By explaining how popular stories go viral and contribute to major economic events such as booms and crashes, Robert Shiller, in Narrative Economics, introduces a new way of thinking about, and guiding, economic change.
Robert J. Shiller is a Nobel Prize–winning 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
"Finalist for the Best Book Published by a University Press,
Digital Book World Awards"
"Longlisted for the getAbstract International Book Award"
"Winner of the PROSE Award in Economics, Association of American
Publishers"
"Co-Winner of the Gold Medal in Economics, Axiom Business Book
Awards"
"One of the Financial Times' Best Books of 2019: Economics"
"One of Prospect's Best Economics Books of 2019"
"An Economist Book of the Year"
"Mind-opening Business Books of 2019"
"One of Mint's Books of 2019 You Should Not Miss"
"A Project Syndicate Best Read in 2019"
"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
"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
"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
"[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*
"A magisterial account . . . . In some ways . . . a bigger
challenge to the foundations of economics than behavioral
economics."---Steve Denning, Forbes
"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
"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
"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
"Excellent."---Gillian Tett, Financial Times
"[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
"Shiller argues forcefully."---Chris Johns, Irish Times
"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
"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
"Highly readable, compelling."---Steve Levine, Medium
"The book is . . . good fun to read. It is full of amusing and
apposite quotations, and interesting detail."---Charles Goodhart,
Central Banking Journal
"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
"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
"This book about the economic significance of viral stories has a
great potential to become a viral story itself."---Gábor István
Bíró, Metascience
"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
"This is a must read."---Vivek Kaul, Mint
"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
"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
"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] 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
"Narrative Economics is an eloquent and accessible exposition of a
seductive idea. It’s a particularly compelling hypothesis."---Tim
Jackson, Nature
"Narratives are important and enduring, as Professor Shiller’s
entertaining book reminds us."---David Smith, The Times
"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 Derviş, Project Syndicate
"An uncannily prescient book for the current moment."---Chris
Taylor, Reuters
"By emphasizing narratives, Shiller aims to mount a fundamental
challenge to standard economic thinking—and to open up new
territory for analysis. Narrative Economics was published before
the novel coronavirus struck, but in a sense the
pandemic is an important point in his argument’s favor. . . .
Shiller is right to suggest that narratives can be uniquely
memorable and influential, because they focus people’s attention and
move their emotions in ways that abstractions usually do
not."---Cass R. Sunstein, New York Review of Books
"The subject deserved a treatise by a brilliant author, and Robert
Shiller delivered. Economic science would benefit immensely if the
ideas from this book were to go viral themselves."---Josip Lucev,
International Studies
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