Although the instruments and transactions most closely associated with the financial crisis of 2008 and 2009 were novel, the underlying themes that played out in the crisis were familiar from previous episodes: Competitive dynamics resulted in excessive leverage and risk-taking by large,...

We adopt an `epistemic' interpretation of social decisions: there is an objectively correct choice, each voter receives a `noisy signal' of the correct choice, and the social objective is to aggregate these signals to make the best possible guess about the correct choice. One epistemic method is...

This paper discusses quantitative information as a historiographic instrument: its individual characteristics and those it shows in sets of data, its capacity to describe historical phenomena and the uses historian give to them. It specially examines the sense and limits of quantitative...