Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller on "Phishing for Phools"

Lecture/Symposia Series

Nobel Laureate Robert Shiller on \

Thursday, October 8, 2015 | 5:30 PM to 7:00 PM

Ever since Adam Smith, the central teaching of economics has been that free markets provide us with material well-being, as if by an invisible hand. In Phishing for Phools, Nobel Prize–winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller deliver a fundamental challenge to this insight, arguing that markets harm as well as help us. As long as there is profit to be made, sellers will systematically exploit our psychological weaknesses and our ignorance through manipulation and deception. Rather than being essentially benign and always creating the greater good, markets are inherently filled with tricks and traps and will “phish” us as “phools.”

Phishing for Phools therefore strikes a radically new direction in economics, based on the intuitive idea that markets both give and take away. Akerlof and Shiller bring this idea to life through dozens of stories that show how phishing affects everyone, in almost every walk of life.

About the Speaker
Robert J. Shiller is Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale University, the winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize and the author of the New York Times bestseller Irrational Exuberance (Princeton). He is the co-author, also with George Akerlof, of Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism (Princeton).