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Title details for Narrative Economics by Robert J. Shiller - Available

Narrative Economics

How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

by Robert J. Shiller
Susan Osman
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
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An audiobook narrated by esteemed BBC television journalist and anchor Susan Orman, with an introduction read by the author himself—Nobel Prize-winning economist and bestselling writer Robert Shiller In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events. Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets—whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up, that housing prices never fall, or that some firms are too big to fail. Whether true or false, stories like these—transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media—drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that by laying the foundation for a way of understanding how stories help propel economic events that have had led to war, mass unemployment, and increased inequality. The stories people tell—about economic confidence or panic, housing booms, the American dream, or Bitcoin—affect economic outcomes. Narrative Economics explains how we can begin to take these stories seriously. It may be Robert Shiller's most important book to date.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    October 1, 2019

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9780691199054
      • File size: 320437 KB
      • Duration: 11:07:34

  • Languages

    • English

  • Reviews

    • Kirkus

      September 1, 2019
      An engaging scholarly study of the stories we tell about economic events--stories that go viral, for better or worse. Bitcoin is the wave of the future, an anarchist challenge to national currencies meant to disguise the identity of those who hold stores of the "cryptocurrency." It's been valued at something around $300 billion. However, writes Nobel Prize-winning Yale economist Shiller (Finance and the Good Society, 2015, etc.), "Bitcoin has no value unless people think it has value, as its proponents readily admit." It attains value because it's surrounded by economic narratives, some erratic, some untrustworthy--of the sort that fuel classic bubbles: the mania of speculation that surrounded the South Sea Company, the mania for tulips, the fear-of-missing-out mania for being part of the future rather than the past. By the author's account, narratives are too often overlooked, so that "we need to incorporate the contagion of narratives into economic theory," recognizing them to be a driver of economic change, for good or ill. "Contagion" is a word used advisedly, for Shiller draws some of his models from epidemiology; his work also combines with the growing acknowledgment that people are often not the rational actors of classic economic theory. Accounting for narrative epidemics does not necessarily mean trying to counter them, though economic forecasts--the currently building sentiment that a major recession is about to hit, for example--are best used not to frighten but to warn, so that self-fulfilling-prophecy disasters do not in fact happen. Shiller locates one pioneering forecaster in the economist John Maynard Keynes, who warned--unsuccessfully--that placing heavy penalties on a defeated Germany after World War I would yield an even bloodier disaster powered by the thirst for vengeance. That narrative proved correct even if Ronald Reagan's anecdotal embrace of supply-side economics proved a sham even as his stories "touched off an intense public mandate for tax cutting." Wonky but of immense value to economists and policymakers working on the behavioral side of the field.

      COPYRIGHT(2019) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

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