like a virus through the industry.

July 6, 2009