Forecast
What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics
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- $17.99
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
Picture an early scene from The Wizard of Oz: Dorothy hurries home as a tornado gathers in what was once a clear Kansas sky. Hurriedly, she seeks shelter in the storm cellar under the house, but, finding it locked, takes cover in her bedroom. We all know how that works out for her.
Many investors these days are a bit like Dorothy, putting their faith in something as solid and trustworthy as a house (or, say, real estate). But market disruptions--storms--seem to arrive without warning, leaving us little time to react. Why are we so often blindsided by these things, left outdoors with nothing but our little dogs? More to the point: how did Kansas go from blue skies to tornadoes in such a short time?
In this deeply researched and piercingly intelligent book, physicist Mark Buchanan shows how a simple feedback loop can lead to major consequences, the kind predictable by mathematical models but hard for most people to anticipate. From his unique perspective, Buchanan argues that our basic assumptions about economic markets--that they are for the most part stable, with occasional interruptions--are simply wrong. Markets really act more like the weather: a brief heat wave can become a massive storm in a matter of a few days, or even hours.
The Physics of Finance reimagines the basics of how economics, with consequences that affect everyone.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Time to grapple with the stormy realities of an unbalanced marketplace, argues this scathing critique of economics-as-usual. Physicist and journalist Buchanan (The Social Atom) attacks what he thinks are the unrealistic assumptions of modern economics: that financial markets efficiently process all information; that humans make perfectly rational decisions; that market economies reliably find a placid equilibrium when freed from regulation. To understand the real economy of irrational mortgage bubbles, prolonged recessions, and split-second stock-market crashes, he contends, we must look to other sciences meteorology, physics, cognitive psychology for insights into the intrinsic instabilities of complex systems like the market. Buchanan's case against mainstream free market economics, which takes aim at Nobel luminaries like Milton Friedman, Robert Lucas, and Gary Becker is a lucid, cogent one that reveals the shaky foundations of much overconfident theorizing and ill-conceived deregulatory policies. His brief for a new economics of nonequilibrium dynamics is less incisive; he does a good job explaining some conceptual underpinnings of the science of complexity, but since that approach relies on modeling chaotic markets with mysterious black-box computer simulations, it lacks the analytical clarity and catchiness of neoclassical economics' simplistic theories. Still, Buchanan offers a compelling outsiders' take on the hubris and failures of reigning economic orthodoxies.
