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Fortune Tellers: The Story of America S First Economic Forecasters by Walter Friedman

Fortune Tellers: The Story of America S First Economic Forecasters

by Walter Friedman
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Book cover type: Paperback
  • ISBN13: 9780691169194
  • Binding: Paperback
  • Subject: N/A
  • Publisher: Princeton University Press
  • Publisher Imprint: Princeton University Press
  • Publication Date:
  • Pages: 288
  • Original Price: USD 23.95
  • Language: English
  • Edition: N/A
  • Item Weight: 363 grams
  • BISAC Subject(s): Economic History, Forecasting, and General

From the Back Cover

"Timely, trenchant, and entertaining, Walter Friedman's Fortune Tellers is a captivating history of modern economic forecasting. With graceful prose and penetrating insight, Friedman shows how scientific pretension and cultural persuasion gave birth to a new industry. Through their frustrated attempts to predict the future, Friedman's cast of oracles, gurus, entrepreneurs, and academics finally began to shape it. This is a fascinating tale about doubt and certainty in modern economic life."--Jonathan Levy, author of Freaks of Fortune: The Emerging World of Capitalism and Risk in America

"Economic forecasters attempt to reduce the dimensions of the unknowable, for private profit and the public good. Fortune Tellers is the story of America's first professional forecasters. It explains their methods, quirks, limited successes, and major failures in the Great Depression. Friedman's cast of characters--Babson, Moody, several Ivy League professors, and Herbert Hoover--is a fascinating crew of would-be soothsayers. This is intellectual and business history at its best."--Richard Sylla, New York University

"Who knew that the pioneers of economic forecasting in America were such an eclectic, eccentric, entrepreneurial bunch? In profiling the likes of Roger Babson, John Moody, and Irving Fisher, historian Walter Friedman makes vividly clear their noble motives, occasionally hucksterish tendencies, and sometimes downright bizarre thinking. In the process, he elegantly sketches their different theories for charting the economy's future."--Walter Kiechel III, author of The Lords of Strategy

"Fortune Tellers tells the remarkable story of the first generation of economic forecasters in the United States. Like Robert Heilbroner's Worldly Philosophers, it combines biographical vignettes with intellectual history in an engaging narrative that documents the perilous relationship between professional expertise, economic theory, and cultural norms."--Richard R. John, author of Network Nation: Inventing American Telecommunications

"Fortune Tellers is a deeply researched account of the rise and fall of economic forecasting in early twentieth-century America. Profiling a colorful cast of characters, Friedman deftly documents the careers--and the hubris--of the men who sought to impose predictability and certainty on the modern economy. This is a fascinating, timely book, one with many lessons for our own age of uncertainty."--Stephen Mihm, author of A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States

Walter A. Friedman is a historian at Harvard Business School and the author of Birth of a Salesman: The Transformation of Selling in America.

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