The End of Theory : Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction / Richard Bookstaber.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Bookstaber, Richard, author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Human behavior.

Economics.

Financial crises--Forecasting.

Financial crises.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (228 pages) : illustrations

Place of Publication:

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press, [2017]

Language Note:

In English.

Summary:

An in-depth look at how to account for the human complexities at the heart of today's financial systemOur economy may have recovered from the Great Recession-but not our economics. In The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber discusses why the human condition and the radical uncertainty of our world renders the standard economic model-and the theory behind it-useless for dealing with financial crises. What model should replace it? None. At least not any version we've been using for the past two hundred years. Instead, Bookstaber argues for a new approach called agent-based economics, one that takes as a starting point the fact that we are humans, not the optimizing automatons that standard economics assumes we are.Bookstaber's groundbreaking paradigm promises to do a far better job at preventing crises and managing those that break out. As he explains, our varied memories and imaginations color our economic behavior in unexpected hues. Agent-based modeling embraces these nuances by avoiding the mechanistic, unrealistic structure of our current economic approach. Bookstaber tackles issues such as radical uncertainty, when circumstances take place beyond our anticipation, and emergence, when innocent, everyday interactions combine to create sudden chaos. Starting with the realization that future crises cannot be predicted by the past, he proposes an approach that recognizes the human narrative while addressing market realities.Sweeping aside the historic failure of twentieth-century economics, The End of Theory offers a novel and innovative perspective, along with a more realistic and human framework, to help prevent today's financial system from blowing up again.

Contents:

Frontmatter

Contents

SECTION I. Introduction

1. Crises and Sunspots

2. Being Human

SECTION II. The Four Horsemen

3. Social Interactions and Computational Irreducibility

4. The Individual and the Human Wave

5. Context and Ergodicity

6. Human Experience and Radical Uncertainty

7. Heuristics

SECTION III. Paradigm Past and Future

8. Economics in Crisis

9. Agent- Based Models

10. Agents in the Complexity Spectrum

SECTION IV. Agent- Based Models for Financial Crises

11. The Structure of the Financial System: Agents and the Environment

12. Liquidity and Crashes

13. The 2008 Crisis with an Agent- Based View

SECTION V. The End of Theory

14. Is It a Number or a Story? Model as Narrative

15. Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

References

Index

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 23. Mai 2019)

ISBN:

9780691191850

0691191859

OCLC:

987159309