Another thought is- was the importance of financial theory. I've talked a lot about behavioral finance in this course but I want to come back and say that mathematical finance of the traditional kind is still extremely important. And the world will never be the same again because after the development of mathematical finance. There is a theory of the allocation of scarce resources and also of the pooling of information through markets. That was not understood by most people in the early 20th century. And that's why I read critics of finance with a certain amount of skepticism although I'm also one of them. I think finance. I find myself admiring the financial system, the efficiency with which it feeds billions of people and provides education and innovations to them. So I think that the basic financial theory is valid. And even people who seem to be doing things that are remote from productive, it look like takers, like people who trade in options for example. They are not necessarily takers. They're doing something for the system that makes it more efficient. And the benefits are not, to society are not easily seen. On the other hand, the critics may have a point about recent trends that things are not going absolutely optimally. So behavioral finance which we've talked about in this course, which involves other social sciences like psychology. I think is the salvation of mathematical finance because it's like adding friction to Newtonian mechanics. Isaac Newton described the motions of the planets but wasn't able to describe the motions of machines here on Earth because there were other things like frictions that intervened with his laws of mechanics. So we have to add friction to those models. And similarly, adding psychological principles to mathematical finance is important. There are the hard core mathematical people. I've met the mathematical finance that have a tendency to be, act as if they're threatened by behavioral finance. I don't think that's where they should be reacting to. I mentioned law schools. You know, when I first got my PhD I was hardly aware of law schools. It seems over the course of my career and trying to read and understand economics and finance, I find myself more and more reading law journals and learning what goes on in law schools. I think it just goes back to where Gillian Tett called the "silo effect". It's unfortunate that we are separated from- we in economics, are separated from professional schools. We have a separate management school too. Separate law school. I guess it's maybe necessary to have these compartmentalizations. And yet, it seems to me that they operate together. Better Together. So law schools are as necessary as the math finance people. What I like about law schools is that they would operate very much in the real world. Especially in a common law environment where cases are the basis of law. So that there's individual conflicts among people that have to be resolved. Very real world, very much psychological. You can't be, well, maybe there is a pure mathematical law but mostly it's down to Earth. And it seems to me that most of the economic principle proposals that are embodied in laws are from law school people who probably read economics.
