Fact and Fiction in Economics

Fact and Fiction in Economics
Author: Uskali Mäki
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 404
Release: 2002-12-12
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780521009577

There is an embarrassing polarization of opinions about the status of economics as an academic discipline, as reflected in epithets such as the Dismal Science and the Queen of the Social Sciences. This collection brings together some of the leading figures in the methodology and philosophy of economics to provide a thoughtful and balanced overview of the current state of debate about the nature and limits of economic knowledge. Authors with partly rival and partly complementary perspectives examine how abstract models work and how they might connect with the real world, they look at the special nature of the facts about the economy, and they direct attention towards the academic institutions themselves and how they shape economic research. These issues are thus analysed from the point of view of methodology, semantics, ontology, rhetoric, sociology, and economics of science.

Economic Facts and Fallacies

Economic Facts and Fallacies
Author: Thomas Sowell
Publisher: Basic Books
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2011-03-22
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0465026303

Thomas Sowell “both surprises and overturns received wisdom” in this indispensable examination of widespread economic fallacies (The Economist) Economic Facts and Fallacies exposes some of the most popular fallacies about economic issues-and does so in a lively manner and without requiring any prior knowledge of economics by the reader. These include many beliefs widely disseminated in the media and by politicians, such as mistaken ideas about urban problems, income differences, male-female economic differences, as well as economics fallacies about academia, about race, and about Third World countries. One of the themes of Economic Facts and Fallacies is that fallacies are not simply crazy ideas but in fact have a certain plausibility that gives them their staying power-and makes careful examination of their flaws both necessary and important, as well as sometimes humorous. Written in the easy-to-follow style of the author's Basic Economics, this latest book is able to go into greater depth, with real world examples, on specific issues.

Narrative Economics

Narrative Economics
Author: Robert J. Shiller
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-09-01
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0691212074

From Nobel Prize–winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events—and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses Stories people tell—about financial confidence or panic, housing booms, or Bitcoin—can go viral and powerfully affect economies, but such narratives have traditionally been ignored in economics and finance because they seem anecdotal and unscientific. In this groundbreaking book, Robert Shiller explains why we ignore these stories at our peril—and how we can begin to take them seriously. Using a rich array of examples and data, Shiller argues that studying popular stories that influence individual and collective economic behavior—what he calls "narrative economics"—may vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises and other major economic events. The result is nothing less than a new way to think about the economy, economic change, and economics. In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.

Economics Fact and Fiction

Economics Fact and Fiction
Author: Charles H. Meter
Publisher: CreateSpace
Total Pages: 42
Release: 2013-12-28
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9781494828776

Economics - Food for thought

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man

Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Author: John Perkins
Publisher: Berrett-Koehler Publishers
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2004-11-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1576755126

Perkins, a former chief economist at a Boston strategic-consulting firm, confesses he was an "economic hit man" for 10 years, helping U.S. intelligence agencies and multinationals cajole and blackmail foreign leaders into serving U.S. foreign policy and awarding lucrative contracts to American business.

The Fictions of American Capitalism

The Fictions of American Capitalism
Author: Jacques-Henri Coste
Publisher: Springer Nature
Total Pages: 408
Release: 2020-02-26
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 3030365646

The Fictions of American Capitalism: Working Fictions and the Economic Novel introduces a new way of thinking about fiction in connection with capitalism, especially American capitalism. These essays demonstrate how fiction fulfills a major function of the American capitalist engine, presenting various formulations of American capitalism from the perspective of economists, social scientists, and literary critics. Focusing on three narratives—fictitious capital, working fictions, and the economic novel—the volume questions whether these three types of fiction can be linked under the sign of capitalism. This collection seeks to illustrate the American economy’s dependence on fictitiousness, America’s ideological fictions, and the nation’s creative literary fiction. In relation to what the credit and banking crisis of 2007–2008 exposed about the “unreal” base of the economy, the volume concludes with a call to recognize the economic humanities, arguing that American fiction and American literary studies can provide a useful mirror for economists.

A History of the Modern Fact

A History of the Modern Fact
Author: Mary Poovey
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 446
Release: 1998-11-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226675262

How did the fact become modernity's most favored unit of knowledge? How did description come to seem separable from theory in the precursors of economics and the social sciences? Mary Poovey explores these questions in A History of the Modern Fact, ranging across an astonishing array of texts and ideas from the publication of the first British manual on double-entry bookkeeping in 1588 to the institutionalization of statistics in the 1830s. She shows how the production of systematic knowledge from descriptions of observed particulars influenced government, how numerical representation became the privileged vehicle for generating useful facts, and how belief—whether figured as credit, credibility, or credulity—remained essential to the production of knowledge. Illuminating the epistemological conditions that have made modern social and economic knowledge possible, A History of the Modern Fact provides important contributions to the history of political thought, economics, science, and philosophy, as well as to literary and cultural criticism.

