End of Theory

Richard Bookstaber has overseen risk management at investment banks Morgan Stanley and Salomon Brothers, as well as major hedge funds such as Moore Capital and Bridgewater. He has also held positions at the U.S. Treasury, and is currently at the University of California. He is the author most recently of A Demon of Our Own Design (Wiley).

• I: Introduction 1 1 Crises and Sunspots 3 2 Being Human 14 II: The Four Horsemen 23 3 Social Interactions and Computational Irreducibility 25 4 The Individual and the Human Wave: Emergent Phenomena 34 5 Context and Ergodicity 40 6 Human Experience and Radical Uncertainty 50 7 Heuristics: How to Act Like a Human 65 III: Paradigm Past And Future 79 8 Economics in Crisis 81 9 Agent-Based Models 94 10 Agents in the Complexity Spectrum 108 IV: Agent-Based Models For Financial Crises 125 11 The Structure of the Financial System: Agents and the Environment 127 12 Liquidity and Crashes 144 13 The 2008 Crisis with an Agent-Based View 157 V: The End Of Theory 169 14 Is It a Number or a Story? Model as Narrative 171 15 Conclusion 185 Acknowledgments 191 Notes 193 References 211 Index 221

"Important and elegantly written."--Jason Zweig, Wall Street Journal "The End of Theory holds some important lessons for financial markets today... According to Bookstaber, it's time to stop tweaking a 150-year-old model that seems to be getting worse, not better, at predicting crises, and embrace something totally new. Finally, and perhaps most usefully, he challenges the economics profession itself, where too many experts still have way too much faith in their own mathematical infallibility."--Rana Faroohar, Financial Times "The analysis is top-notch, and anyone who wants to understand the workings of the financial system will benefit from reading this book."--The Economist