Arnold Kling on One-Sided Bets

By -
Here.

Money quote:
'If I offer flood insurance in New Orleans on behalf of my company, my bet might be "There won't be another Katrina in 2011." Let's say that we lose $1 billion if I am wrong, and we win $1 million (in insurance premiums) if I am right. If the chance of another Katrina is one out of 1000, that is a fair bet. But I can choose to make that bet even if the chance is 1 out of 50. The chances are 49 out of 50 that this deal will show a nice profit and I can get a fat bonus, and 1 out of 50 that I lose my job and the shareholders take big losses. A reasonable deal--at least for me.'

This sort of thing goes on in financial companies all the time. Traders make bets far, far more risky (given the payoffs) than they would if it were their own money. But you could make one of these a year for fifty years and the odds would be you're fine. Until the 51st year, when you bring down Barings.

Comments

  1. Bob Murphy10:36 PM

    It would be as foolish for me to challenge your observation, as it would be for you to doubt my anecdotes about working in the dairy department of a grocery store.

    But, what if the naive free-marketeer asks, "Why do the shareholders allow this type of thing, if it's so obvious to everybody at the firm?"

    ReplyDelete
  2. gcallah5:13 AM

    I, too, worked at a dairy store.

    The shareholders do the best they can, but:
    a) These things are not obvious to everyone at the firm; and
    b) The shareholders interest in what's going on at any one of the (perhaps many) firms they hold stock in is less intense than the acute interest the managers of that one firm have in bilking those shareholders to line their own pockets.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more