100 Books Like Money Illusion and Strategic Complementarity as Causes of Monetary Non-Neutrality

Similarly, like John Maynard Keynes is considered to be “father of macroeconomics”, Irving Fisher is considered to be “father of money illusion”, which is a failure to perceive that the dollar expands or shrinks in value.

Although this book is older, it is highly topical for me, because of the rapid development of behavioral macroeconomics, which brings back attention to the resurrected concept of money illusion.

Fisher remarkably demonstrates, with the help of illustrative examples, direct harm which might be experienced in real life by people who suffer from money illusion in financial markets or labor markets. Fisher uses persuasive case studies based on his own observations. 

He also utilizes money illusion and its indirect harms in order to explain the nature of the business cycle, in which case money is not neutral in the short run.

One of the disadvantages to writing a book with any economics in it is just that, readers need to know a little economics to get the most out of your book.

But to grasp how oil and the dollar interact and why we wind up in repeating financial crises, you don’t have to go back and reread Keynes and Irving Fischer (on interest rates). In 2009, Nobel Prize-winning economists George Akerlof and Robert Shiller wrote this easy-to-read and easy-to-understand book that critiques traditional economics (e.g. it’s dependence on “rational” actors) and dissects the building blocks one needs to know to grasp the ins and outs of economic cycles.

Importantly, they explain why people continue to believe they can make a fortune by investing at the top of the market (the confidence multiplier and contagion). Their book leads the reader through the basics on how bubbles (irrational exuberance) and panics ensue… show more.

I like this book especially due to its ability to illustrate money illusion in a very unconventional context.

Normally, money illusion means that people take nominal variables as proxy for real variables, which leads to suboptimal choice having real effects on the economy and affecting business cycle.

However, to my great surprise this book claims that even economic experts might suffer from some kind of money illusion, because they tend to misinterpret what is happening in the monetary system. This offers a very interesting explanation of recession and suggests that economists have not targeted adequate variables.

Unconventional suggestion to practice nominal GDP (gross domestic product) targeting instead of targeting the money supply is “outcome” of unique author´s vision called market monetarism. Inattention of policymakers to development of nominal GDP is blamed to be the direct cause of recession. 

This was an exciting reading for me. I find a great connection with Akerlof and Shiller’s book Animal Spirits.

This book admits, that people might have some cognitive limitations and use simple forecasting rules in order to make decisions with resulting implications at the aggregate level. As a result, there is great potential for the emerging, yet undiscovered discipline of behavioral macroeconomics.

Personally, for me, revolutionary element is the combination of bounded rationality and willingness to learn from past mistakes and consequent switch to better rules. This book introduces special behavioral macroeconomic model based on the dynamics of endogenous animal spirits, in which case waves of optimism and pessimism are responsible for the business cycle itself.

I find especially interesting the part devoted to the discussion of how central banks should approach inflation targeting in behavioral models with animal spirits.

The first “how to” business book, and what surprised me about it was how, for Cotrugli, being a good merchant was as much about being morally upright as about being profitable.

He spends as much time telling merchants how to pray as he does how to handle their ledgers (the book is historically famous for being the first European work to explain double-entry bookkeeping).

What I found fascinating about this book is how modern Cotrguli sounds; maybe it’s the work of the translators, but he comes across as somebody you could talk to today. And he is impassioned with his main preoccupation: how to both pursue material wealth and still be a good person. He’s trying to walk a line between greed and God, and that still matters today.

Having entrepreneurial tendencies my entire life, I loved the book because it helped me realize the chaos, randomness and reality of the early days in any company, especially some of the most successful ones, was not unique to my own experience. Having started my career in corporate America in my early twenties, it didn’t take long before the pace, bureaucracy and general politics of the place started to wear thin.

The book is a collection of Q&A sessions with some of the most successful founders of modern-day companies. Hearing them talk about how some of the greatest inventions in business were discovered and built-in unbusinesslike ways was inspiring. Seeing that being too businesslike can actually stifle and kill innovation changed my career.

This book presents the historical story of another great company that rose to dominate its industry from the perspective of the man who led the company and was the architect of the strategic battle to create it. Alfred P. Sloan was an MIT-trained engineer when he was selected to lead General Motors, which was at the time “an also ran” to the once mighty Ford Motor Company led by the legendary visionary of the industry, Henry Ford. Yet Sloan, who even today is less well known than Henry Ford, crafted a strategy and organization that ultimately surpassed Ford not only in market share, but also in all aspects of operations so that General Motors and not Ford became the dominant colossus of the Automotive industry for more than a half-century. 

The book gives readers an opportunity to see the nature and evolution of Sloan’s plans and actions that slowly and… show more.

I love reading fiction, and so do many of my students. This book is a gift for us fiction lovers who are also interested in leadership. 

From ancient to modern, literature teaches about quite contemporary issues regarding leadership. In fact, I was astounded to realize how much real-life insight fiction is able to offer in this respect–much more than many management textbooks that often present a simplified and rationalized image of what management means. This book teaches how to approach difficult and very human aspects of leadership: everything that is linked to human experience. 

I found accounts of Herman Melville, Thomas Pynchon, Maurice Blanchot, and other writers captivating and enlightening.

In recent decades, as advertising has moved from one-way communication about product benefits to conversations with consumers about brands, someone needed to sum things up. Iezzi and the creatives she interviews do exactly that. As she presents it, “First of all, forget about making an ad… You’re making something to compete with every other piece of content, every other media experience that a person has during her waking hours.” The Idea Writers is an excellent primer on this new landscape. How do we create a brand’s story, one that consumers identify with and help propagate, if not create? How do we manage it, move it forward, spread it across various media, and make it viral? How can it become its own never-ending story?

I am an academic economist, but even more interested in intellectual debates. I discovered this book when I was a PhD student, and it has remained a favorite of mine.

In the 1970s, macroeconomics (not my field) underwent a revolution. The old guard was “Keynesian,” the new Turks were “new classical”. This book is a series of conversations from the early 1980s with the protagonists of this epic period, many future Nobel laureates.

The interviewer, Arjo Klamer, was interested in the rhetoric and culture of economics, and he constructed the interviews in a way that nicely brought out these elements. The interlocutors are brilliant, acerbic, and funny. If you think economics is dry or boring, you won’t think so after seeing how passionate these people are.