Abstract

Soon after the 2008 financial crisis, Gillian Tett, an anthropologist and the US Managing Editor of the Financial Times, suggested that regulators’ and practitioners’ inability to anticipate and respond to deep problems in the financial industry could be traced back to what she called “silo thinking,” wherein experts in one area know nothing about the methods and research of other areas. As she put it, “the essential challenges for investors today…”—and, we might add, for regulators and academics—is “to understand the micro-details of the silos, and see how all the macro-pieces add up”.In years since, many researchers in many fields have sought to identify causes of the...