The Wisdom of Finance
How the Humanities Can Illuminate and Improve Finance
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £3.99
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- £3.99
Publisher Description
Longlisted for the FT & McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award 2017
Finance is shrouded in mystery for outsiders, while many insiders are uneasy with the disrepute of their profession. How can finance become more accessible and also recover its nobility?
Harvard Business School professor Mihir Desai takes up the cause of restoring humanity to finance. With deft wit, he draws upon a rich knowledge of literature, film, history, and philosophy to explain finance's inner workings. Through this creative approach, he shows that outsiders can easily access the underlying ideas and insiders can reacquaint themselves with the core values of their profession.
This combination of finance and the humanities creates unusual and illuminating pairings: Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope are guides to risk management; Jeff Koons becomes an advocate of leverage; and Mel Brooks' The Producers teaches us about fiduciary responsibility. In Desai's vision, the principles of finance also provide answers to critical questions in our lives: bankruptcy teaches us how to react to failure, the lessons of mergers apply to marriages, and the Capital Asset Pricing Model demonstrates the true value of relationships.
The Wisdom of Finance is a wholly unique book, offering an enlivening new perspective on one of the world's most complex and misunderstood professions.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this slender but erudite treatise, law and finance professor Desai (International Finance: A Casebook) proposes that humanity, rather than the hot-button issue of income inequality, lies at the center of finance. To do this, he calls upon none other than Jane Austen and John Milton, among others. Desai gives humanists explanations of basic financial principles, such as value creation and leverage, with nary a numeral. For number crunchers, Desai provides a fresh way of viewing basic ideas. A scene from Dashiell Hammett's novel The Maltese Falcon is used to explain randomness and chance. The contemporary artist Jeff Koons is invoked to illustrate the power of financial leverage. Other analogies work less well: the description of the Time Warner AOL merger as a May-December romance seems both strained and precious. Nonetheless, this book does valuable work toward demystifying finance for laypeople and deepening the art for practitioners. Desai's approach will broaden and enrich any perspective.
