Title: Narrative Economics Pdf How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events
From Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times best-selling author Robert Shiller, a new way to think about how popular stories help drive economic events
In a world in which internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times best-selling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change. Using a rich array of historical examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior - what he calls "narrative economics" - has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events.
Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets - whether it's the belief that tech stocks can only go up, that housing prices never fall, or that some firms are too big to fail. Whether true or false, stories like these - transmitted by word of mouth, by the news media, and increasingly by social media - drive the economy by driving our decisions about how and where to invest, how much to spend and save, and more. But despite the obvious importance of such stories, most economists have paid little attention to them. Narrative Economics sets out to change that by laying the foundation for a way of understanding how stories help propel economic events that have had led to war, mass unemployment, and increased inequality.
The stories people tell - about economic confidence or panic, housing booms, the American dream, or Bitcoin - affect economic outcomes. Narrative Economics explains how we can begin to take these stories seriously. It may be Robert Shiller's most important book to date.
Yes, we can talk our way into recession 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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