HodgBlog

I spend a lot of time thinking about what I'm doing vs. what I could be doing, and what's important in life -- finding meaning in life, rather than looking for The Meaning of Life. Several books have helped draw my thoughts together, including Melissa Everett's Making a Living While Making a Difference, which I read more than 10 years ago, and two I read more recently: the Dalai Lama's Ethics for a New Millennium, and Viktor E. Frankl's Man's Search for Meaning. Here are some thoughts:

I recently read an interesting book by James Tooley called The Beautiful Tree: A Personal Journey Into How the World's Poorest People Are Educating Themselves, published by the Cato Institute.

I recently read The Green Collar Economy, by Van Jones (with a forward by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.). I think President Obama must have read it too, since the ideas he's been talking about lately for fixing the economy are basically the same as what Jones sets out in his book. This is a good thing, in my opinion. Here are the main points from this book:

Because I used to work on Wall Street, some people I know are under the (incorrect) impression that I'm an expert in all things financial, and they have been asking me if I can explain how we got into our current state of financial collapse. So, I thought I would write a short summary of my understanding of how rampant greed around the practice of sub-prime lending led to a full-scale financial crisis.

First, let's set the scene: the sub-prime lending market. Here's a brief summary of how it worked: