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The Inner Lives of Markets: How People Shape Them - And They Shape Us
What is a market? To most people it is a shopping center or an abstract space in which stock prices vary minutely. In reality, a market is something much more fundamental to being human, and it affects not just the price of tomatoes but the boundaries of everything we value.
Reading the newspapers these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that markets are getting ever more efficient - and better. But as Tim Sullivan and Ray Fisman argue in this insightful book, that view is far from complete. For one thing, efficiency isn't always a good thing - illegal markets are very often more efficient than legal ones, because they are free of concern for laws and human rights. But even more importantly, the chatter about efficiency has obscured a much broader conversation about what kind of economic exchange we actually want. Every regulation, every sticker price, and every sale is part of an ever-changing ecosystem - one that affects us as much as we affect it.
By tracing 50 years of economic thought on this subject, Fisman and Sullivan show how markets have evolved - and how we can keep making them better. This leads to fascinating and surprising insights, such as:
- Why your £10,000 used car is likely to sell for £2,000 or less;
- Why you should think twice before buying batteries on Amazon; and
- Why it's essential that healthy people buy medical insurance.
In the end, The Inner Lives of Markets argues for a new way of thinking about how you spend your money - it shows that every transaction you make is part of a grand social experiment. We are all guinea pigs running through a lab maze, and the sooner we realize it, the more effectively we can navigate the path we want.
Reading the newspapers these days, you could be forgiven for thinking that markets are getting ever more efficient - and better. But as Tim Sullivan and Ray Fisman argue in this insightful book, that view is far from complete. For one thing, efficiency isn't always a good thing - illegal markets are very often more efficient than legal ones, because they are free of concern for laws and human rights. But even more importantly, the chatter about efficiency has obscured a much broader conversation about what kind of economic exchange we actually want. Every regulation, every sticker price, and every sale is part of an ever-changing ecosystem - one that affects us as much as we affect it.
By tracing 50 years of economic thought on this subject, Fisman and Sullivan show how markets have evolved - and how we can keep making them better. This leads to fascinating and surprising insights, such as:
- Why your £10,000 used car is likely to sell for £2,000 or less;
- Why you should think twice before buying batteries on Amazon; and
- Why it's essential that healthy people buy medical insurance.
In the end, The Inner Lives of Markets argues for a new way of thinking about how you spend your money - it shows that every transaction you make is part of a grand social experiment. We are all guinea pigs running through a lab maze, and the sooner we realize it, the more effectively we can navigate the path we want.
224 pages, Paperback
First published June 7, 2016
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November 11, 2016
HL Mencken is credited with saying that “for every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong.”
The authors of “Inner Lives of Markets” claim to have been inspired by a book they found at the MIT bookstore that contained “reprints of the most important physics papers of the twentieth century, together with […] what they accomplished and why they were important.”
What they have borrowed from this book is the structure, rather than the goal.
Their much higher aim is to guide you, based on their reading of some seminal post-WWII Economics papers, to the conclusion that HL Mencken’s qualification must be applied to the generally accepted axiom that markets can solve all our problems: yes, there usually is a market-based solution, but you have to adapt the theory to the particulars of the problem you are trying to solve.
They set the scene early on, explaining that markets can make the difference between life and death: Trading between POWs (using cigarettes as currency) saved the lives of thousands of prisoners of war in WWII. Prisoners in camps where no trading was allowed and camps that were run by senior officers were much more likely to die than prisoners who were allowed to trade their rations. “Markets work” is the message here.
From there the authors move on to a high-level discussion of how Samuelson ('70 Nobel), Arrow ('72) and Debreu ('83) brought rigor to the study of Economics, but I have no idea why this chapter is here. The rest of the book is nothing to do with them, it’s a guided tour of some papers that endeavored to stop us looking at the economy as a whole and brought us back to basics, so we can examine individual markets one at a time:
Akerlof’s ('01) work regarding lemons is hailed as a major breakthrough, but is also criticized as ultimately inadequate to actually describe what happens with used cars, a market that somehow manages to clear, to say nothing of eBay and airBnB making a splash, despite the massive information asymmetries that logic would dictate should have stopped them in their tracks.
