My essay, “Defending Shylock: Productive Work in Financial Markets,” is now available in pamphlet form at Amazon. The essay is also available for free at the Social Science Research Network.
In this essay I discuss the great value that financial markets add to an economy and the nature of the intellectual work that underlays them. In addition, I argue against the usual criticisms of financial markets that those who work in them are zero-sum parasites upon the physical labor and that they make merely “paper profits.”
Along the way, I discuss controversial figures such as Martha Stewart, Michael Milken, Aristotle Onassis, Ivan Boesky, Jesus, Augustus, and Shakespeare’s character Shylock from The Merchant of Venice.