
Buying Tomorrow - pg
http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/buying-tomorrow.php?page=all
======
rdl
> "In his General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, written during the
> Great Depression, Keynes likened the activity to a newspaper contest in
> which, “The competitors have to pick out the six prettiest faces from a
> hundred photographs, the prize being awarded to the competitor whose choice
> most nearly corresponds to the average preferences of the competitors as a
> whole; so that each competitor has to pick, not those faces he himself finds
> prettiest, but those which he thinks likeliest to catch the fancy of the
> other competitors, all of whom are looking at the problem from the same
> point of view.”

This seems like it would be an interesting game; the last time I saw it was
when I had a customer hosting the same (using porn images, and real money,
back in 2001). I didn't know it was from Keynes back then!

Is there anything like this today (other than financial markets in general; I
mean something purely in the form of a game, and iterated with discrete
rounds, vs. fairly continous).

~~~
neilk
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Keynesian_beauty_contest>

Related: The NPR podcast Planet Money recently held a "contest" where you had
to pick the number from 0 to 100 that would be the average of all guesses. If
you assume everyone is rational (and everyone's estimate of each other's
rationality, recursively) it should be 0; the actual answer was around 11.5.

~~~
bdr
_the average of all guesses_

Should be something like "two-thirds of the average of all guesses".

------
smilliken
This might not be exact one I'm remembering, but there was an interesting
article posted here a few months back on Goldman Sachs and how they corned the
wheat futures market: [http://theglobalrealm.com/2011/02/04/the-food-bubble-
how-wal...](http://theglobalrealm.com/2011/02/04/the-food-bubble-how-wall-
street-starved-millions-and-got-away-with-it/)

------
zdw
Hmm...

    
    
        $ wc <text copy of this article>
        66    4283   31540 <text copy of this article>
    

Anyone care to write at TL;DR?

~~~
gruseom
This is ironic, as one of the points of Lapham's Quarterly is to restore
excellence to long-form journalism.

Side note: a subscription to LQ would make a great Christmas present for
discerning types.

Other side note: this video of Lapham at Google, although uneven, contains
some first-rate material about the history of journalism:
<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzQYkTttj7k>.

~~~
maxprogram
Lapham's is a great publication. Especially for anyone who loves history
(through the words of those living it, without the benefit of hindsight).

Though, you definitely have to love reading also to make it worth your while.
Some of it can get pretty dense. I usually end up reading only 2 or 3 of the
articles but still get a lot out of it.

~~~
gruseom
The emphasis on history is really the killer feature. I almost posted this a
few days ago because I love how they frame older documents in modern contexts:

[http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/question-
and-...](http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/voices-in-time/question-and-
answer.php)

I didn't, in the end, because I decided it would lead to a useless discussion
about how stupid Gandhi was.

On a tangential note, wouldn't it be great if there were a news network (say
like NPR, the good parts) whose focus was to include history in everything?
For example, when covering the Libyan war, also cover the colonial history,
previous wars fought there
([http://www.google.ca/#ssource=hp&q=%22benghazi+stakes%22](http://www.google.ca/#ssource=hp&q=%22benghazi+stakes%22))
- really anything related would do. We could better understand what's going
on, learn things of substance, _and_ the material wouldn't have to be the same
old recycled talking points bullshit, because you'd have all of history to
draw on. (It needn't just be history, either; that's just where the most ready
material would be.) Rather than interviewing bobbleheads for their opinions,
interview scholars for their learning. I bet you could get some pretty good
historians to go on for cheap.

~~~
maxprogram
Completely agree. I'd personally love something like that. But then again, I'd
think it would be a very VERY niche product. I have trouble enough convincing
people I know to watch an episode of Charlie Rose.

------
Hitchhiker
This line is remarkable:

" We court an exquisite ruin whenever we succumb to a pretty face that we fail
to recognize as our own. "

