Overview

Full Product Details

9780691182292

Table of Contents

Reviews

Ambitious and absorbing, Narrative Economics takes seriously the possibility that stories may have an economic life of their own, spreading through communities like epidemics, and it makes an extremely compelling case that studying such stories is important. The book is also a joy to read-lively, engaging, and accessible. -Rajiv Sethi, Barnard College, Columbia University This is a fascinating and important book, written in an engaging style and packed with intriguing examples. -Diane Coyle, University of Cambridge

[Shiller aims] to identify the enduring narratives that influence the way we think about the economy, and may influence our patterns of spending and saving, and therefore become self-fulfilling prophecies . . . the results are fascinating, and sometimes startling. ---Howard Davies, Prospect The idea that human behaviour can exert its own influence in the market is something that most traders would buy into. . . . But in Narrative Economics, Shiller goes much broader and deeper, looking at how the stories we tell ourselves about the world drive our behaviour. . . . Economists, he argues, need to study this if they are to have any hope of doing a better job than they have in the past of predicting major events . . . and how people react to them. ---Rana Foroohar, Financial Times Co-Winner of the Gold Medal in Economics, Axiom Business Book Awards An engaging scholarly study of the stories we tell about economic events-stories that go viral, for better or worse . . . . Of immense value to economists and policymakers working on the behavioral side of the field. * Kirkus Reviews * A magisterial account . . . . In some ways . . . a bigger challenge to the foundations of economics than behavioral economics. ---Steve Denning, Forbes Narratives are important and enduring, as Professor Shiller's entertaining book reminds us. ---David Smith, The Times An Economist Book of the Year Shiller argues forcefully. ---Chris Johns, Irish Times Winner of the PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American Publishers An uncannily prescient book for the current moment. ---Chris Taylor, Reuters Any given scenario can allow for multiple narratives, both actual and potential. The question is why some prove more compelling than others. Shiller offers a range of answers, starting with the most obvious: a narrative is compelling when it is engaging and well expressed. Because his book is very well written, Shiller himself has satisfied this criterion. ---Barry Eichengreen, Project Syndicate If we are going to win the war for reason and evidence, if we are going to stop humans from wiping out entire species and cities, economists and humanists are going to need to create more bridges across the disciplinary chasms. The proposal to focus on narratives and their powers is spot on. Robert Shiller gets us going. ---Jeremy Adelman, Public Books Shiller's thorough discussion and many examples are certainly convincing as to the importance of narratives in individual economic decision-making and aggregate economic phenomena. ---Sonia Jaffe, Science Much of the book . . . . is an enjoyable and well-informed description of such narratives. I especially liked his discussion of bimetallism, wherein he shows that Brexit is not the first debate about an abstruse issue which triggered a culture war. ---Chris Dillow, Stumbling & Mumbling The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert Shiller defends the skills learned by English majors and other liberal arts graduates in his new book, Narrative Economics. Such graduates have highly developed critical-thinking and analysis skills in the narrative storylines that help people guide their way through complex personal and organizational relationships. ---C. Ronald Kimberling, The Hill One of Prospect's Best Economics Books of 2019 Many economists argue that the US housing market and economy are still on solid foundations, but ignore Shiller's warnings at your peril. He rarely gets it wrong. ---Tom Rees, The Telegraph This is a must read. ---Vivek Kaul, Mint One of Mint's Books of 2019 You Should Not Miss [Shiller] explores how the public's subjective perceptions can shape economic trends. . . . A sensible and welcome escape from the dead hand of mathematical models of economics. * The Economist * One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2019: Economics Shiller's book is a spectacular effort at unifying distinct fields and encouraging the profession to be ever more capacious in its approach to phenomena and methodology. ---Mihir Desai, Times Higher Education Highly readable, compelling. ---Steve Levine, Medium This book alone should be enough to convince readers that assumptions about given preferences and rational utility-maximizing actors are totally inadequate for predicting economic and social events. ---Kemal Dervis, Project Syndicate Excellent. ---Gillian Tett, Financial Times Shiller has none of the salesman-like bluster of the stock pickers clamouring for attention on business TV news . . . . As it is, he has only 40-odd years of being freakishly right about things. It will have to do. ---David Morris, Financial News A Project Syndicate Best Read in 2019 This book about the economic significance of viral stories has a great potential to become a viral story itself. ---Gabor Istvan Biro, Metascience Economics is the study of people at work, but where are the people? Many a learned economist forgets all about them. Not Robert Shiller, the author of Narrative Economics, who believes that volatile human emotion counts for more than you think in the ostensibly objective valuation of stocks, bonds and buildings. ---James Grant, Wall Street Journal Provocative . . . . Especially timely in the current social media-obsessed era, because narratives-both real and false-can spread globally with just a few swipes, affecting not just economic activity, but ultimately the balance of geopolitical power. ---Matt Schifrin, Forbes The book is . . . good fun to read. It is full of amusing and apposite quotations, and interesting detail. ---Charles Goodhart, Central Banking Journal Mind-opening Business Books of 2019 Narrative Economics is an eloquent and accessible exposition of a seductive idea. It's a particularly compelling hypothesis. ---Tim Jackson, Nature What's surprising, perhaps, is that the gearheads in academic economics departments may finally be getting wind of all this. If they are, much of the credit must go to Robert J. Shiller, the Yale economist who won the Nobel Prize in his field in 2013. Shiller's iconoclastic new book, Narrative Economics, ranges across disciplines to explore the role of narratives in explaining (as the subtitle has it) 'how stories go viral and drive major economic events'. ---Daniel Akst, Strategy+Business [A] highly readable introduction to narrative economics . . . . Readers can readily identify with the examples given in this book and will gain a much better understanding of the role of stories, especially in view of the speed of modern contagions. ---David Lorimer, Paradigm Explorer Shiller is one of the world's most original economists. . . . Stories allow human beings to make sense of an uncertain world. But they also drive economies into booms and busts. Armed with this understanding, we gain a far richer understanding of how economies behave. ---Martin Wolf, Financial Times

Author Information

Robert J. Shiller is a Nobel Prizewinning economist, the author of the New York Times bestseller Irrational Exuberance, and the coauthor, with George A. Akerlof, of Phishing for Phools and Animal Spirits, among other books (all Princeton). He is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University and a regular contributor to the New York Times. He lives in New Haven, Connecticut. Twitter @RobertJShiller

Tab Content 6

Customer Reviews

Recent Reviews

Countries Available