Michael Blastland
speaker
745 appearances
4 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2011
last heard Aug 2011
Michael Blastland’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
That is, to know ourselves better, with all our oddities and reasons, and then to understand how these everyday personal quirks come together to cause global boom and bust.
This, for Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz, is economics' holy grail.
So there's a fair bit for economics to do.
Though not for us.
We're nearly done with our story.
But before we go, listen to this.
See if you can guess what it is.
It's a chorus of metronomes in Cambridge University's engineering lab.
They're standing on a platform suspended by ropes, then set off, unsynchronised.
Metronomes keep their own steady time, that's their point, except that they don't.
Listen again.
They coordinate.
How?
By talking to one another.
They send vibrations through the platform.
These influence the movement of the other metronomes.
They're not independent at all.
Soon they're in step like choreographed penguins.
It's not a bad analogy for how people with their own rationality can start behaving like a beastly herd.
Heady with optimism or pessimism.
Showing 281–300 of 745 · page 15 of 38
← Previous
Next →