What An Economist Learned From Reading 21 Books About The Crisis

Now read 15 more.

A while back, the MIT economist Andrew Lo set out to review a couple books about the financial crisis. Those books led to a couple more books, which led — you see where this is going — to 17 more books.

Now, Lo is about to publish “Reading About The Financial Crisis: A 21-Book Review” (PDF).

Reading 21 books about the financial crisis does not sound, on its face, like a fun experience. After you talk to Lo, it sounds even worse.

“After each book, I felt like I knew less,” he told me. “For an academic, that’s a pretty frustrating feeling.”

Lo read widely. Idea books by economists, newsy books by journalists. An 800-year history of financial crises. (The full listis on pp. 4-5 of the review.)

He knew going in that there was still disagreement over the finer points of the crisis. But reading all those books showed him that the debate runs much deeper than he thought.

“If you got five economists in a room and you asked them what caused the crisis, you’d probably get eight different opinions,” he says.

For Lo, this is a problem. His dream is for economists to look at the crisis the way climatologists look at climate change.

You have … hundreds of scientists who have a number of varying perspectives. They’re fiercely independent. They’ve got huge egos. And yet they all seem to be able to come together around the data about climate change. At this point, I don’t think there’s any dispute in the academic world about whether or not global warming is a fact.

Lo knows that there aren’t “laws of physics that will govern all economic behavior.” Still, he says, economists ought to be able to agree on a basic set of facts about what caused the crisis……..

http://www.npr.org/blogs/money/2012/01/23/145661552/what-an-economist-learned-from-reading-21-books-about-the-crisis?ft=1&f=93559255

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