Minds and markets

Richard Lea, journalist for The Guardian, reviews the book The Hour Between Dog and Wolf: Risk-taking, Gut Feelings and the Biology of Boom and Bust in Nature. He finds that minds, including those of financial traders, have a physiological basis, and this impels him to advocate a financial-transaction tax to reduce market volatility. And:

Readers reeling from the effects of the most recent financial Armageddon may feel that the Universe needs some new masters.

By this he perhaps means that we need to give even more power to politicians and bureaucrats. But I bet they have physiologically-based minds too.

In another book review in the same issue Tom MacMillan, who says that we must thank government social programs for hunger reduction, defends consuming locally grown food with the argument that

[A]bove a certain point, growth in gross domestic product is not correlated with improved well-being. At the core of progressive locavore thinking are efforts to address this by questioning the association between material consumption and prosperity, pushing use of renewable resources and reducing economic inequalities.

Minds are funny.