Myths and Facts about Football

Myths and Facts about Football
Author: Patric Andersson
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2009-10-02
Genre: Sports & Recreation
ISBN: 144381525X

This book presents accounts of economic and psychological analyses of association football (or “soccer” as it is popularly known in the USA). As football is widely accepted to be the world’s most popular sport, the case for scientific investigation of its characteristics is self-evident. As the contributions to this book demonstrate, the game of football offers an ideal opportunity to empirically investigate a wide range of broad issues, for example: behavioural decision-making; judgmental forecasting; motivation; game-theoretic models of strategic choice; competition and labour markets. Are teams more likely to concede a goal after having just scored? Does the team going first in a penalty shoot-out have an advantage? Should goal-keepers dive or stay put for penalty kicks? Do referees make decisions consistently? Why do fans like their teams? What factors influence the career of footballers? How well can experts predict football matches? How accurate are prediction markets? How does the stock-market react to match outcomes? These questions and others are addressed in this book. A particular focus is the investigation of popular conceptions—and misconceptions—about football. Of interest to psychologists, behavioural economists and football enthusiasts with an analytic approach to understanding the game, this book brings together contributions from a range of academic disciplines and will stimulate further research into football and the intriguing insights into behaviour it offers. See feature article in The Independent, October 8th, 2008: http://www.independent.co.uk/sport/football/news-and-comment/fact-or-fiction-form-in-football-954440.html Listen to interview with Patric Andersson on Swedish National Radio http://www.sr.se/cgi-bin/P1/program/index.asp?ProgramID=1302 Read Chris Charles’s blog on BBC website: http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/chrischarles/2008/10/lies_damned_lies_and_statictic.html

Economics in One Lesson

Economics in One Lesson
Author: Henry Hazlitt
Publisher: Crown Currency
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010-08-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0307760626

With over a million copies sold, Economics in One Lesson is an essential guide to the basics of economic theory. A fundamental influence on modern libertarianism, Hazlitt defends capitalism and the free market from economic myths that persist to this day. Considered among the leading economic thinkers of the “Austrian School,” which includes Carl Menger, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich (F.A.) Hayek, and others, Henry Hazlitt (1894-1993), was a libertarian philosopher, an economist, and a journalist. He was the founding vice-president of the Foundation for Economic Education and an early editor of The Freeman magazine, an influential libertarian publication. Hazlitt wrote Economics in One Lesson, his seminal work, in 1946. Concise and instructive, it is also deceptively prescient and far-reaching in its efforts to dissemble economic fallacies that are so prevalent they have almost become a new orthodoxy. Economic commentators across the political spectrum have credited Hazlitt with foreseeing the collapse of the global economy which occurred more than 50 years after the initial publication of Economics in One Lesson. Hazlitt’s focus on non-governmental solutions, strong — and strongly reasoned — anti-deficit position, and general emphasis on free markets, economic liberty of individuals, and the dangers of government intervention make Economics in One Lesson every bit as relevant and valuable today as it has been since publication.

Money

Money
Author: Jacob Goldstein
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2020-09-08
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 0316417181

The co-host of the popular NPR podcast Planet Money provides a well-researched, entertaining, somewhat irreverent look at how money is a made-up thing that has evolved over time to suit humanity's changing needs. Money only works because we all agree to believe in it. In Money, Jacob Goldstein shows how money is a useful fiction that has shaped societies for thousands of years, from the rise of coins in ancient Greece to the first stock market in Amsterdam to the emergence of shadow banking in the 21st century. At the heart of the story are the fringe thinkers and world leaders who reimagined money. Kublai Khan, the Mongol emperor, created paper money backed by nothing, centuries before it appeared in the west. John Law, a professional gambler and convicted murderer, brought modern money to France (and destroyed the country's economy). The cypherpunks, a group of radical libertarian computer programmers, paved the way for bitcoin. One thing they all realized: what counts as money (and what doesn't) is the result of choices we make, and those choices have a profound effect on who gets more stuff and who gets less, who gets to take risks when times are good, and who gets screwed when things go bad. Lively, accessible, and full of interesting details (like the 43-pound copper coins that 17th-century Swedes carried strapped to their backs), Money is the story of the choices that gave us money as we know it today.