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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... read more

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  • - How classical economics works, how reality works and why did the financial crisis happened.

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A common reaction to extreme events is to say they couldn't have been predicted.

Table of Contents edit see section history

Introduction

PART ONE: UTOPIAN ECONOMICS
1. Warnings Ignored and the Conventional Wisdom
2. Adam Smith's Invisible Hand
3. Friedrich Hayek's Telecommunications System
4. The Perfect Markets of Lausanne
5. The Mathematics of Bliss
6. The Evangelist
7. The Coin-Tossing View of Finance
8. The Triumph of Utopian Economics

PART TWO: REALITY-BASED ECONOMICS
9. The Prof and the Polar Bears
10. A Taxonomy of Failure
11. The Prisoner's Dilemma and Rational Irrationality
12. Hidden Information and the Market for Lemons
13. Keynes's Beauty Contest
14. The Rational Herd
15. Psychology Returns to Economics
16. Hyman Minsky and Ponzi Finance

PART THREE: THE GREAT CRUNCH
17. Greenspan Shrugs
18. The Lure of Real Estate
19. The Subprime Chain
20. In the Alphabet Soup
21. A Matter of Incentives
22. London Bridge Is Falling Down
23. Socialism in Our Time

Conclusion

Notes
Acknowledgments
Index

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This book is in Oxford PPE UA Amp P Political Economy. (community list)

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  1. John Cassidy (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Country: United States of America
Publication Date: 2009
ISBN: 9781846143007
Page Count: 346

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