Spence’s ('01) work on signalling is added to the mix, as an early theory providing a remedy to the asymmetric information problem that ought to plague markets. (Spence, btw, stopped doing economics more than 25 years ago and has found his true calling as an administrator in academia and Nobel Prize-accredited pundit)
The theoretically “most efficient” Vickerey ('96) auction (where the highest bidder in a sealed-bidding process pays the price submitted by the second-highest bidder) is discussed next, as an introduction to a long chapter that unveils some of the shortcomings of this type of market-clearing process and other types of auctions that address these potential shortcomings. Stories involving Goethe (a bit early for the Literature Prize) and the trading of Japanese baseball players by American teams keep this interesting, if trivial.
A chapter follows on “platforms” such as the Visa payment system and medieval trade fairs, Expedia, eBay and LinkedIn, but its hero is economist Jean Tirole ('14), and the main point is they are all different and you can’t cover them all with one theory.
The point is made again when the authors (successfully, bravo!) take you through Shapley’s algorithm that produces “stable” couples of boys and girls for the prom (the kind that won’t leave a single couple glancing at each other from the opposite side of the dancefloor, but will still obviously leave the prom queen dancing with the captain of the football team), only to tell you that you need a guru like Alvin Roth ('12) to solve more complex matching problems such as assigning kids to schools in Boston (for the record, I think the authors get either the answer wrong or the explanation here) or swapping kidneys between donors.
The two penultimate chapters are a wash: one’s about how a committed socialist who worked for a food bank was delighted to work using an internal currency of “shares” to allocate corporate food donations to the most needy branches of the food bank; the other is about how sometimes you should perhaps put efficiency to one side and recalls an early Larry Summers (the committee's Antichrist at this point, but don't count him out) faux pas regarding the trading in waste between poor and rich countries. (If I understand this right, Summers took the flak for standing behind the work of one of his underlings on this one, so the authors need to get their story straight, but the point is well made)
In the final chapter, the authors introduce the concept of time: what’s good now may be bad later, but you may find that “bad” habits are difficult to drop. So to do business in a backwards place you may have to initially hire minors or pay some bribes, but once this locale has moved forward from an economic standpoint, what wins? It’s a question Andrei Shleifer (robbed in '13) posed and it is very deep indeed.
I wanted to love this book, but in the end I could not. I think its failure lies in the structure. It all would have stood much better if it had not been structured around the papers by the famous people. And I got sick of being told how important all these Nobel Prize winners were.
Indeed, most books that talk about Economics are full of references to the peers of the authors. If you read a book by a giant, he will be discussing the work of his fellow giants and if you read a book by an up-and-coming guy all references will be to the work of his sparring partners in the field and none of the names will mean anything to you, but that’s OK.
Not this book. All references here are either to Nobel Prize winners or to dead people, with special mention for the one point where the Venn diagram meets, an economist who was (unwittingly from the Swedish side) awarded the prize posthumously!
My mom once advised me in her oblique and roundabout way to stay away from girls who don’t seem to have any girlfriends. I never got to test her theory, but this is a book by economists who don’t seem to have any economist friends they’re comfortable talking about.
“The Inner Lives of Markets” has a tremendous premise: Put in the work and the market will reward you.
But the analysis is superficial, the average reader will not feel the “star power” of Akerlof or Spence and this book is at best OK reading for that “economics for poets” distributional requirement at BU where one of the authors teaches.
Which is a shame, because this is a story that’s crying out to be told.
The authors of “Inner Lives of Markets” claim to have been inspired by a book they found at the MIT bookstore that contained “reprints of the most important physics papers of the twentieth century, together with […] what they accomplished and why they were important.”
