Money in the Mirror

摘要

On october 3,2008, President George W. Bush signed the Troubled Asset Relief Program bill into law, delivering $450 billion to failing banks on the premise that it would prevent their collapse and stimulate a faltering economy. Like millions of Americans, Dmitri Williams, an associate professor of communications at the University of Southern California, found TARP troubling- not because the bill provided too much or (as many economists argued) too little, but because it was unscientific. "We did a half-a-trillion-dollar experiment with the economy and had no control group," he says. Setting up a test bed for a program as complex as TARP might be difficult, but it wasn't impossible. Williams had found just such a petri dish in videogames.