In a world in which Internet troll farms attempt to influence foreign elections, can we afford to ignore the power of viral stories to affect economies? In this groundbreaking book, Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller offers a new way to think about the economy and economic change, says a review on the Princeton University Press website. Shiller argues that studying popular stories that affect individual and collective economic behavior — what he calls “narrative economics” — has the potential to vastly improve our ability to predict, prepare for, and lessen the damage of financial crises, recessions, depressions, and other major economic events. Spread through the public in the form of popular stories, ideas can go viral and move markets — whether it’s the belief that tech stocks can only go up, that housing prices never fall, or that some firms are too big to fail. Narrative Economics sets out to change that by laying the foundation for a way of understanding how stories help propel economic events that have had led to war, mass unemployment, and increased inequality.