Making Peas From Pea Soup

An Army of Quants Has Annihilated A Country

In trying to understand this whole bank disaster situation and the concepts involved - like derivatives, etc., I came across this article from 2003 by a guy who teaches some of these concepts to people called “Quants” who are the geeks who develop these theoretical valuations of assets that are used by these Wall Street “Fund” makers to make oodles of profit and gigantic salaries.

In the article he muses on about the school/real-world methods of learning. In doing so, he presents a fascinating picture of a science that today has our culture by the balls - a science that isn’t even a science, but rather a system created to explain things that only exist if you believe the explanation. When I read the article - here in 2009, with chaos flooding through the financial world, I could finally understand how greed had constructed a fake world for its own purposes, and why the value of our homes - and America itself, is helplessly sinking until it finds it's true worth.