The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street [Hardcover]

Justin Fox (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 9, 2009

Chronicling the rise and fall of the efficient market theory and the century-long making of the modern financial industry, Justin Fox's The Myth of the Rational Market is as much an intellectual whodunit as a cultural history of the perils and possibilities of risk. The book brings to life the people and ideas that forged modern finance and investing, from the formative days of Wall Street through the Great Depression and into the financial calamity of today. It's a tale that features professors who made and lost fortunes, battled fiercely over ideas, beat the house in blackjack, wrote bestselling books, and played major roles on the world stage. It's also a tale of Wall Street's evolution, the power of the market to generate wealth and wreak havoc, and free market capitalism's war with itself.

The efficient market hypothesis—long part of academic folklore but codified in the 1960s at the University of Chicago—has evolved into a powerful myth. It has been the maker and loser of fortunes, the driver of trillions of dollars, the inspiration for index funds and vast new derivatives markets, and the guidepost for thousands of careers. The theory holds that the market is always right, and that the decisions of millions of rational investors, all acting on information to outsmart one another, always provide the best judge of a stock's value. That myth is crumbling.

Celebrated journalist and columnist Fox introduces a new wave of economists and scholars who no longer teach that investors are rational or that the markets are always right. Many of them now agree with Yale professor Robert Shiller that the efficient markets theory “represents one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economic thought.” Today the theory has given way to counterintuitive hypotheses about human behavior, psychological models of decision making, and the irrationality of the markets. Investors overreact, underreact, and make irrational decisions based on imperfect data. In his landmark treatment of the history of the world's markets, Fox uncovers the new ideas that may come to drive the market in the century ahead.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. At the core of the current financial crisis has been the widely held assumption that markets behave rationally. Fox, Time magazine editor-at-large, isn't the first to bring scrutiny—or censure—to the conceit, but his analysis is singularly compelling, and the rare business history that reads like a thriller. Fox leads us on a chronological journey of modern economic theory, featuring the cast of scholars who constructed the 20th- and 21st-century financial landscape, from Irving Fisher to such post-WWII figures as Milton Friedman, Harry Markowitz, Franco Modigliani and Merton Miller, Jack Treynor and William Sharpe. Fox offers a behind-the-scenes glimpse at academia's finest, complete with amusing anecdotes about the players and their theories, and illustrates how our economic behaviors and markets have been shaped by a gradually refined theory holding that the stock market prices are both random and perfectly rational. A must-read for anyone interested in the markets, our economy or government, this dense but spellbinding work brings modern finance and economics to life. (July)
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Review

“This wise and witty book is must reading for anyone who wonders what makes financial markets tick. Even those who have wrestled with this question for years will be glad to have read Fox’s compelling history.” (Peter Bernstein, author of Against the Gods: The Remarkable Story of Risk )

“Fox makes business history thrilling.” (St. Louis Post-Dispatch )

“Impressively broad and richly researched.” (Financial Times )

“Good wonky fun.” (Barry Ritholz, The Big Picture blog )

“A thoughtful, often fascinating, always illuminating history of the idea of market rationality.” (Cory Doctorow, boingboing.net )

“Do we really need yet another book about the financial crisis? Yes, we do — because this one is different. Fox’s book is not an idle exercise in intellectual history, which makes it a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the mess we’re in.” (Paul Krugman, New York Times Book Review )

“His analysis is singularly compelling, and the rare business history that reads like a thriller... A must-read for anyone interested in the markets, our economy or government, this dense but spellbinding work brings modern finance and economics to life.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review) )

“A fascinating historical narrative.” (Roger Lowenstein, The Washington Post )

“A lucid, lively and learned account.” (Barron's )

“...a rich history of the world’s most seductive investing idea...the book chronicles the rise of rational market theory over the decades and captures the sizzle and pop of the intellectual debate ...” (Bloomberg )

“A tough, tasty steak of a book.” (Dan Neil, Los Angeles Times )

