Intro
Robert Shiller is a Nobel Prize-winning American economist, best-selling author, and renowned professor at Yale University. Shiller demonstrates how our complex nature is embedded within financial markets by interweaving the psychology of human decision-making, technical econometric methods, and analysis of large scale economic phenomena. Some of Shiller’s major publications include Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events (2019) and Irrational Exuberance (2000, revised 2005).
Since the 1980s, Shiller has been challenging accepted tenets of economic theory. This critical perspective has pushed economists outside the comforts of a rational framework and towards understanding economic patterns driven by irrationality. Shiller’s contributions range from research on asset pricing volatility to prediction and analysis of financial bubbles. In 2003, Shiller and his colleague Karl Case published a paper predicting the impending housing crisis, emphasizing the role of buyer expectations and panic in market phenomena.1 One of the leading economic minds of our time, Shiller is a frequent contributor to new sources such as Project Syndicate, The New York Times, CNBC, and more.
Trying to understand major economic events by looking only at data on changes in economic aggregates, such as gross domestic product, wage rates, interest rates, and tax rates, runs the risk of missing the underlying motivations for change. Doing so is like trying to understand a religious awakening by looking at the cost of printing religious tracts.
– Robert Shiller, Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Economic Events2