What they have borrowed from this book is the structure, rather than the goal.
Their much higher aim is to guide you, based on their reading of some seminal post-WWII Economics papers, to the conclusion that HL Mencken’s qualification must be applied to the generally accepted axiom that markets can solve all our problems: yes, there usually is a market-based solution, but you have to adapt the theory to the particulars of the problem you are trying to solve.
They set the scene early on, explaining that markets can make the difference between life and death: Trading between POWs (using cigarettes as currency) saved the lives of thousands of prisoners of war in WWII. Prisoners in camps where no trading was allowed and camps that were run by senior officers were much more likely to die than prisoners who were allowed to trade their rations. “Markets work” is the message here.
From there the authors move on to a high-level discussion of how Samuelson ('70 Nobel), Arrow ('72) and Debreu ('83) brought rigor to the study of Economics, but I have no idea why this chapter is here. The rest of the book is nothing to do with them, it’s a guided tour of some papers that endeavored to stop us looking at the economy as a whole and brought us back to basics, so we can examine individual markets one at a time:
Akerlof’s ('01) work regarding lemons is hailed as a major breakthrough, but is also criticized as ultimately inadequate to actually describe what happens with used cars, a market that somehow manages to clear, to say nothing of eBay and airBnB making a splash, despite the massive information asymmetries that logic would dictate should have stopped them in their tracks.
Spence’s ('01) work on signalling is added to the mix, as an early theory providing a remedy to the asymmetric information problem that ought to plague markets. (Spence, btw, stopped doing economics more than 25 years ago and has found his true calling as an administrator in academia and Nobel Prize-accredited pundit)
The theoretically “most efficient” Vickerey ('96) auction (where the highest bidder in a sealed-bidding process pays the price submitted by the second-highest bidder) is discussed next, as an introduction to a long chapter that unveils some of the shortcomings of this type of market-clearing process and other types of auctions that address these potential shortcomings. Stories involving Goethe (a bit early for the Literature Prize) and the trading of Japanese baseball players by American teams keep this interesting, if trivial.
A chapter follows on “platforms” such as the Visa payment system and medieval trade fairs, Expedia, eBay and LinkedIn, but its hero is economist Jean Tirole ('14), and the main point is they are all different and you can’t cover them all with one theory.
The point is made again when the authors (successfully, bravo!) take you through Shapley’s algorithm that produces “stable” couples of boys and girls for the prom (the kind that won’t leave a single couple glancing at each other from the opposite side of the dancefloor, but will still obviously leave the prom queen dancing with the captain of the football team), only to tell you that you need a guru like Alvin Roth ('12) to solve more complex matching problems such as assigning kids to schools in Boston (for the record, I think the authors get either the answer wrong or the explanation here) or swapping kidneys between donors.
The two penultimate chapters are a wash: one’s about how a committed socialist who worked for a food bank was delighted to work using an internal currency of “shares” to allocate corporate food donations to the most needy branches of the food bank; the other is about how sometimes you should perhaps put efficiency to one side and recalls an early Larry Summers (the committee's Antichrist at this point, but don't count him out) faux pas regarding the trading in waste between poor and rich countries. (If I understand this right, Summers took the flak for standing behind the work of one of his underlings on this one, so the authors need to get their story straight, but the point is well made)
In the final chapter, the authors introduce the concept of time: what’s good now may be bad later, but you may find that “bad” habits are difficult to drop. So to do business in a backwards place you may have to initially hire minors or pay some bribes, but once this locale has moved forward from an economic standpoint, what wins? It’s a question Andrei Shleifer (robbed in '13) posed and it is very deep indeed.
I wanted to love this book, but in the end I could not. I think its failure lies in the structure. It all would have stood much better if it had not been structured around the papers by the famous people. And I got sick of being told how important all these Nobel Prize winners were.
