Jim Chanos on Crypto, AI, and Casino Capitalism
By Lynn Parramore

Aug 26, 2025  | Finance | Government & Politics | Technology & Innovation

Edited from an article originally posted by the Institute for New Economic Thinking

Legendary short seller Jim Chanos has built a career sniffing out bubbles, hype, and outright fraud. In this conversation with the Institute for New Economic Thinking, he connects the speculative mania of today’s AI- and crypto-driven markets to past booms, from the dotcom era to 17th-century London. 

LP: You said something recently about how the heavy push toward STEM education has produced a lot of unemployed programmers. Have we perhaps overvalued tech and undervalued, say, the humanities and other forms of learning? Is it time to go short on STEM and long on the humanities — investing more in thinking about things like moral reasoning, citizenship, and a cohesive society?

JC: I’m never going to go short on education, but it just goes to show you how hard it is to predict the future. A handful of years ago, the accepted wisdom was, look, forget the humanities, go study computer programming. Don’t learn French, learn COBOL [an old programming language] or whatever the case might be.

Ironically, tech itself is pushing back — the technology is now rendering some of that advice a little questionable. With AI starting to write its own code, even programming may not be as future-proof as we thought.

So, I don’t think it ever hurts to remember that the most important part of education is learning critical thinking—whether in the humanities, sciences, or anywhere else. Ultimately, humans have a pretty good ability to adapt. Learning skills like logic and composition will never go out of style, and having some understanding of the history of the human condition doesn’t hurt either. We don’t change all that much over the centuries, over eons, maybe, but we’re still a pretty predictable bunch of apes.

Understanding how human beings have acted in the past in similar circumstances is a benefit, I think, to not only business people and investors, but to society as a whole. My students are always shocked when I bring my friend Jamie Catherwood in for a guest lecture in class about the broadsheets in the late 17th century, talking about people manipulating stocks in the first IPO bubble in London. It wasn’t a whole lot different from today, you know, having Twitter feeds promoting companies and so on. Just the technology is a lot better.

Lynn ParramoreSenior Research Analyst
Senior Research Analyst, INET
 
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