Why and How Humans Trade, Predict, Aggregate, and Innovate: An Economist's Lessons on the Role of Human Behavior and Economic Systems

Trading, forecasting, aggregating, and innovating (the Four) are essential social interactions in human life, stemming from mankind's peculiarities. Humans need to organize themselves to maintain, improve, and extend their social interactions and a safe and ordered life. Economics students can exploit this book by inserting what they are learning from textbooks into a wider framework and enjoying the hints revealed by the grand social theorizing of giants.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 191 pages
Publication date: 30 March 2023
Publisher: Springer Nature Switzerland AG

Trading, forecasting, aggregating, and innovating (the Four) are essential social interactions in human life at both the individual and aggregate levels. They are part of the human fabric because they stem from mankind's peculiarities—heterogeneity, inclination to forecast, sociality, and inventiveness. But humans have multifaceted behavior, too. They are capable of having contradictory impulses towards one another, integrating and disintegrating as well as cooperating and dominating, and behaving prosocially and anti-socially. Hence, humans need to organize themselves to maintain, improve, and extend their social interactions as well as a safe and ordered life. Crucial intersections emerge naturally—the efficiency of humans' way of tackling the Four is a joint product of economic systems, institutions, and behaviors.

All told, the main idea of this book is to include in a single tour a collection of insights on why and how humans implement the Four. The narrative highlights several connections as well as how key these businesses are as the traveler is escorted through some Four-related behavioral problems and institutional solutions that humans have been, respectively, facing and elaborating over time. Economics students may exploit this book by both inserting what they are learning from textbooks into a wider framework and enjoying some of the hints revealed by the grand social theorizing of giants such as A. Smith and J. Schumpeter. But the proposed tour may also attract outsiders to economics who are curious about disparate economic themes linked to the Four but who wish to gain an overview without engaging in longer readings.

Weight: 314g
Dimension: 235 x 155 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9783030938871
Edition number: 1st ed. 2022