How Markets Fail

The Logic of Economic Calamities

By: John Cassidy

Narrated by: Ralph Cosham

Behind the alarming headlines about job losses, bank bailouts, and corporate greed, there is a little-known story of bad ideas. For 50 years or more, economists have been busy developing elegant theories of how markets work - how they facilitate innovation, wealth creation, and an efficient allocation of society's resources. But what about when markets don't work? What about when they lead to stock-market bubbles, glaring inequality, polluted rivers, real-estate crashes, and credit crunches?

In How Markets Fail, John Cassidy describes the rising influence of what he calls utopian economics, thinking that is blind to how real people act and which denies the many ways an unregulated free market can produce disastrous unintended consequences. He then looks to the leading edge of economic theory - including behavioral economics - to offer a new understanding of the economy, one that casts aside the old assumption that people and firms make decisions purely on the basis of rational self-interest.

Taking the global financial crisis and current recession as his starting point, Cassidy explores a world in which everybody is connected and social contagion is the norm. In such an environment, he shows, individual behavioral biases and kinks - such as overconfidence, envy, copy-cat behavior, and myopia - often give rise to troubling macroeconomic phenomena, such as oil-price spikes, CEO greed cycles, and boom-and-bust waves in housing. These are the inevitable outcomes of what Cassidy refers to as "rational irrationality" - self-serving behavior in a modern market setting.

Combining on-the-ground reporting, clear explanations of esoteric economic theories, and even a little crystal-ball gazing, Cassidy warns that in today's economic crisis, conforming to antiquated orthodoxies isn't just misguided - it's downright dangerous. How Markets Fail offers a new, enlightening way to understand the force of the irrational in our volatile global econ...

©2009 John Cassidy (P)2009 Blackstone Audio, Inc.

Critic reviews

"[A]n elegant, readable treatise on economics, swathed in current headlines....Cassidy writes with terrific clarity and a finely tuned sense of moral outrage, yielding a superb book." ( Kirkus Reviews)

My Pick for Best Book, 2010

The book explains the history of economic though about market stability in significant depth. Like all good histories it is organized around a story, the story of two competing ideas.

The first idea is Keynesian economics which recognized that some markets possess positive feedback, which is inherently unstable. The Keynesian model suggested that a central role for governments was to intervene in order to partially stabilize these markets. However, this failed in part because market participants could adapt to the government intervention far faster than the government could adapt to market changes. The resulting combination of government intervention and a market that anticipates and accounts for government intervention is even more unstable, and has the added problem that wealth is sucked out of the government, to savvy market players.

The narrative suggests that the competing idea has been something that I will call ???Friedmonian??? economics, which argued that markets are nearly perfect information machines. This model leads naturally to a policy of extreme government abstention in all economic matters, which, leads to a kind of lawlessness. Perhaps you can???t (yet) bulldoze your competitor???s factories in the dead of night, but the economic equivalent of this is increasingly endorsed. This had led to a series of bubbles, where a savvy few (often in collusion) have bilked and swindled the economy as a whole. These frauds tend to actually destroy wealth, not just transfer it, so the result is decidedly not good for the whole, even in the statistical sense.

In the shadow of thesub-prime bubble, the two main economics schools are nearly wholly discredited.

The author is clearly somewhat sympathetic to the Keynesian theory; I???m too young to think of Keynesianisum as truly distinct from astrology. But I think that the idea of market efficiency is at least as silly, and I'm glad he's willing to say so.

A detailed history

Where does How Markets Fail rank among all the audiobooks you’ve listened to so far?

The book does a nice job of reviewing the history of markets and provides more detail towards the end about the events that occurred within the past couple of years.

What did you like best about this story?

The detail within the past couple of years

What does Ralph Cosham bring to the story that you wouldn’t experience if you just read the book?

A reminder of what happened and how we have been through this before.

Was this a book you wanted to listen to all in one sitting?

No.

Must-read for everyone interested in economics

A clarifying explanation of how Adam Smith's early, simple economic model is dangerous when applied to scaled, inter-obligated, highly-leveraged modern real-life economies influenced by human psychology.

Way more than I expected

I bought this book thinking it would be another book on the current financial crisis; after all, there are so many. I was pleasantly surprised when after a few chapters I realized that this was not at all what the book was about. It does not chronicle the crisis or even how markets have failed catastrophically in the past. Rather it articulates various ways in which free markets can fail to produce efficient outcomes. If you want a history of the current crisis, read "Too Big to Fail" by Andrew Ross Sorkin. It's essentially a blow by blow chronology and a comprehensive one at that. It's worth reading. But this book very skillfully presents a case for how markets are not always the best solution to economic problems. I've learned more from this book than I have from anything I've read in quite a while. I plan to purchase a physical copy and read it again at least once.