Indeed, most books that talk about Economics are full of references to the peers of the authors. If you read a book by a giant, he will be discussing the work of his fellow giants and if you read a book by an up-and-coming guy all references will be to the work of his sparring partners in the field and none of the names will mean anything to you, but that’s OK.
Not this book. All references here are either to Nobel Prize winners or to dead people, with special mention for the one point where the Venn diagram meets, an economist who was (unwittingly from the Swedish side) awarded the prize posthumously!
My mom once advised me in her oblique and roundabout way to stay away from girls who don’t seem to have any girlfriends. I never got to test her theory, but this is a book by economists who don’t seem to have any economist friends they’re comfortable talking about.
“The Inner Lives of Markets” has a tremendous premise: Put in the work and the market will reward you.
But the analysis is superficial, the average reader will not feel the “star power” of Akerlof or Spence and this book is at best OK reading for that “economics for poets” distributional requirement at BU where one of the authors teaches.
Which is a shame, because this is a story that’s crying out to be told.
November 26, 2018
I would recommend the book to someone who is not familiar with economics, as there is no blatant mistake or exaggeration of what the models are as is so often found in popular science takes on economics. The papers that inspire the discussion are classics of the field and you can never learn too much about them, plus the first chapter on the economics of POW camps was entirely new to me. Still, for someone more comfortable with market mechanisms, some parts lack significant nuance, especially towards the end with the brief discussion on the sharing economy and the effects of markets on behaviour, a subject much better treated in The Moral Economy by Samuel Bowles.
July 4, 2017
Its a pretty good read in parts. The start is very interesting and insightful. But in the first couple of chapters, the book gets a bit too much into citations :P or basically praising all the economists. (I seriously considered not going further in the second chapter). But, the third chapter on is when this book reveals some unique market traits and development stories that makes the book definitely a worthwhile read. If one skips Chapters 1 and 2 (especially 2), its a 4-star rather than the 3 I rated it at.
December 27, 2016
Comprehensive and smooth read about markets. Starts with market efficiency, covers market asymmetry, design, platforms, market failure, a little bit of ethics and trade-offs between free-market capitalism and socialism.
February 2, 2019
This short and accessible overview of post-World War Two economic thought provides a useful corrective to some of the more hyperbolic commentary on markets. Rather than present markets as a panacea for all of society's ills or as a mere vehicle for exploitation, the authors present markets as a set of tools that are appropriate for different tasks. Markets are not simply "free" or "unfree," they must be consciously designed to overcome particular obstacles between buyers and sellers.
Some of the economic concepts addressed are relatively well-known (e.g., Akerlof's "lemon problem" and the problem of "cheap talk,") but there are some solid insights here that are not often acknowledged in books directed at a general audience. For instance, this book's discussion of market platforms does a good job of acknowledging the potential for platforms to exploit participants and the fact that a lot of "disruptive" platforms want to be just as anti-competitive as the older markets they seek to supplant.
My favorite discussion, however, is of the internal "market" that was designed for Second Harvest to distribute food donations to its network of food banks. One of the food bank leaders was an avowed socialist who distrusted the initial market idea and expressed (reasonable) fears that it would privilege large food banks over small ones. The consulting economists responded by addressing those fears directly and adjusted the market design to make it more equitable without sacrificing efficiency. Because the economists treated the markets as a tool, rather than an object of reverence, they were able to design a market that spoke to the particular concerns of its participants.
The authors of this book made a deliberate choice to avoid talking much about market ethics or the "optimal" set of regulations for markets. Some readers may be disappointed by this choice, but I appreciate the authors' restraint and think it makes the book an easier sell to people who have strong preexisting opinions about government regulation. Rather than push a particular political narrative, this book is focused on giving people the foundation for more productive and informed conversations about market regulation. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a general curiosity about markets but prefers to avoid complicated mathematical equations and dense pages of academic jargon.
