Subprime mortgages and CDS

Here is an interesting interview with Michael Lewis about the financial meltdown.  Part of it has to do with how so many people made so many dumb mistakes.  I hope this makes people more skeptical of their decisions, and do a bit more analysis and think about how it could go wrong.

Costs and risks

The "Top Gear" guy had a nice rant in the Times Online about laws to mitigate risks.  Can we think of a way to connect the risk with the costs?  Suppose that we could eliminate a risk entirely if everyone just paid a small price.  Think polio, for example.  Well, then what about this risk, or that risk.  Surely the same solution applies, right?  As Jeremy points out, we all take our shoes off at the airport now, so the terrorists decided to use their underwear.  What will we have to do now, if risk elimination is the goal.

Or are there risks that we just have to live with?  Where do we draw the line?  Can we use probabilities and decision analysis to help make policies a little more bearable?

Rankings

Here is the most admired companies list for this year.  There are quite a few ways to set up the mechanics for the 'scoring' and there is not much in the way of confidence intervals in the article.  Would the article be more or less effective if there were statistical ties in the rankings?  How many ties would there be?

Here are the undergraduate business school rankings for 2010.