Wants, Greed, and Capitalism

A special TV program on capitalism (link) will be broadcasted tomorrow by NHK from 11pm (50 minutes) in Japan. The Japanese title of the program is "欲望と資本主義", which roughly corresponds to the title of this blog post. The program aims to (re)consider essential aspects of our economic society and the future of capitalism (as well as its origin), focusing especially on people's wants and greed. I contribute to the program as a navigator, interviewing major players from academia, financial sector and IT industry. The persons whom I made interviews are listed below (alphabetical order):

- Alvin E. Roth, Professor at Stanford University (Nobel laureate)
- Tomas Sedlacek, Chief Macroeconomic Strategist at CSOB
- Scott Stanford, Co-Founder & Managing Partner at Sherpa Capital
- Joseph E. Stiglitz, Professor at Columbia University (Nobel laureate)
- William Tanuwijaya, founder & CEO at Tokopedia

I would be grateful for everyone involved in this wonderful program. Really look forward to watching it :)

Historical drama on the creation of game theory

I just came back to Tokyo after attending the SAET conference (link) in Singapore and the world congress of the Econometric Society (link) in China (Shanghai). It was a great experience to visit the two Asian countries that I have never been before. I really enjoyed the conferences, meeting lots of people such as my friends, co-authors, teachers, and big names.

Now it's time to go back to my work! Many thanks to everyone I met there. Hope all of you would have a productive academic year starting from September :)

The short article below is what I had prepared before I left Japan:

A new book on the early history of game theory came out recently. It focuses on the two founding fathers, Von Neumann and Morgenstern.

"Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory: From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960" by Robert Leonard, Cambridge University Press (link)

As a reviewer's comment, Harold W. Kuhn, a professor emeritus of mathematics at Princeton university describes the book as follows:

The publication of The Theory of Games and Economic Behavior by John von Neumann and Oskar Morgenstern in 1944 was hailed by one reviewer as 'one of the major scientific achievements of the first half of the twentieth century.' Another reviewer signaled that 'the techniques applied by the authors in tackling economic problems are of sufficient generality to be valid in political science, sociology, or even military strategy.' In this exemplary study in the history of economics, Robert Leonard has given us a masterful account of the gestation of this work, starting with the importance of chess in European intellectual life at the beginning of the twentieth century and ending with the military applications of game theory at the RAND Corporation during the middle of the century.

The predecessor of the work is the author's 1995 article in the Journal of Economic Literature, which won the Best Article Award of the History of Economics Society.

Robert Leonard (1995) "Von Neumann, Morgenstern, and the Creation of Game Theory From Chess to Social Science, 1900–1960" (link)