Joris Luyendijk, the anthropologist who interviews finance professionals for The Guardian has recently published an interview with an LSE academic who  is a quant "of sorts".  Joris, as an anthropologist, has been trained to interview people and distinguish the wheat from the chaff, and appreciate when they are constructing myths to protect their psyche from unpalatable truths. One unpalatable truth that (primarily Anglo-Saxon) academics have to face up to is their role in the current financial crises that have ravaged first the Atlantic nations and now the Mediterranean ones, but...

When the short lived Edward VI became king of England in 1547, the nation’s wealth was based on the export of one commodity, wool, out of London and into Antwerp [Stone, 1947, p 104]. Edward was succeeded by his Catholic sister Mary, who married Philip of Spain but died young and was followed by her Protestant sister, Elizabeth, in 1559. During the turbulent times of Elizabeth’s reign, security, and not prosperity, became the main object of Tudor economics. Central to managing the economy was Thomas Gresham. Born in London around 1519 into a prominent merchant family, Gresham was...

Since John Maynard Keynes rescued a collection of Newton's private papers and declared that "Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians" the popular imagination has looked at the influence of esoteric arts on the emergence of Western' science. What is often forgotten is that in almost the same breath, Keynes declared Newton as "one of the greatest and most efficient of our civil servants", in recognition of his work as Master and Warden of the Mint, positions that he held longer than his Chair at Cambridge. The significance of the relationship between...