The Complexity of Wealth Management

4min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

Sociologist Brooke Harrington has studied offshore wealth managers. She says they can be thought of as both a complex system and a scale-free network. The US, the UK, Hong Kong, Russia, China all have slightly different perspectives on how this works. This podcast looks at human behavior en masse in a group context with an eye to understanding issues that are very relevant to public policy going forward.

The modern world is large and interconnected, and there are a lot of systems that might be important to how it functions but about which most people are barely aware. One of these is the offshore wealth management network, which wealthy individuals can use both legitimately (to invest and plan their money) and less legitimately (to avoid taxation or hide questionable practices generally). Brooke Harrington is a sociologist who has studied offshore wealth management, including by training to be one. In a recent paper, she and colleagues analyze networks of offshore wealth managers as a complex system, uncovering power-law behavior and interesting nation-dependent network structures.

Web site with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2023/05/22/237-brooke-harrington-on-offshore-wealth-as-a-complex-system/

Support Mindscape on Patreon.

Brooke Harrington received her Ph.D. in sociology from Harvard University. She is currently a professor of sociology at Dartmouth College. Among her awards are the IPM Outstanding Book Award from the American Sociological Association. She is the author of Capital Without Borders: Wealth Management and the One Percent.

See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.