On his book Speculation: A History of the Fine Line between Gambling and Investing
Cover Interview of September 10, 2017
In a nutshell
Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the
legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment
is necessary and ought to be encouraged. There has also been a near consensus,
one that has weakened recently but is still substantial, that gambling
is dangerous and ought to be discouraged or even prohibited. But what about speculation?
Speculation lies somewhere between investing and gambling.
It has attributes of both. Should speculation be legal? Should it be illegal?
Should some kinds be legal and others illegal? Which kinds? Throughout American
history (and the history of other places too, but this book is just about the
United States), speculation has presented a puzzle to the legal system. To
figure out how to treat speculation, we have always needed to distinguish
between two kinds of risky commerce, a good kind the law should promote and a
bad kind the law should deter. But how should that line be drawn?
My book traces the history of debates on this set of
questions, from the crash of 1792 to the present.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Speculation is about a dilemma that has troubled the legal system for a long time. For centuries, there has been a consensus that investment is necessary and ought to be encouraged. There has also been a near consensus, one that has weakened recently but is still substantial, that gambling is dangerous and ought to be discouraged or even prohibited. But what about speculation?
Speculation lies somewhere between investing and gambling. It has attributes of both. Should speculation be legal? Should it be illegal? Should some kinds be legal and others illegal? Which kinds? Throughout American history (and the history of other places too, but this book is just about the United States), speculation has presented a puzzle to the legal system. To figure out how to treat speculation, we have always needed to distinguish between two kinds of risky commerce, a good kind the law should promote and a bad kind the law should deter. But how should that line be drawn?
My book traces the history of debates on this set of questions, from the crash of 1792 to the present.