Phishing for Phools

سعره منخفض ، وانصح بشرائه

Como não poderia deixar de ser, o livro traz exemplos históricos de como o comportamento econômico racional é um mito e de como os mercados são organizados para ludibriar.

Why are the things as we see them. Why we are on the receiving end. The answers to why we loose are explained lucidly

I was expecting an in more depth book from these authors. Doesn't offer any new perspective on the subject , mostly clippings from other sources.Didn't like it.

What a pleasant surprise to discover that two Noble Prize-winning economists, George A. Akerlof and Robert J. Shiller, have written a fast-paced, thoroughly enjoyable book on why markets fail because economists, consumers, and governments are conned into believing that the standard models that economists use to describe markets are value free and benefit buyers and sellers commensurately, i.e., each of the parties get what they want out of the exchange.Their book is an easy read in the sense that they describe themselves as "George" and "Bob", people you might know socially who are also very, very smart, and very perceptive about the way in which consumer spending and political hucksterism really work.As the song from Jerome Kern's "Showboat" famously begins, "It ain't necessarily so…" What we have is a catalog of market failure made possible by psychological manipulation and deception on an industrial scale, engineered by marketing professionals and industrial psychologists who traffic in consumers' weakness, apathy, ignorance, and stubbornness in their refusal to wise up and see marketers' gamesmanship for what it really is. If this type of salesmanship were an illicit drug, it would be crack cocaine.There is a laundry list of the myriad ways in which our emotion-driven selves are plumbed by marketers, and ably assisted by their hired guns in the form of research psychologists, whose job it is to promote consumer spending for goods and services that rarely if ever measure up to the hype their promoters give them. Much of what Professors Akerlof and Shiller describe will be well known to most readers, at least in their outlines, but the authors do drill down into the details.Their underlying premise is simply this: free markets produce a cornucopia of products, goods, services, political messages, and so on, stuff that people want. Consumers are free to choose among that mountain of stuff that producers and marketers want to sell, barter, or simply give away for the sellers' own economic advantage. Effective selling requires sellers to tell us a story, because storytelling and its underlying narrative is the best way to capture our attention and to insinuate the story's message deep within our emotional selves. Even when we know particular stuff is injurious to our health and welfare, we still remember the advertising jingle that makes us want to have it regardless of the consequences.The cause du jour for some of today's trending economists is that markets are omniscient and self-correcting, and that any attempt by government to correct market failure (a term that economists use to describe markets where buyers and sellers have unequal resources, information, or ability to make responsible choices) is inherently illegitimate. This is essentially 19th-century laissez-faire economics on steroids. Not only does this infect our economic lives, but also our politics, as the authors briefly but quite astutely describe.They also describe the damaging effects that this 'New Story' has wrought on our economy, noting the billions of dollars that have been lost through an economy that was nearly wrecked by unregulated excess.For those who have been victimized by this behavior, and that would include most of us, we would do well to reflect on William Shakespeare's magisterial play, Julius Caesar, in which Mark Anthony says to his friend Brutus, "The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves…"And so it is true here. We want what we want, and we will pay whatever price demanded in order to have it. We allow ourselves to be deceived, because it justifies fulfillment of a transient want, even if it comes at the cost of our long-term security. Akerlof and Shiller do not condemn us for that, but simply say it's a fact of life, and we all can do better in dealing with it now that we are fully aware of what we are up against.Akerlof and Shiller are especially critical of colleagues in the economics profession, and they wonder why professional economists have allowed themselves to become so willfully blind to what was going on under their noses. It would appear though that behavioral economics, in which human psychology and its foibles do not easily lend themselves to neat mathematical formulae and its descriptive models. It also suggests that some of them are writing to an audience that is predisposed to discount the likelihood of market failure, where the because of ideology, or because it hurts their bottom line. Akerlof and Shiller intend their book to be a healthy corrective to the kind of compromised thinking that self-deception and conflicted interest represent.By focusing on the mental framework that people use to make their economic decisions and choices, Akerlof and Shiller have done us an immense service by stripping away a lot of the obfuscation and blather that so often accompanies debate on economic matters. They tell us, "… Since our decisions are usually based on the stories we are telling ourselves about our situation, this gives us a transparent characterization of motivation that allows us to understand how most phishing for phools happens."The fact that we live in a free market economy that gives us a standard of living that, as Akerlof and Shiller say, "would be the envy of all previous generations," should not blind us to the dangers that we face from the manipulations and deceptions that are inherent in having a free economy, and that we need to pay close attention to what we are told, and to exercise a healthy skepticism toward the stories that today's marketers are asking us to accept as our own.

Die Autoren sind beide Nobelpreisträger der Wirtschaftswissenschaften. Das Buch ist mehr als interessant - nicht nur für studierte Volkswirte! Im wesentlichen geht es um die Frage wie sich das Verhalten einiger "Fools" auf die Ergebnisse des Marktes auswirken. Das Buch ist verständlich geschrieben - die Fachterminologie sollte man allerdings kennen.