Patrick Cockburn explains the recent up-welling of religious warfare occurring in the Middle East in his book, The Jihadis Return: ISIS and the New Sunni Uprising. The situation in the Middle East could be the defining crisis of my generation and Cockburn does a good job reporting the details.
In No One Would Listen: A True Financial Thriller, Harry Markopolos, the financial fraud detective who studied Bernie Madoff’s questionable returns in early 2000, narrates the entire history and investigation of Bernie Madoff’s ponzi scheme — starting in 1998. I was shocked, as was Markopolos, on learning about the negligence and failure of the SEC on numerous occasions. The book provides a good summary account of the Madoff fraud and the people involved. It also provides important insight into financial fraud, reform, and regulations.
To me, the idea of infinite memory processes is one of the most important concepts touched on by Mandelbrot in this book. It suggests that economists and traders should be developing models and theories which value the importance of price series and data going back decades. And it makes sense to me that people and prices do not change their fundamental behavior over extended periods of technological evolution. However, I suspect that organisms do change their fundamental behavior if the time horizon is thousands or millions of years. I am very curious to read more about Hurst’s studies of the Nile.
Kondratieff Waves, Warfare and World Security: Volume 5 NATO Security through Science Series: Human and Societal Dynamics by T.C. Devezas is what I am currently reading.
Fascinating to say the least.
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