Some of the economic concepts addressed are relatively well-known (e.g., Akerlof's "lemon problem" and the problem of "cheap talk,") but there are some solid insights here that are not often acknowledged in books directed at a general audience. For instance, this book's discussion of market platforms does a good job of acknowledging the potential for platforms to exploit participants and the fact that a lot of "disruptive" platforms want to be just as anti-competitive as the older markets they seek to supplant.
My favorite discussion, however, is of the internal "market" that was designed for Second Harvest to distribute food donations to its network of food banks. One of the food bank leaders was an avowed socialist who distrusted the initial market idea and expressed (reasonable) fears that it would privilege large food banks over small ones. The consulting economists responded by addressing those fears directly and adjusted the market design to make it more equitable without sacrificing efficiency. Because the economists treated the markets as a tool, rather than an object of reverence, they were able to design a market that spoke to the particular concerns of its participants.
The authors of this book made a deliberate choice to avoid talking much about market ethics or the "optimal" set of regulations for markets. Some readers may be disappointed by this choice, but I appreciate the authors' restraint and think it makes the book an easier sell to people who have strong preexisting opinions about government regulation. Rather than push a particular political narrative, this book is focused on giving people the foundation for more productive and informed conversations about market regulation. I would recommend this book to anyone who has a general curiosity about markets but prefers to avoid complicated mathematical equations and dense pages of academic jargon.
September 17, 2018
Writing a book on economic concepts can be a challenging task: it's a subject that comes off as very dry to many, and is a highly politicaly charged topic to boot. One position or the other will attract negative attention of one degree or another.
This book accomplishes several impressive feats: it is a Economics book that is genuinely entertaining (dare I say funny at times, an accomplishment usually reserved for Charles Wheelan). It's other major achievement is being as unbiased as possible in terms of it's views on markets.
This has most likely attracted negative attention from both sides. The free market zealots will fling insults at the authors for even considering that markets are not perfect (or that they dare use the term "market failure"). Your typical market skeptic (one might call them socialists) will be equally unhappy that the authors do not discuss more topics of where markets fail horribly or lead to negative outcomes. They would most likely not even enjoy hearing that markets can be useful means of allocation.
However, such is the cost of being unbiased. You anger both sides. I was certainly annoyed that the book mostly sidesteps the most controversial aspects of market failure (such as Healthcare, with gets just a passing mention in the text), but that's besides the point. This is not the book "how markets fail". This is "the hidden life of markets". And it tells that story perfectly, while being both unbiased and entertaining.
If you want to know some cool storys about markets (from WW2 prison camp markets to funky auction systems) this book is for you.
I highly recommend it, and Grant it a perfect rating for meeting it's goals.
This book accomplishes several impressive feats: it is a Economics book that is genuinely entertaining (dare I say funny at times, an accomplishment usually reserved for Charles Wheelan). It's other major achievement is being as unbiased as possible in terms of it's views on markets.
This has most likely attracted negative attention from both sides. The free market zealots will fling insults at the authors for even considering that markets are not perfect (or that they dare use the term "market failure"). Your typical market skeptic (one might call them socialists) will be equally unhappy that the authors do not discuss more topics of where markets fail horribly or lead to negative outcomes. They would most likely not even enjoy hearing that markets can be useful means of allocation.
However, such is the cost of being unbiased. You anger both sides. I was certainly annoyed that the book mostly sidesteps the most controversial aspects of market failure (such as Healthcare, with gets just a passing mention in the text), but that's besides the point. This is not the book "how markets fail". This is "the hidden life of markets". And it tells that story perfectly, while being both unbiased and entertaining.
If you want to know some cool storys about markets (from WW2 prison camp markets to funky auction systems) this book is for you.
I highly recommend it, and Grant it a perfect rating for meeting it's goals.
