Book Review of The Black Swan

From this book review:

Taleb is concerned with black swans, i.e., unpredictable and improbable events that have great impact. Among the examples of these he cites are the rapid spread of the Internet and the 9/11 attacks.

People endeavor to explain black swans after they occur, but they cannot do so in advance. Despite the crucial effects of these events, economists and other supposed experts in prediction fail to allow for them; indeed, their theories often deny their possibility.

Because of this failure, Taleb maintains that much business forecasting is useless. To him, only a few economists, e.g., Friedrich Hayek, grasp the vital importance of uncertainty and escape condemnation. Taleb extends his indictment of conventional approaches to risk, contending that the bell curve, a key tool of many standard theories, often fails to fit the actual world. He further posits that people tend not to cope with a black swan properly, tailoring their response to specific details of the incident rather than generalizing their response.

Wake Up Everyday to the Wall Street Journal or Other Business News

Want to automatically receive daily news from the Wall Street Journal, Forbes, Barron's or many, many other business titles? You can create an RSS feed that sends you a link to the daily news to your email, Google account, or other RSS readers.

Go to ABI Inform and click on publications. Browse or find the exact title you want. If there's a RSS icon next to the publication title, you can create a RSS feed for that title.

After the RSS is created, click on the URL and you will see several options for receiving the feed.



FYI: A lotta other databases allow you to create alerts or RSS feeds. Look for the option.

Update: Hmmm....there might be a one day delay on the Wall Street Journal RSS feed....but it's still cool.

Book review of Predictably Irrational

This is a neat book about the subjective way people make decisions. It fits into a recent rash of books that argue that people don't make logical judgements based on perfect information. And there is an economic emphasis to the book.

LOTS ABOUT PRICING, CONSUMERS AND MARKETING.

I'll include an excerpt of the New Yorker review below:

When they examined how people deal with uncertainty, Tversky and Kahneman found that there were consistent biases to the responses, and that these biases could be traced to mental shortcuts, or what they called "heuristics." Some of these heuristics were pretty obvious -- people tend to make inferences from their own experiences, so if they've recently seen a traffic accident they will overestimate the danger of dying in a car crash -- but others were more surprising, even downright wacky.

When you walk into Starbucks, the prices on the board are supposed to have been determined by the supply of, say, Double Chocolaty Frappuccinos, on the one hand, and the demand for them, on the other. But what if the numbers on the board are influencing your sense of what a Double Chocolaty Frappuccino is worth? In that case, price is not being determined by the interplay of supply and demand; price is, in a sense, determining itself.

Match Your Consumer to A Community

If you've figured out who buys your product, now match your consumer to a community or vice versa.

Here's how to find out this kind of information:

Our Simply Map and Local Market Analyst databases give you consumer information about local populations.

Here are some print options in the library:

County Demographics, the Rand McNally Marketing Atlas and Zip Code Demographics.

Web:

Finally, you could go online and use government census data from American Factfinder.

Who Buys Your Product?

Who is the typical consumer for your product?

Lotta different ways to research this one. (update: watch the overall training video here. )

There is a great series called Who's Buying (just about anything). Most of these are located behind the reference desk.

Can't miss the Best Customers book.

Library Databases:

Local Market Analyst is a good source.

Simply Map is a good source for seeing how consumers in your geographic area behave. Tutorial here.

MRI+ breaks this down. Watch the training video. This is a way to get some online data from a reliable source.

Another Thing:

Don't forget to get the macropicture of your industry with industry surveys.

Weblink to Niall Ferguson Explaining Financial Crisis Background

Niall Ferguson is a popular historian that's hosting an excellent series on PBS entitled The Ascent of Money.

Lotsa cool stuff about the role of money and credit in shaping society and Niall makes it easy to follow. Recommended for you to get a sense of how this stuff works in real life.

You can watch the entire 4 part series on the official PBS web site here.

Part Four is dedicated to the current financialization crisis.

Thinktanks: Learn How Reality is Made

Thinktanks are research institutions that produce analyses of current or future societal issues. Housing policy, income taxes, debt, credit and international trade are just some of the issues you'll see covered by these research institutions.

Some thinktanks have a political agenda while others are nonpolitical.

I have collected a list of some of the best-regarded thinktanks here. Usually, there's an emphasis on economics.

Learn how to use statistics and make arguments. Or learn to criticize their use in an argument!

Can you use thinktank papers in your project? It depends on the professor. The real point, as stated above, is to get you to see how arguments on contemporary issues are constructed.