Narrative Economics

How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events

By: Robert J. Shiller

Narrated by: Susan Osman, Robert J. Shiller - introduction

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.

©2019 Robert J. Shiller (P)2019 Princeton University Press

Shiller explains real economic behavior

Over my 50 years engaged in economic research, I have seen the profession gradually retreat from its insistence on rational economic behavior. Milestones along the way includes incomplete information, gaming behavior, and Prospect Theory. Now Schiller has taken us another big step towards establishing a scientific methods for evaluating the way that storytelling influences real economic behavior. This book is highly relevant to a world in which all sorts of information and misinformation gets spun into stories that influence economic and political behavior. Any missteps, such as the fuzzy and incomplete connection between artificial intelligence and narrative economics, are small in terms of the overall significance of this book.

Slow middle, picks up after

Really slows down a bit in the early middle, but if you power through it is a really useful book. Lots of the topics covered are timeless, and seem especially relevant today. (Viral spread of ideas anyone?)

Nothing new

I understand how this would be groundbreaking for economist, but it’s really nothing new for people in the humanities or social science...

Data guy goes squishy for Narrative.

Skip to C19. The rest is a fanciful attempt to spawn a new branch of Economics.

Patiently informative

I took Shiller’s Coursera and loved his style of teaching and thinking. This book seemed very original. It’s great to hear somewhere older and wiser remark on the arbitrary trends of today....bitcoin.

Rethink economics

Schiller does a wonderful job of explaining how the story around economic events play into them. A must read for anyone trying to understand the world today.

Not great.

This book was more like a collection of stories rather than a coherent book. I thought that “narrative economics” would consist of a theory but this was not the case. Again, only a collection of narratives or stories.

Enjoyed the book.

I would of enjoyed the author reading this one. I have heard him didcuss the book and we lost something when he was not the voice

Interesting But Still Acedemic

I'll start with the narrator. For the most part I enjoyed her flow, voice, and reading style. The only thing that threw me off is when Schiller made personal references and i had to remember it was a male that wrote the book.

This is my first time reading Schiller's work. i can appreciate his ability to bring in various historical accounts and date to convey the creation and development of narratives. On a personal note, this book was recommended at a great time because Schiller touches on something I've been arguing about in the #massadoption of technology (specifically blockchain technology). Point is my theory isn't totally far fetched.

The downside for me is that most of Schiller references and #POV are based on a very western (#American) narrative. And arguably have a white male bias. He does address his scope of view in the beginning. but i would have still like to get more insight on how econimic events look for people out side the US. granted that would've probably made the listen more than a 11hr listen. i would appreciate the cross referencing aspect.

In the overall i found it worth the listening and found the subject very interesting. But i still felt there was a level of academic dryness to it.

One of the best works of our time.

The book leads the narrative of the future of economic understanding. Dr Shiller is as important to our understanding of humans and money as Adam Smith or any other scholar.