A Boon for Old Times

Jim Boon, Benjamin Lee, and Edward LiPuma were overlapping graduate students in the University of Chicago's anthropology department in the early 1970s. At the same time, the business school and economics department were inventing modern finance. The key figures were Frank Knight, one of the founders of the Chicago School of Economics, Clifford Geertz, anthropology professor and one of Jim's Ph.D. advisors, and Fischer Black, one of the inventors of the Black-Scholes options pricing model, which would revolutionize finance. This piece traces some of the overlapping concerns around meaning, information, and interpretation that are still relevant today in an age of global finance.