The End of Theory: Financial Crises, the Failure of Economics, and the Sweep of Human Interaction
by Richard Bookstaber (Author)

About the Author
Richard Bookstaber received a B.A. in Economics from Brigham Young University and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He held academic positions at Boston University, Brigham Young University, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, the last as a Fulbright Scholar. His research focused on option pricing theory, and he wrote an early book in the field.
Bookstaber joined Morgan Stanley in 1984, where he held positions in research and proprietary trading, and was appointed to be the firm's first market risk manager. In 1994 he moved to Salomon Brothers where he was the Managing Director in charge of firmwide risk. Following the purchase of Salomon Brothers by Citigroup he took on risk manager roles in a number of hedge funds, including Moore Capital Management and Bridgewater Associates; and also founded the FrontPoint Partners Quantitative Equities Fund.

About this book
An in-depth look at how to account for the human complexities at the heart of today's financial system
Our economy may have recovered from the Great Recession―but not our economics. In The End of Theory, Richard Bookstaber discusses why the human condition and the radical uncertainty of our world renders the standard economic model―and the theory behind it―useless for dealing with financial crises. What model should replace it? None. At least not any version we've been using for the past two hundred years. Instead, Bookstaber argues for a new approach called agent-based economics, one that takes as a starting point the fact that we are humans, not the optimizing automatons that standard economics assumes we are.
Bookstaber's groundbreaking paradigm promises to do a far better job at preventing crises and managing those that break out. As he explains, our varied memories and imaginations color our economic behavior in unexpected hues. Agent-based modeling embraces these nuances by avoiding the mechanistic, unrealistic structure of our current economic approach. Bookstaber tackles issues such as radical uncertainty, when circumstances take place beyond our anticipation, and emergence, when innocent, everyday interactions combine to create sudden chaos. Starting with the realization that future crises cannot be predicted by the past, he proposes an approach that recognizes the human narrative while addressing market realities.
Sweeping aside the historic failure of twentieth-century economics, The End of Theory offers a novel and innovative perspective, along with a more realistic and human framework, to help prevent today's financial system from blowing up again.

Table of contents
SECTION I: INTRODUCTION
1 Crises and Sunspots
2 Being Human
SECTION II: THE FOUR HORSEMEN
3 Social Interactions and Computational Irreducibility
4 The Individual and the Human Wave: Emergent Phenomena
5 Context and Ergodicity
6 Human Experience and Radical Uncertainty
7 Heuristics: How to Act Like a Human
SECTION III: PARADIGM PAST AND FUTURE
8 Economics in Crisis
9 Agent-Based Models
10 Agents in the Complexity Spectrum
SECTION IV: AGENT-BASED MODELS FOR FINANCIAL CRISES
11 The Structure of the Financial System: Agents and the Environment
12 Liquidity and Crashes
13 The 2008 Crisis with an Agent-Based View
SECTION V: THE END OF THEORY
14 Is It a Number or a Story? Model as Narrative
15 Conclusion

Length: 240 pages
Copyright: 2017
Language: English
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Edition: 1 edition (May 2, 2017)
ISBN-10: 0691169012
ISBN-13: 978-0691169019