Robert Shiller’s new book probes how social behaviour trumps statistics in determining the fate of economies—Tim Jackson weighs it up. This article was written for Nature.
Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events Robert J. Shiller Princeton University Press (2019)
“Economists are tellers of stories and makers of poems,” wrote the economic historian Deidre McCloskey in 1990. It’s a curious observation for a profession that prides itself on hard-nosed, quantitative analysis and strives continually for predictive power. The Nobel-prizewinning economist Robert Shiller goes even further.
Stories are more powerful than statistics, he claims. The irrationality inherent in financial exuberance (and despair) defies the neat territory of numbers and demands a deeper excursion into the decidedly unruly world of narratives. That is the declared aim of his book Narrative Economics.
It’s a compelling hypothesis…. Read in full on the Nature website .
Further Reading
- Jackson, T 2018: The Post-Growth Challenge: Secular Stagnation, Inequality and the Limits to Growth. CUSP Working Paper No 12. Guildford: University of Surrey.
- Jackson, T 2016.
Beyond consumer capitalism – foundations for a sustainable prosperity. CUSP Working Paper No 2. Guildford: University of Surrey
