The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector: And Other Black Holes of Risk

Acknowledgements

xvi My academic base is provided by the McLaughlin Centre for Population Health Risk Assessment at the University of Ottawa. I am very grateful to the director of the centre, Professor Dan Krewski, for his support and encouragement of my research and writing since I became affiliated with it in 2001. I am greatly indebted to the following colleagues for reviewing and commenting on drafts of Chapter 2: Professors Philip Chang and Norma Nielson of the Haskayne School of Business at the University of Calgary; Brian Hunter of Calgary; and Sujit Kapadia of the Bank of England. My good friend Harrie Vredenburg, also of the Haskayne School, supported this work through an invitation to use it in a graduate seminar at the School in 2009. I also received many excellent suggestions for improvements to the book as a whole from two anonymous readers for the University of Ottawa Press. I frequently consulted entries in Wikipedia for many of the topics in this book, and would recommend that any reader seeking further information on any of the topics mentioned consult them too. For someone who started out as a budding academic more than fifty years ago (this is my fifty-fourth consecutive year ensconced in a university setting)—and, indeed, for anyone who has gone through a long apprenticeship at the feet of academic masters and learned how to do honest research—the current state of Internet resources is a wonder to behold. When I started out as a graduate student one could easily spend an entire day in a research library with nothing to show for the effort, because the Acknowledgements Acknowledgements | xvii right sources were hard to find, because the system of locating and delivering books to reading rooms by library staff was painfully slow, or for any of a dozen other reasons. When one finally found some key passages in an obscure volume the laborious work of transcribing passages by hand, and later transferring them to course papers typed on a manual machine using carbon copies, got under way. The difference between then and now is so astonishing that it seems unreal. I can locate in milliseconds material that it would have taken me weeks or months to unearth in times past. I can readily find certain types of references through which my entire interpretation of an issue might be altered materially, and which I could never have located earlier, no matter how much time I devoted to library research. For anyone with a university base, the entire corpus of past and current academic literature in peer-reviewed journals is instantly available. In this context, the voluntary enterprise known as Wikipedia seems to me to represent , for the most part, the great values of scholarship in the public interest. I find that the large majority of the Wikipedia entries I examine are reliable, thorough, reasonably well written and replete with links to additional resources. Crucially, if one has any doubts on the matter, it is ridiculously easy to check a Wikipedia entry against other sources. Critics based in the academic community may well not view my recommendation of Wikipedia entries very kindly, but this seems to me to represent a regrettable and unjustified prejudice on their part. The second major source of many of the references comprises articles published in the New York Times. In an age when the continued viability of print journalism is under heavy threat from those same Internet facilities, one can take pleasure in having access (including, of course, access via the Internet) to the invaluable information and analyses provided by talented investigative reporters working for an organization with strong traditions rooted in the best journalistic practices. If such organizations are allowed to disappear, the results generated by search engines will be severely impoverished. xviii | The Doom Loop in the Financial Sector There are also recurring references to reports prepared under the auspices of the United States National Academies. This amazing and inspiring operation, the origins of which go back to the government of Abraham Lincoln, consistently publishes authoritative , in-depth studies on scientific issues related to public policy, authored by the most credible practitioners in hundreds of different academic specializations. Indeed, there is almost no set of important science policy issues that has not been the subject of such a study. Other national academies around the world, including the Royal Society in the United Kingdom and the Royal Society of Canada...