Jeff Madrick, author of The Case for Big Government, and Jim Pinkerton of Fox News held a debate on Bloggingheads.tv earlier this month. The subject of their discussion? Is the American government capable of getting us out of the current financial debacle.

PUP author Skip Gates sat down to talk about his new book, LINCOLN ON RACE AND SLAVERY on The Colbert Report last night.

Click video to watch!

Amar Bhide, Glaubinger Professor at Columbia Business School and author of The Venturesome Economy, has a fascinating article posted at Business Week in which he argues that the mess we’re in started with financial theories that substituted banking innovation for due diligence and sensible regulation. Amar’s work was also featured this past weekend in the New York Times Magazine‘s Consumed column.

A longer version of the article is also available at Amar’s site.

“Where enterprise leads,” wrote British economist Joan Robinson in 1952, “finance follows.” But now finance has led industry—into a ravine. It didn’t start with the recent missteps of bankers, rating agencies, and mortgage brokers. Finance has been on the wrong trajectory for more than a half-century: The current crisis has deep historical roots in financial theories that regarded diversification as a substitute for due diligence—and in a dysfunctional regulatory system.

Commercial banking’s diversification, its expansion beyond traditional lending, has been disastrous. What’s needed now is a Glass-Steagall Act for the 21st century—rules requiring banks to focus simply on taking deposits and granting loans. This would protect depositors, limit financial-risk contagion, and allow the FDIC and the Federal Reserve to do what they do best. Others—hedge funds, private equity firms—would face no further regulation.

How did the banks’ recklessness, masked as innovation, evolve? Until the 1930s, economists had two views of uncertainty. John Maynard Keynes and Frank Knight (who then dominated the University of Chicago’s economics department) treated uncertainties as elements that couldn’t be quantified.Followers of the 18th century mathematician Reverend Thomas Bayes, on the other hand, quantified uncertainties as if they were bets placed on a roulette wheel. Throughout the 1940s and beyond, the Bayesian view gained the upper hand. Its conquest of scholarly journals helped mathematical modeling leap into financial practice. The idea was that all uncertainty could be reduced to probability distributions. Case-by-case judgment? Unnecessary. Returns could be maximized for the least risk simply by diversification.

Continue reading at Business Week.

In the immortal words of CodyJ, iTunes reviewer: “Who knew there would be videos of Cal. classes on iTunes?”

A popular mathematics professor at Princeton University, Adrian Banner designed his calculus review course to help highly motivated students ace calculus. And, as is often the case, out of the notes he developed for the course, a book was born–The Calculus Lifesaver.

To support the publication of the book, Princeton University Press and the author made video lectures of his course available online at our own Web site and through iTunes and other file download sites. These lectures (twenty-four, 2-hour lectures) have proven wildly successful by anyone’s measure–in 2008 the lectures were downloaded 92 million times, averaging over 7.6 million downloads a month.

Here’s a snippet from the third lecture:

Self-described “Enlightenment junkie” and economics expert Diane Coyle featured a discussion of books and bucks with Press Director Peter Dougherty on the new Enlightened Economist blog this past Friday.  As more publishers are moving their reference titles to the Web, Coyle wondered (and Dougherty explained) why Princeton is increasing the number of physical reference titles in its list, using the recently released Princeton Encyclopedia of the World Economy edited by Kenneth Reinert and Ramkishen Rajan as something of a case study.

Read the post here to learn more about how the new encyclopedia came to be, what a stolen book might say about the state of the economy, and why the reference reader is due for a comeback.

Apocalypse CERN

                                     Tony Rothman