叙事经济学 – Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events by Robert J. Shiller

每个人都是听故事长大的。在当下高度联通的小世界中，通过口述、新闻媒体和社交网络传播的流行叙事，无论是关于经济信心或恐慌、房地产繁荣与萧条，还是关于网红、比特币、健康养生，也无论流行的是真相还是谣言，都在影响人们的决策，乃至改变整个经济和社会的走向。

然而，固守理性行为人和完全信息假说的经济学家此前却视而不见，远远落后于历史学家、人类学家以及高度敏感的媒体和商界。

《叙事经济学》试图填补这一空白。在该书中，诺贝尔经济学奖得主罗伯特·希勒借鉴了流行病学模型，为读者提供了思考流行叙事影响经济和社会生活的全新视角。

通过诸多重大事件的回顾，辅以数据分析，希勒展示了流行叙事对历史进程及其中的个体人生的深刻影响，表明对这些流行叙事的经济学思考，可以提高对金融危机、衰退、萧条和其他经济事件的预测能力，帮助我们未雨绸缪，将各种负面冲击的危害降到更低。

From Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events–and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses

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 bestselling 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.

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