A Strange Omission

I mentioned the 41 page bibliography to be found at the back of Mirowski’s book – this is not as impressive as at it might seem to the casual reader. Indeed in anyone else’s book, I might suspect  such a list is a sign of self-doubt and a need to assert one’s status…. It’s pretty easy to compile a list – what is much more challenging is to summarise the key argument of each book or article and to make a judgement about how it compares in, for example, coherence with others. Even better if you can classify the various explanations and fit the books into such a classification – Howard Davies, for example, identified 39 different explanations of the financial meltdown

I’ve googled various phrases to try to find such an annotated bibliography of the global crisis – and cannot really find one - let alone one with a decent structure. By way of comparison, look at the annotated bibliography for “change agents” I put on my website a few years back

Two frequently referenced articles are Reading about the financial crisis – a 21 book review - a 40 page note produced in 2012 by Andrew Lo which, as he puts it in the introduction, 

“underscores the desperate need for the economics profession to establish a single set of facts from which more accurate inferences and narratives can be constructed”

And “Getting up to speed on the causes of the financial crisis” looks at only 16 docs between 2007-09

A (very short) Financial Crisis reading List is offered by a blog but one which serves a very simple E-book - “Too Big Has Failed”. The short annotated list offered by the Pluto Press simply advertises a few books in that particular publisher’s stable.

Misrule of Experts (2011) is one of a large number of papers produced by the Centre for Research on Socio-Cultural Change which offers a useful analysis but hardly a bibliography - let alone an annotated one. And the same is true of the minority report produced by the FinancialCrisis Inquiry Commission in 2011 

Responsibilities, ethics and the Financial Crisis is a useful website……part of a 3 year Arts and Humanities Research Council-funded project which brings together "philosophers, economists and social policy academics". It too has reading lists - but none of them annotated. 

So where, please, is there a real annotated bibliography of the events which are now shaping a generation – if not a civilisation ??? And can anyone offer a reason for this absence??