Status
Publication
Description
From the wild swings of the stock market to the online auctions of eBay to the unexpected twists of the world's post-Communist economies, markets have suddenly become quite visible. We now have occasion to ask, "What makes these institutions work? How important are they? How can we improve them?" Taking us on a lively tour of a world we once took for granted, John McMillan offers examples ranging from a camel trading fair in India to the $20 million per day Aalsmeer flower market in the Netherlands to the global trade in AIDS drugs. Eschewing ideology, he shows us that markets are neither magical nor immoral. Rather, they are powerful if imperfect tools, the best we've found for improving our living standards. A New York Times Notable Book.
User reviews
However, the book suffers needlessly from a disjointed presentation, repetitive points (some points are repeated numerous times in just a few paragraphs), and, at times, missing opportunities to offer greater insight into specific examples. Much of the book read like a set of articles loosely related to one another. The last third of the book is really quite dry and disinterested in conveying to the reader, at least it was so to me.
A decent financial book with some interesting examples of market behaviors, but not what I expected from the title, and not covering a lot of new ground for anyone with a reasonable knowledge of markets. Three stars.