The economics of good and evil. In search of the meaning of economics from Gilgamesh to Wall Street
The author of this book is the Czech economist Tomas Sedlacek, one of the five best modern economists according to the Yale Economic Journal and a former adviser to Vaclav Havel. "Economics of Good and Evil" was published in almost 20 languages, and Vaclav Havel himself wrote the foreword to it. The author set himself the task of figuring out how the economy developed over the centuries and how people's perceptions of it changed. After all, the economy as we know it today is a cultural phenomenon. We did not create it consciously and do not even fully imagine how it works. Moreover, we are in the grip of false beliefs. For example, we believe that modern economics began in 1776 with the publication of Adam Smith's book The Wealth of Nations. "However, in reality, economic pursuits accompanied humanity long before the birth of Adam Smith," Sedlacek writes.

Adaptive markets. Financial evolution at the speed of thought
Andrew Lo, professor of finance at the MIT Sloan School of Management, has been writing this book for nearly 20 years, radically changing his views. At first, the author believed in the hypothesis of efficient markets. In the end, he began to doubt it and, in the future, realized the impossibility of explaining the functioning of financial markets only with mathematical models. If people and markets are rational, how do we explain the crises of the 1980s and 1990s, the overinflated dot-com bubble that burst in 2000, the global financial crisis of 2008, and the sheer number of crazy financial decisions made daily? Andrew Lo proposed another model - the hypothesis of adaptive markets, according to which financial markets are the product of evolutionary mechanisms and are primarily subject to the laws of biology.

Narrative economy. How stories go viral and drive significant economic events
In this book, Robert Shiller, a Nobel Prize-winning economist and professor at Yale University, argues in this book that popular narratives can go viral and become epidemics. And then, they influence both individual and collective economic behavior. After all, it is human nature to think in categories of stories. Stories explain the world order, and any events, help make decisions, clarify, inspire. Some scientists even propose to call people as a biological species, not Homo sapiens, but Homo narrativus. And while stories inform our economic decisions, economists tend to ignore their role. Robert Shiller seeks to remedy this situation by proposing the concept of narrative economics.

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