Great audiobook: story and narrator.

Very interesting facts and insights. The explanations of the why and how are very clever and mostly easy to understand. The narrator is a plus.

This is free with membership?

This is worth paying for. Top notch. Not ideological. Very informative tour of economics, history and concepts. Probably not worth reading if you have a post graduate degree in economics. Otherwise it’s great. I would say must read for undergrads.

Extremely informative

What did you love best about How Markets Fail?

This books provides a great historical view of market failure. It is extremely informative and devastatingly enlightening.

What did you like best about this story?

I quite enjoyed the "long view" that this book takes... it shows that only a few people truly understand how the markets work and constantly work towards optimising profits at the expense of others. It also shows that there is a clear role for governments to play in market economics so we don't constantly end up in economic meltdown.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The thesis of the book absolutely shatters the illusion of any pure free market capitalism - without proper government regulation, it is unlikely that the capitalist system will survive... it might even be too late to save it, given the current state of Europe.

Any additional comments?

Highly recommend this book.

Astrology is More of a Science than Economics....

This is an excellent and entertaining book. The author gives a reasonably unbiased review of the various economic theories, as well as the underlying politics that drives these theories. It was a great review and I found myself constantly wanting to listen to more.

That said, it was also very disappointing (frightening even) to learn just how poorly developed and "academically inbred" the field of economics really is (particularly given our current economic crisis). To be fair, there were some economists who made real and significant contributions. There are also some concepts and thought experiments that are quite useful. But I was surprised at just how little most of the "big names" in economics had actually contributed.

I don't know that I learned any new revelations about the current dismal global economy that common sense didn't already dictate. But the book was a gold mine in terms of understanding the relationship between various political movements and their corresponding economic schools of thought.

Entertaining and Insightful.

The bulk of this book is a chronology of market booms and busts and the great minds that shaped our economic policies. As it approaches present day however, some scathing criticisms surface. Greenspan for being too hands off when he should have been alerted by red flags in subprime lending. Bernanke and Paulson are faulted mostly for not doing enough to support the financial markets and protect the large institutions, thus allaying fears in the heat of the crisis. Overall, a great listen and very insightful.
I wonder, if it really was the weakness of these individuals that facilitated the collapse then, what of all other nations of the world? Surely we’re not responsible for their failures as well? And why no mention of oil? I still remember the unsettling feeling as the price of gasoline encroached $5.00 a gallon and fear about the future of discretionary spending. This and other books on the present day failures seem to overlook the impact of fuel costs during the summer of 2008.
The author scores one for Obama’s socialist economic policies as the game winner. He ends in October of 2009 using that month to justify his argument. But that’s like going to bed after your team has just rallied, assuming they won the game. In retrospect August 2009 turned out to be nothing more then a sugar rush as the economy tired soon after. Now that we are further along in the game many people are dissatisfied with the ineffective policies that have been set forth and the amount of debt that has been amassed to fund them.
Finally, one day, after affixing my ear plug and turning on my MP3 player, my wife asked “What are you listening to?”
“A very good story that tells all about what happened during the crises and what led to the economic collapse.”
“You don’t need a stupid book to tell you about that, I can tell you what caused it.”
“Oh yeah” I said “what was it?”
“GREED!”
The beauty of logic is its simplicity. Oh well it was a good history lesson!

Diagnosis spot on, prescription lacks nuance, still worthwhile

I absolutely loved 95% of this book. Cassidy’s review of economic thought and thinkers is one of the most complete, thoughtful and nuanced compilations I’ve ever encountered. His critique of utopian economics is so blatantly and incisively on point that I found myself wanting to shout “amen” in some spots. Only in the conclusion of the book did he lose me; rather than grapple with the fascinating question of how can governments facilitate, harness and optimize the inherent power of markets, and correct for their plainly manifest shortcomings, he seems to fall back on a simple line of prescriptive and proscriptive mandates to simply “force” decision makers to do things the “right” way. Perhaps because I listened to this in 2022, rather than in 2009 when it was written, the entire conclusion seemed dated, overly simplistic and almost hostile to some of the ideas and their proponents which he had spent the entire book to that point carefully portraying and articulating. So much promise in the buildup, only to throw it all away in the end! Nevertheless—all that being said—I highly recommend this book as a useful and insightful synthesis of 19th, 20th and early 21st century economic thought. Despite its flaws, still one of the best, most comprehensive reads on modern economic thought.