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Start giftingHow Markets Fail
This audiobook uses AI narration.
We’re taking steps to make sure AI narration is transparent.
Learn moreBehind the alarming financial headlines is a little-known story of bad ideas. For over fifty years, economists have been developing elegant theories of how markets work. 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, Cassidy describes the influence “utopian economics” thinking that is blind to how real people act and that denies the ways an unregulated free market can produce disastrous unintended consequences. Oil-price spikes, CEO greed cycles, and boom-and-bust waves are the inevitable outcome of self-serving behavior in a modern market setting. Cassidy looks to the leading edge of economic theory, including behavioral economics, for a new, enlightening view of our volatile global economy.
John Cassidy is a journalist at the New Yorker and a contributor to the New York Review of Books. He is the author of Dot.con: The Greatest Story Ever Sold. He lives in New York City.
Geoffrey Howard (a.k.a. Ralph Cosham) was a stage actor and an award-winning narrator. He recorded more than 100 audiobooks in his lifetime and won the prestigious Audio Award for Best Narration and several AudioFile Earphones Awards.
Reviews
“Fascinating and important.”
“A well constructed, thoughtful, and cogent account of how capitalism evolved to its current form.”
“An ambitious, nuanced work that brings ideas alive...Cassidy makes a compelling case that a return to hands-off economics would be a disaster.”
“An essential, grittily intellectual, yet compelling guide to the financial debacle of 2009.”
“Brilliant.”
“[How Markets Fail] brilliantly dissects much of what has passed for economic wisdom, and decries the lack of humility from those whose theories helped cause the disaster.”
“[How Markets Fail] is more than just an account of the failures of regulators and the self-deception of bankers and homebuyers, although these are well covered. For Mr. Cassidy, the deeper roots of the crisis lie in the enduring appeal of an idea: that society is always best served when individuals are left to pursue their self-interest in free markets...an ambitious book, and one that mostly succeeds.”
“The last major attempt of 2009 to make sense of what has become of the discipline of economics.”
“Highly readable...Cassidy offers a clear and occasionally colorful exposition of the evolution of relevant economic thought in a way that is accessible to non-economists.”
“Market disasters—and the cycle of delusions responsible—receive lively, engaging analysis by Cassidy…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.”
“Cassidy delivers on the promise of his title, but he also offers a clear-eyed look at economic thinking over the last three centuries, from Adam Smith to Ben Bernanke, and shows how the major theories have played out in practice, often not well...Cassidy writes with terrific clarity and a finely tuned sense of moral outrage, yielding a superb book.”
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