“Superbly accurate and readable... Clearly the result of many years of research and reading,... it is a model of what the popularization of social science can be, but too rarely is, and it will continue to be read when the current crisis is many years behind us.” (American Scientist )

“An intellectual tour-de-force...” (The Economist )

“Justin Fox is a truly insightful fellow who can see things with his own eyes—a rare, very rare attribute.” (Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of The Black Swan )

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: HarperBusiness (June 9, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0060598999
• ISBN-13: 978-0060598990
• Product Dimensions: 9.4 x 6.6 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (90 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #73,208 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Justin Fox is editorial director of the Harvard Business Review Group. He writes a blog for hbr.org (http://blogs.hbr.org/fox/) and a monthly column for Time magazine. From 2007 through 2009 he was an editor at large at Time, writing a weekly column for the magazine and the Curious Capitalist blog for Time.com. Before that Fox spent more than a decade at Fortune magazine, where he covered a wide variety of topics related to economics, finance, and international business. In 2000 and 2001, he was the magazine's Europe editor, based in London.

Prior to joining Fortune, Fox worked at several newspapers, including American Banker and The Birmingham (Alabama) News. He has a degree in international affairs from Princeton University, studied political science at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, and speaks Dutch and German. Fox is married and has a son. He lives in Manhattan.

His first book, 'The Myth of the Rational Market,' is a history of the rise and fall of the efficient market hypothesis -- the influential academic theory that financial markets are nearly perfectly rational and correct. It was the Amazon.com editors' choice as the Best Business Book of 2009 and was a New York Times Notable Book of 2009.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

97 of 103 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Too Short, June 24, 2009

By 

Samuel J. Sharp - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

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This review is from: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (Hardcover)

Overall, Fox has written a very good book which covers a remarkable amount of material in only 322 pages. The problem is that this book, if properly done, should run around 600+ pages. Granted, Fox is a journalist, not an academic, so his audience might not have an appetite for a book that takes a month to read, but the topic is interesting and important enough to warrant a more detailed discussion.

Fox's book is organized primarily by ideas and then chronologically. This can lead to jarring jumps between time periods within chapters and the reader suspects that important topics are being missed. The twelve-page epilogue for example begins in 1833 and is in the 1960's by the turn of the page.

The mathematics discussed in the book is not terribly complicated but the reader is given no formulas, no graphs, no applications of the quantitative theories. Yes, everyone knows what normal distribution looks like but the power laws discussed deserve a chart. Mandelbrot's fractal theories need a diagram. Fox would also support his argument more strongly if he included the formulas which were eventually altered by the behavioralists. Without these, the reader is forced to blindly trust what Fox is telling him.

Despite these minor criticisms, the book is definitely worth reading. I am guessing that the title attracts many readers who hope financial-economics moves beyond the Chicago School efficient-markets framework. If this is what readers want, I recommend Beinhocker's "The Origin of Wealth." If you want a quick tour of academic financial thought, read Fox.

86 of 91 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Don't believe the title, but read the book, July 16, 2009

By 

Herbert Gintis (Northampton, MA USA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (Hardcover)

A few years ago business and economics journalist Justin Fox went to the University of Chicago to talk to Efficient Markets guru Eugene Fama and behavioral economist Richard Thaler. He then went back to New York and wrote an article entitled "Is the Market Rational?" The headline for the article read "No, say the experts. But neither are you---so don't go thinking you can outsmart it." Out of this encounter came this pretty mammoth, extremely informative, and lively written narrative of modern financial economics. If you read this book and take its arguments seriously, you can avoid the major pitfalls that doom some investors to penury. On the other hand, if you think you can beat the market through personal testosterone and shrewdness, don't bother buying the book. Save your money. You'll be on the bread line soon enough.

