The-Collective-Stupidity
By Peter Walsh Almost overlooked in the wider, world financial crisis this spring is the precipitous decline, and perhaps impending fall, of the American art museum. All of a sudden, the money just isn’t there for them any more.
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh “There’s a gude time coming.” —Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy (1817) Americans, always attuned to the prices and classes of commodity, assume that the arts fall into the expensive luxury category: an ornament to good times but destined to wilt, like a hot house orchid, under the cold wind of recession. History…
Read Moreby Peter Walsh “Architecture is to make us know and remember who we are.” —Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1989) Harvard University’s Shad Hall: Can a building predict the future? Twenty years ago, the completion of Shad Hall, on the Harvard Business School campus, created a stir. Even for Harvard, the place was shrouded in deep secrecy.…
Read MoreBy Peter Walsh “But the trouble continued to spread over the country, and there were reports of big concerns, and even banks, in trouble.” — Upton Sinclair, Oil! (1927) No doubt there are still those who think economics is a dull, plodding technical field, akin to accounting, which pale men in green eyeshades practice somewhere…
Read Moreby Peter Walsh “Collective intelligence has no relationship to the stupidity of crowd behavior.” — Pierre Lévy, The Collective Intelligence The day before the New Hampshire primary, I went with a friend to hear George Packer, author of The Assassin’s Gate: America in Iraq, speak at Dartmouth College. I knew George twenty years ago, when…
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