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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.



About the Author

George A. Akerlof

George A. Akerlof is the Koshland Professor of Economics at the University of California, Berkeley, and 2001 Nobel Laureate in Economics. Akerlof is the coauthor, with Robert Shiller, of "Animal Spirits: How Human Psychology Drives the Economy, and Why It Matters for Global Capitalism".



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