There are a lot of books out there that make the case that conventional economists are a bunch of narrow-minded, equation-besotted twits. I didn’t write that kind of book in The Myth of the Rational Market because I’m of the opinion that, for all its flaws, the economists’ approach of building mathematical models that imperfectly [...]
I just taped an interview about my book with Kai Ryssdal for Marketplace, which you should be able to hear this some afternoon/evening soon on your local public radio station. I forgot to bring a glass of water with me into the studio and my mouth was for some reason extremely parched, so that explains [...]
The Treasury Secretary actually uttered the words “be cautious” while discussing his approach to interpreting economic and financial data, but it also seems to be something of a personal credo. In a half-hour long chat this morning with my boss, Rick Stengel, as part of something called Conversations on the Circle (the circle being Columbus [...]
I’ve got an extended dance version of my column (three pages!) in the magazine this week. It’s basically an extreeeemely condensed version of my book, which coincidentally is also called The Myth of the Rational Market. The print version of the article is really wonderfully laid out, and while the online version can’t offer such [...]
My colleague Stephen Gandel did the hard work of watching the Ken Lewis hearing today on TV, and e-mails this report: The most important thing we learned from the Ken Lewis hearing today is that the Bank of America CEO has no idea what the definition of the word “threaten” is. Lewis testified that he [...]
Some economists, like David Rosenberg, think the answer is substantially less—and for years to come. For quite a while now, Rosenberg has been writing about how the American consumer is due for a serious deleveraging, which means less spending, and how this is the real conversation we should be having. Forget about trolling the stock [...]
Slate’s The Big Money is running a two-part excerpt from my book. Not just any excerpt, but an excerpt from the especially wonky Chapter 8, “Fischer Black Chooses to Focus on the Probable.” It’s Fischer Black day here at the Curious Capitalist! Anyway, Part 1 ran Monday. Part 2 is online now. Enjoy! (And enjoy [...]
Just remembered this, in reference to the previous post. It’s from Keynes’ Tract on Monetary Reform, right after the famous line about us all being dead in the long run: Economists set themselves too easy, too useless a task if in tempestuous seasons they can only tell us that when the storm is past the [...]
Ezra Klein quotes from a new paper by Tyler Cowen on the financial crisis: In a strict rational expectations model, we might expect some people to overtrust others and one view of rational expectations is that investors’ errors will cancel one another out in each market period. Another view of rational expectations is that investors’ [...]
Well, this and the fact that I have an extra-long column due. Update: Okay now (Wednesday morning at 11:11) it’s up to #53, thanks to Burton Malkiel. But it has dropped to #2 in investing books—because Peter Schiff was on the Daily Show last night. My dead-tree work for the day is almost done, so [...]
