Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
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Availability:
In Stock.
Arrives
Friday, Sep 26
Publisher : Princeton University Press; 1st edition (October 1, 2019)
Language : English
Hardcover : 400 pages
ISBN-10 : 0691182299
ISBN-13 : 92
Item Weight : 1.8 pounds
Best Sellers Rank: #292,443 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #212 in Macroeconomics (Books) #425 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior #905 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions
#212 in Macroeconomics (Books):
#425 in Marketing & Consumer Behavior:
#905 in Medical Social Psychology & Interactions:
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Top Amazon Reviews
You probably don’t have to read this book to understand that the stories we tell ourselves affect our economic decisions. That’s intuitive. What makes Narrative Economics worth reading are the historical examples that Shiller puts in the framework of epidemiology. Like contagious diseases, economic viruses rise, burn out, mutate, and repeat themselves in new generations. 9 PERENNIAL ECONOMIC NARRATIVES FROM THE BOOK • Labor-saving machines will put many people out of work. • Automation and artificial intelligence will put many people out of work. • The Great Depression narrative: panic, bank runs, and mass unemployment. • We are in a stock market bubble. • We are in a real estate boom (or bust). • The gold standard will protect the value of money. But bimetallism (or Bitcoin) will help non-elites. • Our culture promotes conspicuous consumption. But during hard times our culture values frugality. • Big business should be boycotted for profiting at the public’s expense. • Labor unions are driving up wages and causing inflation. One of the fun things about this book is the way Shiller explains economic narratives by reaching into the toolkits of many different fields. He considers the theories neuroscientists have about dreams. He reveals what sociologists found when they studied sit-ins during the 1960s, a movement that went viral after a single protest at a lunch counter in 1960 by four students from Greensboro Agricultural and Technical College. He discusses how the narrative in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, energized abolitionists before the Civil War. He even quotes Plato, who warns in the Republic of the power of popular stories. Good stories go viral and have always affected the economy, sometimes dramatically. Shiller shows how other academic disciplines such as history and political science talk a lot more about narratives than the discipline of economics. In this enjoyable book, Shiller builds a new narrative for economic thinking.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 1, 2019 by Trey Shipp
As someone who has greatly enjoyed several of Shiller's previous books and respects his innovative and creative economic thinking, I was disappointed to find "Narrative Economics" is exceptionally light on quantitative analysis and rigor. To be fair, these are nascent ideas, at least from a technical standpoint, and potentially quite important. Nonetheless, the lack of actionable insight was frustrating. Some readers may find the meat of the book, Part 3 containing the nine case studies of economically significant narratives, to be interesting and instructive. This reviewer found them lightweight and somewhat difficult to slog through. The book concludes with a chapter on potential quantitative future directions. Let's hope that these ideas mature sufficiently to provide predictions and policy guidelines rather than just a slick story.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 7, 2019 by Mark Ettinger
I am usually quite excited to read Shiller's books and so reading narrative economics was a disappointment. The author has expounded on instincts that have grown through his career of looking at the irrationalities of economic systems and tried to formalize them via a new field he calls narrative economics. The ideas are a mixture of neuroeconomics, epidemiology, behavioral economics and history. The result is somewhat novel but simultaneous very obvious in some instances and very stretched in others. Narrative economics analyzes the role of narratives in economic life. The author notices, with frequency of phrase identification and other metrics, that certain economic narrative share properties similar to medical epidemics. In particular concepts grab the mind and pass on easily to others and subsequently affect the economic system. Thus when analyzing certain economic phenomenon, like bubbles, or depressions, we need to include the influence of narratives on the outcome space to better understand the phenomenon. This is of course an important perspective that is worthy of consideration but the book is quite meandering and doesn't engage the reader well. The author highlights that people caught up in the narratives often miss the details and aspects of the authors ideas seem close to concepts like memetics, where concepts are formed and spread rapidly through populations. This book is effectively a mixture of a economics, sociology and epidemic study. The author states the obvious by reminding us that the spread of a concept often is done not by the originator but rather by an individual who has the ear of a broader audience. Much of the book looks at phrases and their history and how that history might be a little surprising. Some of the material is highly questionable, for example discussing frugality as a narrative in the depression. The author is testing the waters on a concept which is certainly true but very hard to definitively attribute in a causal form. People's minds are influenced by instincts that can be guided through simplified concepts in the form of narratives, these have the power to change economic landscapes, they can be unpredictable in timing and magnitude, they should be studied. That is pretty much the idea. Narrative economics is disappointing. The author tries to formalize the similarities between epidemic phenomenon and economic narratives ability to create distortions in the economic landscape. Such a link exists at times but that's distinct from then the study of narratives. Concepts around narratives seems quite overlapping with so called memetics and so this idea isn't really that new, its just novel in being used to explain distortions to an economic landscape. The book does give some interesting history but it isn't clearly argued and doesn't have clear direction, it is readable but uninspiring.
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Reviewed in the United States on October 30, 2019 by A. Menon
A waste of time, with nebulous definitions and lack of theory. Doesn't explain anything about the economic narratives, but just throws a bunch of quotations and talks about what may or may not happen.
Reviewed in the United States on October 6, 2019 by Another customer