The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox

The Myth of the Rational Market by Justin Fox

Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk. The book brings to life the people and ideas that forged modern finance and investing, from the formative days of Wall Street through the Great Depression and into the financial calamity of today. It's a tale that features professors who made and lost fortunes, battled fiercely over ideas, beat the house in blackjack, wrote bestselling books, and played major roles on the world stage. It's also a tale of Wall Street's evolution, the power of the market to generate wealth and wreak havoc, and free market capitalism's war with itself.

The efficient market hypothesis--long part of academic folklore but codified in the 1960s at the University of Chicago--has evolved into a powerful myth. It has been the maker and loser of fortunes, the driver of trillions of dollars, the inspiration for index funds and vast new derivatives markets, and the guidepost for thousands of careers. The theory holds that the market is always right, and that the decisions of millions of rational investors, all acting on information to outsmart one another, always provide the best judge of a stock's value. That myth is crumbling.

Celebrated journalist and columnist Fox introduces a new wave of economists and scholars who no longer teach that investors are rational or that the markets are always right. Many of them now agree with Yale professor Robert Shiller that the efficient markets theory represents one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought. Today the theory has given way to counterintuitive hypotheses about human behavior, psychological models of decision making, and the irrationality of the markets. Investors overreact, underreact, and make irrational decisions based on imperfect data. In his landmark treatment of the history of the world's markets, Fox uncovers the new ideas that may come to drive the market in the century ahead.

--Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net

Justin Fox is an award-winning writer and photographer based in Cape Town. Author of more than a dozen books, he is currently the editor of Getaway Magazine. Justin was a Rhodes Scholar and received a doctorate in English from Oxford University, after which he became a research fellow at the University of Cape Town, where he taught part-time for the better part of two decades. His articles and photographs have appeared internationally in a number of publications, while his short stories and poems have appeared in various anthologies. He is a two-time Mondi journalism award winner. Recent books include The Marginal Safari, Whoever Fears the Sea, The Impossible Five and My Great Expedition.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780060599034
ISBN 10	0060599030
Title	The Myth of the Rational Market
Author	Justin Fox
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	HarperCollins Publishers Inc
Year published	2011-02-08
Number of pages	416
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable