If you cannot lose yourself, how on earth will you learn about finding yourself?

Sir, Janan Ganesh writing about needed freedom asks: “Where can you lose yourself, either in crowds or in isolation from them? Where can you meander for hours? Where do you have to watch your words and manners the least? Where lets you get to and from other places on a whim?” “Citizen of nowhere” Prize for freest city goes to . . .” October 14.

Yes, where? And if today you can, where will you go tomorrow when facial recognizers follow you around?

Frightening. I have always held that all young (and perhaps old too) need to be able to lose themselves in order to gain the insights that allow them to find themselves. And that discovery journey must of course not be carried out with the assistance of a GPS.

Modern technology, including of course social media, seems to dramatically be changing the way young (and old too) position themselves in life and society.

PS. Try the following experiment. When you are driving down a mountain and you have some young passengers in the car, mention that you are going south, and when you are driving up, mention that you are going north. You’ll be amazed how many young will think you are right, without giving the least consideration to the fact you are driving in the opposite direction

@PerKurowski

Going up the mountain is going north, going down is going south, and west or east doesn’t matter, anyway around it.

Sir, Gillian Tett writes of “some fascinating studies by neurologists, for example, which suggest that when people rely on GPS to navigate, they stop interacting with their environment in a cognitive sense, and their brains appear to change.” “We’d be lost without GPS”

Yes, young people nowadays have no idea about a compass or what north and south is. If you by chance have a person under 15 in your car when you go up or down a hill, do the following experiment: Tell them “See we are now going north (or south)” and you will be amazed about how easy they swallow that.

But, being on this theme, we should also ask neurologists to study the brain of bankers to see how it has changed when, following the instructions of the Basel Committee, they transitioned from the “know your client” to the “read his credit rating” 

The GPS and the AAAs 

PS. Many cellphones have a compass app. Teach your kids how to use it, and keep a real compass at home  J 

@PerKurowski ©

Taxing the speed of capitals with a Tobin tax is a thousand time better than directing the capitals with capital requirements

Sir Tony Jackson in “Putting a rational spin on inefficient markets and irrational investors” August 31 writes “just because markets are inefficient, it need not mean investors are rational.” Right on. What happens if driving the car your GPS or radio, suddenly announces a roadblock ahead and recommends taking an alternative route? Rationally you do so though that could prove to be highly irrational if all others do the same at exactly the same moment.

That is why I sustain that taxing the speed of capitals with a Tobin tax is a thousand time better than directing capitals with Basel type capital requirements for banks based on credit ratings that could be wrong or that could change whether one second too early, one second too late or exactly in the right second.

Jackson refers to a paper by Paul Woolley and Professor Dimitri Vayanos titled “An Institutional Theory of Momentum and Reversal” which draws special conclusions about “assets with high idiosyncratic risk. And I wonder Sir, have you ever come around something with a higher idiosyncratic risk than an AAA-rated asset?