April 7, 2020
A sometimes interesting book about different kinds of markets, with the examples mostly built off important economics papers of the last sisxty years, many by Nobel winners. Its sometimes interesting because the chapters felt rather uneven to me (the effect of different authrs writing individual chapters, perhaps?). At the end of the last chapter therés a sort of attempt to provide a thesis about how markets are both important and problematic, but it didn't seem to me that there had been any attempt in the preceding cghapters to help lead us to these possible conclusions: just a set of stories illustrating the ways real life interfers with the ideal markets that economists describe (and I know they are well aware, and say so frequently, that real life is vastly different from the theorectical markets they describe).
A short read, but I'd probably have preferred a slighlty more thorough discussion and exploration of some of the cases.
A short read, but I'd probably have preferred a slighlty more thorough discussion and exploration of some of the cases.
June 23, 2021
There is no such thing as a free lunch. Market is not panacea. There're things where markets are and aren't doing well. The markets will shape us. How high a price are we willing to pay for a more efficient world?
October 27, 2024
Not that it wasn't good - it is a helpful introduction to market design theory, but similar to other books I'd read with similar anecdotes (e.g. improving matching process of kidney transplants etc) - but it's an accessible, easy read
August 12, 2021
Clearly presented summaries of economic ideas that provide a great starting point for further research.
January 29, 2024
Guys I swr I’m not a finance bro
March 28, 2025
As a struggling first year questioning the point of what the fuck I’m doing, I like how this book places these esoteric ideas in context and how it shaped the future after being published.
August 8, 2016
I read this shortly after finishing Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business, which made it very difficult for me to warm to the opening chapters of this book, discussing RAND Corporation and the "mathematization" of economic theory. Makers is considerably less enamoured of the legacy of RAND than Fisman and Sullivan; and I personally consider the "mathematization" of economics one of the greatest scams of modern academia. Although the proofs and models the post-war economists developed may have some limited application, economics cannot be divorced from psychology and behavourial science and retain any semblance of relevancy to the real world.
The middle section, particularly regarding auction design, was more engaging for me. However, throughout the book I found the authors' application of "diverse" gendered pronouns a bit odd -- I appreciate the impulse to use "she" in equal measure to "he" for generic examples but I noticed early (and often) that the "she" examples were almost universally the more negative ones. This was further driven home when the authors spent an entire chapter using (what they admitted to be) heteronormative middle school dance couplings as the descriptive example of deferred acceptance algorithms, where they somehow managed to entirely strip the majority of women within the example of any agency. The authors doubled-down on the gendered inequality by repeatedly commodifying the "prom queen" stereotype as a luxury good.
Although the authors acknowledged that they purposefully didn't discuss government intervention or regulation, I acutely felt the lack of that discussion throughout the book. Adam Smith was not a free market advocate -- he believed that unregulated capitalism would tend toward greed and inequality. The "invisible hand" is not a magical apparition within the heart of a market, it is the result of the direct intervention of regulators and/or market makers.
Finally, if there aren't enough coat hooks in a classroom for all of the students, the answer is not (and never will be) to auction off the existing hooks to the highest bidders -- put up more goddamn coat hooks. (How was that literally never suggested in the entire chapter where they used this as an illustrative example of market application?)
The middle section, particularly regarding auction design, was more engaging for me. However, throughout the book I found the authors' application of "diverse" gendered pronouns a bit odd -- I appreciate the impulse to use "she" in equal measure to "he" for generic examples but I noticed early (and often) that the "she" examples were almost universally the more negative ones. This was further driven home when the authors spent an entire chapter using (what they admitted to be) heteronormative middle school dance couplings as the descriptive example of deferred acceptance algorithms, where they somehow managed to entirely strip the majority of women within the example of any agency. The authors doubled-down on the gendered inequality by repeatedly commodifying the "prom queen" stereotype as a luxury good.
Although the authors acknowledged that they purposefully didn't discuss government intervention or regulation, I acutely felt the lack of that discussion throughout the book. Adam Smith was not a free market advocate -- he believed that unregulated capitalism would tend toward greed and inequality. The "invisible hand" is not a magical apparition within the heart of a market, it is the result of the direct intervention of regulators and/or market makers.
