“ Extensive interviews with money managers have led him to posit that because certain financial instruments are so volatile and hard to value, they trigger humans’ tendency to fantasize. Borrowing language from Sigmund Freud, he calls such financial assets “phantastic objects,” which people see alternately as capable of fulfilling their dreams of wealth and power or utterly worthless and repulsive.
Economists’ Grail: A Post-Crash Model
Thaaaat's Numberwang
"Number occupies a strategic position in this conflict, because it is simultaneously the most generalized basis of thought and that which demands most abruptly the question of its being." — Alain Badiou
See also Mitchell & Webb's "Numberwang" sketch.
