Description
Book SynopsisInspired by Charles Mackay's 19th-century classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, William Bernstein engages with mass delusion with the same curiosity and passion, but armed with the latest scientific research that explains the biological, evolutionary and psychosocial roots of human irrationality. Bernstein tells the stories of dramatic religious and financial mania in Western society over the last 500 years - from the Anabaptist Madness that afflicted the Low Countries in the 1530s to the dangerous end-times beliefs that animate ISIS and pervade today's polarised nations; and from the South Sea Bubble to the Enron scandal and dot com bubbles of recent years. Through Bernstein's supple prose, the participants are as colourful as their motivation, invariably 'the desire to improve one's well-being in this life or the next.'
As revealing about human nature as they are historically significant, Bernstein's chronicles reveal the huge cost and alarming implications of mass mania as he observes that if we can absorb the history and biology of mass delusion, we can recognise it more readily in our own time and avoid its frequently dire impact.
Trade ReviewFascinating...Bernstein is an entertaining chronicler and analyst * The Times *
Table of Contents1: Joachim's Children 2: Believers and Rogues 3: Briefly Rich 4: George Hudson, Capitalist Hero 5: Miller's Run 6: Winston Churchill's Excellent Adventure in Monetary Policy 7: Sunshine Charlie Misses the Point 8: Apocalypse Cow 9: God's Sword 10: Entrepreneurs of the Apocalypse 11: Dispensationalist Catastrophes: Potential and Real 12: Rapture Fiction 13: Capitalism's Philanthropists 14: Hucksters of the Digital Age 15: Mahdis and Caliphs
