The Market Mind Hypothesis: Understanding Markets and Minds Through Cognitive Economics

The Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH) argues that economics' mechanical worldview is the ontological error that leads to flawed thinking and faulty practices. It offers an alternative paradigm that recognizes that consumers, investors, and other participants are conscious beings and that their minds extend to make consciousness a reality in markets. The book argues that if mechanical economics is the answer, we have been asking the wrong questions and that we need to investigate the deep links between markets and minds through cognitive economics to better understand both.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 493 pages
Publication date: 04 October 2023
Publisher: De Gruyter

Recent economic crises have had a devastating impact on society, gravely risking the collapse of the financial system and revealing economics' blind spots. Economics is not an innocent bystander but central to the problem. In this pioneering book, Patrick Schotanus argues that economics' mechanical worldview is the ontological error that leads to flawed thinking and faulty practices. The Market Mind Hypothesis (MMH) calls this mechanical economics, which views and treats the economy as a machine, the market as an automaton, and its agents as robots. Inspired by heterodox economic and leading cognitive thinkers, the book offers an alternative paradigm.

Central to MMH's psychophysical worldview is the fact that consumers, investors, and other participants are conscious beings, and their minds' extension makes consciousness a reality in markets. The denial of the complex mind-matter exchanges as the essence of markets means the extended mind-body problem is economics' elephant in the room.

The book argues that if mechanical economics is the answer, we have been asking the wrong questions. Moreover, we will not solve our economic predicaments by doubling down on the assumption of rationality or by identifying yet another behavioral bias. Instead, scholars and students of economics and finance, as well as finance practitioners, need to investigate through cognitive economics the deep links between markets and minds to better understand both.

The book features a foreword by investment strategist Russell Napier, an intermezzo by neuroscientist and complexity pioneer Scott Kelso, and an afterword by 4E cognition expert Michael Lewis.

Weight: 830g
Dimension: 240 x 170 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783111211619