How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global economy. Why do many people contribute generously to charity but fail to save for their own retirement? What is the economic answer to global warming? Using fascinating new insights from behavioural economics, and vivid contemporary and historical examples, Cassidy explains that individual behavioural biases and kinks--such as overconfidence, envy, and a sense of altruism and fairness--all help us understand the ...
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How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global economy. Why do many people contribute generously to charity but fail to save for their own retirement? What is the economic answer to global warming? Using fascinating new insights from behavioural economics, and vivid contemporary and historical examples, Cassidy explains that individual behavioural biases and kinks--such as overconfidence, envy, and a sense of altruism and fairness--all help us understand the world in ways that rational-choice economics does not. This is the book that explains both the current moment and such past and future moments. We will continue to get things wrong. But at least now we will be having the right conversation.
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Add this copy of How Markets Fail: the Logic of Economic Calamities to cart. $6.53, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Reno rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Reno, NV, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by Viking.
Add this copy of How Markets Fail: the Logic of Economic Calamities to cart. $39.05, good condition, Sold by Bonita rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Newport Coast, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2009 by Viking.
Borrowed it from the library and decided later I needed to have a copy always handy. A useful antidote to the free market fundamentalist idiocies that we keep being subjected to.
roaddog
Mar 4, 2010
Economic Id-eology
With wit and clarity, Cassidy provides a compressed history of economics beginning with Adam Smith and leading to the murky behavioral psychology that makes comprehensible the devastating suicidal plunge of bankers and brokers over the edge of reasonable risk. Wall Street emerges as the Id of the national psyche, driven by dark and irresistible forces, and regulation, our Superego, seems the only remedy for the passionate irrationality of which all of us -- financiers, consumers, politicians -- are guilty. Most instructively, Cassidy points to the fact that all markets are not the same or subsumable under the same theory. Economic behavior is, first of all behavior, not mathematics, and requires a more subtle and flexible understanding than classical economics or ideologies can provide.
