How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities - Hardcover

Cassidy, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374173206 ISBN 13: 9780374173203

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009

Synopsis

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed is a little-known story of bad ideas. For fifty years or more, economists have been busy developing elegant theories of how markets work—how they facilitate innovation, wealth creation, and an efficient allocation of society’s resources. But what about when markets don’t work? What about when they lead to stock market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, real estate crashes, and credit crunches?

In How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes the rising influence of what he calls utopian economics—thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the many ways an unregulated free market can produce disastrous unintended consequences. He then looks to the leading edge of economic theory, including behavioral economics, to offer a new understanding of the economy—one that casts aside the old assumption that people and firms make decisions purely on the basis of rational self-interest. Taking the global financial crisis and current recession as his starting point, Cassidy explores a world in which everybody is connected and social contagion is the norm. In such an environment, he shows, individual behavioral biases and kinks—overconfidence, envy, copycat behavior, and myopia—often give rise to troubling macroeconomic phenomena, such as oil price spikes, CEO greed cycles, and boom-and-bust waves in the housing market. These are the inevitable outcomes of what Cassidy refers to as “rational irrationality”—self-serving behavior in a modern market setting.

Combining on-the-ground reporting, clear explanations of esoteric economic theories, and even a little crystal-ball gazing, Cassidy warns that in today’s economic crisis, conforming to antiquated orthodoxies isn’t just misguided—it’s downright dangerous. How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global economy.

About this title

About the Author

John Cassidy is a journalist at The New Yorker and a frequent contributor to The New York Review of Books. He is the author of Dot.con: How America Lost Its Mind and

Money in the Internet Era and lives in New York City.

Reviews

Market disasters—and the cycle of delusions responsible—receive lively, engaging analysis by Cassidy (Dot.con), a journalist at the New Yorker. The author focuses primarily on the rise and fall of free market ideology and the mostly unrealistic ideal of a self-correcting marketplace. An excellent comprehensive history of the economic thought that led to this kind of utopian economics provides a refresher course in Adam Smith, Friedrich August von Hayek, Kenneth Arrow and Hyman Minsky. Both a narrative and a call to arms, the book provides an intellectual and historical context for the string of denial and bad decisions that led to the disastrous illusion of harmony, the lure of real estate and the Great Crunch of 2008. Using psychology and behavioral economics, Cassidy presents an excellent argument that the market is not in fact self-correcting, and that only a return to reality-based economics—and a reform-minded move to shove Wall Street in that direction—can pull us out of the mess in which we've found ourselves. (Nov.)
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Cassidy, economist and journalist, launches a theoretical attack on Milton Friedman and the Chicago school’s free market concepts, calling them Utopian Economics, which Cassidy explains in part one. The author describes his replacement theories in part two, which give market failure a central role, calling them Reality-Based Economics. Drawing on both approaches, in part three he explains in detail his analysis of the financial crisis of 2007–2009, indicating that the subprime boom was a failure of capitalism and the financial crisis was the consequence on decisions made by private firms under deregulation. He concludes with suggestions including banks that create and distribute mortgage securities should be forced to keep approximately one-fifth on their books and federal regulators should have oversight responsibility for mortgage bankers and lenders. Everyone will not agree with the author’s theories, and although he denies this is a textbook, it will stir controversy within and outside the classroom. However, the challenging material in this book will limit its appeal to many library patrons. --Mary Whaley

Edition details

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2009
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374173206
• ISBN 13: 9780374173203
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 400