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your turn by Robert J. Shiller Teaching Finance as a Force for Good world, I argue that most business professionals view financial tools as instruments that can help them steward society���s assets and protect people against economic risk as they seek to achieve other goals. In fact, I think that the young oceanographers Lewis describes would have a better chance of realizing their dreams if they studied for careers in finance. Let���s consider their true goals. Do they really want to ���set out to sea,��� as Lewis suggests? Perhaps they do aspire to experience nature from the deck of a ship. But I���m guessing that idealistic young deep-water enthusiasts may feel a stronger commitment to protect the oceans and make sure they are not destroyed by the expanding circle of human activities. Achieving that objective is substantially an economic problem that will be mastered by people who understand finance. When commentators like Michael Lewis express skepticism about the purposes of the financial community, people come to believe that financial innovations are just subterfuges to hide the greed of aggressively selfish people. But many of the recent financial innovations have worked to benefit the world. For instance, there���s a financial innovation that is helping to preserve the ocean���and the rest of the environment. The ���cap and trade��� system regulates the CO2 emissions that companies are allowed to emit into the atmosphere. Industries that emit the most CO2 can buy permits from companies that have reduced their own emissions, resulting in an economically efficient program that has lowered carbon emissions. Today, five climate exchanges oversee the cap and trade system worldwide: the Chicago Climate Exchange, Commodity Exchange Bratislava, The European Climate Exchange, the European Energy Exchange, and NASDAQ OMX Commodities Europe. Innovation in this area has been lively. Here���s another example. Within the last two years, financial innova- Financial tools coordinate the activities of diverse people and allow them to get things done. 66 January/February 2013 BizEd M ichae l Mar slan d The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine is Michael Lewis��� best-selling 2010 book about the people who profited from the real estate and subprime crash. In his introduction, the author describes what motivated him to write the first business book he���d published more than 20 years earlier. He says he was thinking ���something like, ���I hope that college students trying to decide what to do with their lives might read it and decide that it���s silly to phony it up, and abandon their passions or even their faint interests, to become financiers.��� I hoped that some bright kid at Ohio State University who really wanted to be an oceanographer would read my book, spurn the offer from Goldman Sachs, and set out to sea.��� So many readers are fascinated by Lewis��� books that business professors may be inclined to assign one as supplementary reading. The problem is, Lewis��� selfproclaimed original motive for writing these books is to convince people not to choose business as a career. And if they do go into business, he urges them to treat it as a sort of aggressive game, an extrapolation of the computer and video games that young people love so much. That���s no surprise because, in The Big Short and four other highly successful business books, Lewis portrays the financial world as being filled with cynical jerks and sharp operators who only want to cheat people. I think Lewis has it wrong. Sure, a few evil people reside in the business world, but I don���t believe the whole field is tainted by their sleaziness. In my own recent book, Finance and the Good Society, I look at some of the same issues Lewis raises, but I try to present a more balanced view of the financial sector. While I acknowledge that there are villains in the financial