Download the Book (PDF): Introduction A table of visitors from Europe were coming to the end of a long tasting menu at Eleven Madison Park. They had spent a week eating their way across New York, and one of them said, in the ordinary unguarded way people talk when the wine has been poured a few times, that for all of it they had never had a street hot dog. Someone from the floor team heard it. A member of staff went out to a cart on the corner, bought one, and brought it back

Dwonload the Book (PDF): Introduction There is a question that anyone who allocates capital has to answer and almost nobody answers properly: how do you tell whether a manager with a good record is any good? The obvious method is to look at the record. Nassim Taleb's Fooled by Randomness is an extended demonstration that the obvious method does not work, and that the reasons it does not work are statistical rather than psychological — though the psychology explains why the er

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Warren Buffett has said that The Intelligent Investor is by a considerable margin the best book on investing ever written. He has also said that the two chapters that matter most are the one about a fictional business partner and the one about a bridge. Neither contains a single valuation formula. That is the first thing a student needs to understand about this book, and the thing that makes it survivable. Benjamin Graham published it in

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction There is a peculiarity about A Random Walk Down Wall Street that puzzles nearly every student who reads it. Here is the definitive popular defence of the efficient market hypothesis, and roughly a third of it consists of detailed accounts of episodes in which prices were manifestly, catastrophically wrong. The puzzle dissolves once the thesis is stated precisely, and stating it precisely is the first thing this guide does — because the ve

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Skin in the Game is not really a book about ethics, though it is written as one. It is a book about a design problem: how to arrange an institution so that the people making decisions receive information about whether their decisions are any good. Nassim Taleb's answer is that there is only one mechanism that reliably works, and it is exposure — requiring the decision-maker to bear a share of the loss. Every other device the governance fi

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction "Antifragile" has become a word that consultants use to mean "resilient", and that is a small tragedy, because the whole point of Nassim Taleb's coining it was that resilient is not what he meant. A resilient system absorbs a shock and returns to where it was. An antifragile system ends up better than it was before. A shock absorber is resilient; a muscle under load is antifragile, because it rebuilds stronger than it started. That distin

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction A finance student opening The Black Swan expecting a book about risk mathematics finds instead a book about epistemology, written by a man who is visibly enjoying an argument with people he names, and interrupted by a fictional Brooklyn trader called Fat Tony who exists to demonstrate that credentialled people are fools. The reaction is usually one of two kinds. Some readers find the style bracing and come away persuaded by force of asser

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction There is a standard model of workplace motivation taught in every introductory course. Effort is costly to the worker and unobservable to the employer. The employer therefore ties pay to something measurable. The stronger the link, the more effort is elicited. Everything else — culture, meaning, recognition, fairness — belongs to a soft residual category that appears in a different module and does not connect to the equations. Dan Ariely'

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Students generally enjoy Predictably Irrational, and that is part of the problem. Dan Ariely's book is a sequence of experiments so well designed and so entertainingly told that they lodge in the memory whole. The chocolate truffles. The subscription options. The beer with vinegar in it. Ask a student who has read it what they remember and they will give you the stories, accurately and with pleasure. Ask them what economic proposition eac

Download the Book (PDF): Finance is the study of how money moves through time and between people. That single sentence contains almost everything this module teaches. A saver puts money aside today so that it will be worth more tomorrow. A company borrows money today so that it can build something that earns money tomorrow. A bank stands between the two, holding a promise from one and giving a promise to the other. A government issues a bond, an investor buys a share, a suppl

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Misbehaving is a wonderful book and an inefficient way to revise. Richard Thaler wrote it as a memoir — the story of how a young economist began keeping a list of things people did that his discipline said they should not do, and how that list turned into a field. It has jokes, feuds, seminar humiliations and a long-running argument with the economics department at the University of Chicago. It is one of the most readable books ever writt

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Nearly everyone who has read Nudge can tell you about organ donation rates and pension auto-enrolment. Rather fewer can state what the book actually argues, and the difference between those two groups is visible in the first paragraph of an essay. The examples are the problem. Nudge is unusually readable, and it makes its case through a long series of concrete policy stories — cafeteria layouts, retirement plans, prescription drug menus,

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Thinking, Fast and Slow is a difficult book to revise from, and the difficulty is not conceptual. It is that the book is a memoir of a research programme. Kahneman moves through four decades of experiments in the order he encountered them, with the reasoning, the false starts and the collaborations preserved, and the result is a wonderful piece of scientific writing and a poor study text. A student trying to build a coherent account of be

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Most students meet Karl Polanyi through a single phrase — the double movement — and then discover that the book it comes from spends its central chapters on the poor relief practices of Berkshire magistrates in the 1790s. The gap between the concept's fame and the text's density accounts for a great deal of the difficulty, and for a great many essays that cite the concept without engaging the argument. The Great Transformation was written

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction The difficulty with The Affluent Society is not that it is hard. It is that it appears to be about tail fins. John Kenneth Galbraith published his book in 1958, and its furniture belongs unmistakably to that decade: the oversized American car, the new suburb, the television set in the living room, the advertising jingle. A student encountering it in a twenty-first-century seminar can be forgiven for filing it under period social criticism

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Nine hundred pages is a lot of pages, and Human Action does not make them easy. It opens with epistemology rather than economics. It uses words — praxeology, catallactics, thymology, autistic exchange — that appear nowhere else in the syllabus. It asserts that the entire apparatus of statistical economics is a category error. And it does all this in a tone of settled certainty that can make a reader feel either converted or excluded, neit

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Most students who struggle with Foundations of Economic Analysis are not struggling with economics. They are struggling with the experience of reading a page on which the reasoning is carried entirely by symbols, in a discipline they chose partly because they liked arguments made in words. The anxiety is understandable and largely misplaced, and the reason it is misplaced is the premise of this book. Paul Samuelson's Foundations is not a

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction Inequality is the topic most likely to make an economics essay go wrong, because it is the topic on which students most often already have a view. The temptation is to arrive with a conclusion and gather supporting material. Joseph Stiglitz's The Price of Inequality makes this especially easy, because it is written with visible anger, aimed at a general readership, and full of passages that a sympathetic reader can quote and an unsympathe

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction In 1999, protesters shut down a World Trade Organisation ministerial meeting in Seattle. Two years later, a Nobel laureate who had until recently been the World Bank's Chief Economist published a book making, in more precise language, several of the same accusations. That coincidence is the first thing to understand about Globalization and Its Discontents, and the first thing to get past. Joseph Stiglitz's book was read on publication as

Download the Book (PDF): Introduction A student opening The World Is Flat in the mid-2020s encounters a book about Netscape. That is not quite fair, but it is close enough to be the problem. Thomas Friedman published his account of globalisation in 2005, and its illustrations come from the technological world of the preceding decade: browser wars, the dot-com fibre glut, Y2K remediation contracts, offshore call centres teaching Bangalore graduates to say "have a nice day" in