Finally, if there aren't enough coat hooks in a classroom for all of the students, the answer is not (and never will be) to auction off the existing hooks to the highest bidders -- put up more goddamn coat hooks. (How was that literally never suggested in the entire chapter where they used this as an illustrative example of market application?)
February 23, 2017
It took me a while to get used to the way the authors tell stories. But once I was in the zone, I kinda enjoyed reading about the economics concepts and how they shaped our lives. It is worth reading. Plus, it is really short.
September 24, 2018
I began this book thinking that economic theory probably doesn't play any part in real life trading. But it showed that I was wrong, the design of many of the internet platforms that we take for granted draws significantly on ideas from theoretical economics. It looks the problems inherent in all kind of market - bringing buyers and sellers together, making sure that they don't cheat each other, giving people a clear idea of what is being traded -and discusses how they have been tackled in different situations, ranging from 12th Century fairs to modern internet platforms. It certainly gave me a lot to think about.
My one criticism would be that the discussion of the limitations of markets seems formulaic and so unpersuasive. For instance, there's a discussion of how markets make us selfish. But compared to what? I think hierarchical societies such as medieval feudalism showed much greater selfishness. We accept that we don't trade in body parts. But what about areas where there is disagreement, such as land. Land isn't produced by those who own it, so is it right that it should be the subject of trade. That isn't discussed in the book.
But despite the fact that it didn't include all that I would have hoped for, I found it an interesting and entertaining read, so it still gets 5 stars.
My one criticism would be that the discussion of the limitations of markets seems formulaic and so unpersuasive. For instance, there's a discussion of how markets make us selfish. But compared to what? I think hierarchical societies such as medieval feudalism showed much greater selfishness. We accept that we don't trade in body parts. But what about areas where there is disagreement, such as land. Land isn't produced by those who own it, so is it right that it should be the subject of trade. That isn't discussed in the book.
But despite the fact that it didn't include all that I would have hoped for, I found it an interesting and entertaining read, so it still gets 5 stars.
April 21, 2020
Focusing on outstanding contributions made over the past half century to applied economic theory, the authors introduce the concept of markets for non economists, and then explore interlinked examples of how markets work in POW camps, used car lots, medical resident "Match Days," food banks and hazardous waste disposal. For fans of Freakonomics and The Undercover Economist, this classroom worthy introducation will give readers a more ordered overview of what drives our organizations.
November 27, 2016
Very good book about the working of markets and what it means for us. There are a lot of examples which show where and how markets work, which might not be obvious for non-economists.
The author also shows that pure economic thought does not necessarily apply to the real world but there always needs to be a combination of theory and real life
The author also shows that pure economic thought does not necessarily apply to the real world but there always needs to be a combination of theory and real life
December 17, 2016
Lumbering descriptions of theory and an endless stream of parenthetic asides mire down the flow. One sentence drones on for seven lines in a vain attempt to explain a concept. One aside took an entire paragraph. At under 200 pages this read on the evolution of Economics from Smith to today's shared economy was more annoying than enlightening.
August 13, 2016
Overall, an intriguing book, but I was a little bored by the end. In addition, I found the book to be a rollercoaster; certain chapters were excellent, but others were very difficult to finish. I would recommend The Inner Lives of Markets, but don't expect a page turner.
Want to read
June 8, 2016Extract in Slate
Want to read
August 5, 20168/5/16 it was reviewed in the WSJ. Sounds like a review of market analysis work since WW2
June 20, 2018
Interesting and engaging review of some of the most important economic contribution to markets analysis (most of them from Novel laureates) if the past century and their implications on shaping and regulating markets (from baseball player trading to the allocation of kids applying for schools). Very practical take and plain language that does not require any technical background.
Displaying 1 - 22 of 22 reviews