Saying that people are irrational and the market is irrational is of course now all the rage. But, if you think you can romp your way to financial security by taming your animal spirits and feeding off the market's irrationality, I assure you, and Justin Fox assures you, that such is not the case. "While behaviorists and other critics have poked a lot of holes in the edifice of rational market finance, they haven't been willing to abandon that edifice." (p. 301). The reason is that the edifice is usually correct, although it can experience spectacular failures. The problem is that we don't know when it will experience these failures. We do know, or at least I strongly believe, that the failures are due to herd behavior of investors, which undermines the applicability of the normal statistical distribution, the mainstay of traditional financial theory.

The theory that financial markets are rational is called the Efficient Markets theory. It has two parts. The first is that unless the investor has some inside information not available to other investors, he cannot tell if stock prices are too low, too high, or just right. This means that on average you can't gain by using a general theory that says when stocks are over- or under-valued. The evidence in favor of this theory is overwhelming. If your stockbroker tells you he can pick winners, run as fast as you can. Indeed, the best policy is simply to invest in low-overhead mutual funds, and look VERY closely at the overhead. You'll do very well that way over the long haul. Trust me.


The second half of the efficient markets theory is that market imbalances cannot persist for more than a very short time, because as soon as they are discovered, they will be arbitraged away. There is fairly good evidence that this half of the theory is often wrong; the stock market, for instance, can suffer run-ups for long periods of time; everyone knows the market is out of balance, but no-one knows when to get off the gravy train. Moreover, a financial manager that fails when all others fail (e.g., after a melt-down) will not be blamed, but one who gets off the train too soon will be widely vilified and discredited. I recall that some economists were predicting a financial crisis a full three years before it actually occurred. This is okay for on-lookers, but real players cannot get off the train too soon. Whence the failure of the second half of efficient markets theory.

This book is an extremely valuable resource for the non-professional. There are no equations, but Fox gives one a pretty good idea of what assumptions lie behind a theory, and what arguments and data can be erected for and against it. Financial economics is about the most difficult area of economics because it uses very high-powered math, including stochastic differential equations. The huge amount of financial data makes it relatively easy to test financial theories, so we know fairly well what works and what doesn't. Fox does a totally convincing job of being balanced without ever being boring or simply taking the middle-road. The book deserves it widespread popularity.

102 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars COMPREHENSIVE, COMPLETE AND CLEVER, June 9, 2009

By 

Sanford "Sanford" (New York) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (Hardcover)

Justin Fox has a great blog and writes for Time magazine, having previously written for Fortune magazine. So it was not a surprise that his book is well written and fast paced. Better yet, he has chosen to cover the most critical topic in all of finance: does the market correctly price stocks, bonds and real estates? In delivering a masterpiece he has either killed himself in thoroughly researching the subject or someone talented has directed him to all the right issues. He correctly dates the emergence of the efficient markets theory to the early twentieth century, then covers the contribution of Paul Samuelson, who is oddly enough always forgotten in any coverage about the efficient markets doctrine. He then goes through the sequence of Markowitz, Miller, Modigliani, Fama and Michael Jensen (an odd insertion indeed, since Jensen sweared by efficient markets theories but made his name emphasizing firm level inefficiencies, ones profitably eliminated by buyout funds, but whose profits would not be so impressive if the market could correctly price their coming contribution). He then introduces Richard Thaler and Robert Shiller, and thus downplays Amos Twersky and Daniel Kahneman, which is a failing of the book.

All in all it is a competent masterful history of financial theory and is a must buy for anyone with interest in investing. What it does not pretend to do is give readers a better idea of how to tackle market decisions. That is fine. What is not fine though, and what should be fixed in any future edition, is the lack of hard evidence on why markets are inefficient. There has to be a chapter on Warren Buffet and Peter Lynch and George Soros too, who made mince meat of efficient markets theories with the money they made. The point cannot be made from quotations of famous people alone. Had Justin Fox done that, he would have created a more complete book, what could even have been a classic. Also missing is the destruction derivatives have caused, and which are the offshoot of efficiency dogma. Once again Justin Fox tries to get off by a quotation here or there, but it is insufficient.