Connecting Occupy Wall Street to the Penn State scandal.

Here's a new Bloggingheads video I did with Glenn Loury, who's an economics professor at Brown. We talk about Rick Perry, Herman Cain, Occupy Wall Street, and Penn State. A big topic is shame — they call this the "Special Shame Edition" — and I want to highlight something Glenn says about Occupy Wall Street and a way that I connect his insight to the Penn State story.

In the first clip, Glenn is saying that the OWS protesters have made him feel uneasy as a member of the economics profession — the "alchemists" who whipped up all these complex financial devices.



The economists benefit amongst themselves, lauding each other for their great works, and the protesters hold up a different mirror, in which the economist can see shame.

Later in the diavlog, we're talking about the Penn State scandal, and I'm puzzling over how so many men — honorable men — could operate together to suppress their own awareness of the evil they harbored within, and I perceive a similarity in they way they closed ranks and functioned as a self-regarding, self-promoting group:

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Here's the movie Glenn mentions in the first clip: "Inside Job."