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Butterfly Economics: A New General Theory of Social and Economic Behavior
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In this cogently and elegantly argued analysis of why human beings persist in engaging in behavior that defies time-honored economic theory, Ormerod also explains why governments and industries throughout the world must completely reconfigure their traditional methods of economic forecasting if they are to succeed and prosper in an increasingly complicated global marketpla
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Paperback, 240 pages
Published
January 25th 2001
by Basic Books
(first published January 1st 1998)
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Butterfly Economics is an interesting book that introduces the theories and thoughts of Ormerod on economic behavior. His entire first chapter is dedicated to an experiment involving communication between ant which he converts to an elegant theory of interacting agents that stock investors should heed. Using economic and stock market data from the past century, Ormerod's braided new ideas combine the disciplines of psychology and economics to describe how the behavior of humans affects those aro
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A very intriguing and interesting read. It definitely helps to have a math and business/economics background to understand the content.
I recommend this book to anybody who’s wants to learn consumer behavior at a macro level or macro-economics in general.
I recommend this book to anybody who’s wants to learn consumer behavior at a macro level or macro-economics in general.
It would be tough for me to recommend this book, although it had some interesting observations. The basic premise is that contrary to the treatment of consumers in classical economics, consumers’ preferences are not fixed and that consumers interact in ways that modify preferences (thus, in effect, changing a price vs. demand curve). Of course! Actually, "Tipping Point" makes the same point much more clearly and much more substantively. The analogy that he makes to ants’ choosing between two
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This book started out interestingly enough with the little morsal of simile that the economy is like an ant colony and preceded to explain a study about ants going to seperate, but equal piles of food and why that is like business cycles. Now that doesn't sound that interesting when I explain it, but it is an eyebrow raiser in the book. Well it goes on and by the late second half of the book I found myself wishing for the end and skimming. Taking a line from another review, it gets a little bori
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It seems I'm heading backwards through Ormerod's books so there was a little repetition for me but this proved another decent dismantling of some economic shibboleths, seemingly nudging the reader towards a more rational economic approach.
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A bit hard to get through, but had some good ideas. Reading it in 2013, not 1998 has benefits and drawbacks. The chapters with tons of scatter-plot graphs weren't my thing, but if you're really hardcore into math, you will like it.
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I find myself thinking about the ant experiment very often, in particular while watching political and financial news.
A little dry and tedious but a good introduction to behavioral economics and finance.
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