"This is without doubt the best book I've read this year, and probably one of the most important books I've ever read … This ought to be a real game changer of a book. Read it."
—Brain Clegg, author of Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe, writing at popularscience.co.uk
From the failure of wealth to make us happier, to the world's catastrophic blindness in the lead-up to the credit crunch, Economyths reveals ten ways in which economics has failed us all.
Forecasters predicted a prosperous year in 2008 for financial markets—in one influential survey the average prediction was for an eleven percent gain. But by the end of the year major economies were plunging into the worst recession since the Great Depression. In 2010, they still haven’t fully recovered.
An even bigger casualty was the credibility of economics, which for decades has claimed that the economy is a rational, stable, efficient machine, governed by well-understood laws. If all this were true, how could the world's most brilliant and talented financial prognosticators get it so wrong? Why couldn’t our elaborate economic theories predict or prevent this enormous financial crisis from happening?
Mathematician David Orrell explores these provocative questions and more. Tracing the history of economics from its roots in ancient Greece to the financial centres of London and New York, he reveals ten distinct ways in which it is mistaken—and proposes intriguing, and sometimes controversial, new alternatives.
An unapologetic critic of economic theory, Orrell explains how the economy is the result of complex ad unpredictable processes; how risk models go astray; why the economy is not rational or fair; why until very recently no woman had ever won the Nobel Prize for economics; why financial crashes are less Black Swans than part of the landscape; and finally, how new ideas in mathematics, psychology, and environmentalism are helping to reinvent economics.
Orrell deftly translates the arcane language of economic theory into a relevant, contrarian, and compelling exploration of the emotional subject of money. Economyths is a fascinating and elegantly written inquiry into the flaws in our conventional economic models, how they got us into so much trouble, and alternatives that could revolutionize the way we think about the economy.
Introduction 1
Chapter 1 The anarchic economy 9
Chapter 2 The connected economy 27
Chapter 3 The unstable economy 47
Chapter 4 The extreme economy 67
Chapter 5 The emotional economy 95
Chapter 6 The gendered economy 119
Chapter 7 The unfair economy 149
Chapter 8 The over-sized economy 175
Chapter 9 The unhappy economy 199
Chapter 10 The good economy 217
Notes 239
Resources 269
Acknowledgements 272
Index 273
Anonymous
Posted May 28, 2012
No text was provided for this review.
Overview
"This is without doubt the best book I've read this year, and probably one of the most important books I've ever read … This ought to be a real game changer of a book. Read it."
—Brain Clegg, author of Before the Big Bang: The Prehistory of Our Universe, writing at popularscience.co.uk
From the failure of wealth to make us happier, to the world's catastrophic blindness in the lead-up to the credit crunch, Economyths reveals ten ways in which ...