The humanities of finance: how culture makes sense of financial risk and reward, and value propositions are not just about marketing skill. From the interview with Professor Mihir Desai:

[Desai]: Over the last half century, finance has become more quantitative, more precise, more elegant, and more abstract, which is wonderful for the discipline. But in the process, it’s also become detached from the reality of daily life for most people. At the same time, frankly, I think the humanities have become more divorced from commerce and finance, and they tend to view the latter with more derision than ever before. So there’s just this widening gulf between the way people in finance and business view the world and the way people in the humanities think about finance. And both are worse off as a result. In finance, we’ve lost the ability to think through the questions that humanities force us to think through, and in a way humanists no longer speak to as broad an audience as they could be speaking to. The book [The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return] closes with a call back to C.P. Snow’s “Two Cultures” because it is a similar problem. The gulf between finance and the humanities is a loss for all.

See a video interview with Desai here. And test your knowledge of the humanities and finance with this quiz.

h/t Rob Townsend @rbhisted