The Wisdom of Finance Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return

"This slender but erudite treatise...does valuable work toward demystifying finance for laypeople and deepening the art for practitioners. Desai's approach will broaden and enrich any perspective." -- Publishers Weekly "Mihir Desai is a fortunate person: he is an expert economist who is also well-read. In this book he uses his skills to provide a fascinating new perspective on modern finance, showing how the main concepts have parallels in literature and the arts. Students of finance will learn literature, students of literature will learn finance, and everybody will learn something. -- Oliver D. Hart , 2016 Nobel Laureate in Economics, and Andrew E. Furer Professor of Economics, Harvard University "The Wisdom of Finance does for the global economy what Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life did for French literature: it expands our idea of an obscure topic and illuminates its centrality to your everyday. This is a work of true philosophy and passion, incorporating thinkers and artists from E. O. Wilson to Jeff Koons elegantly into our understanding of how we make choices. In a chaotic world, everyone should read Mihir Desai's extraordinary debut." - Lea Carpenter , author of Eleven Days "The Wisdom of Finance is a unique and powerful book, using the timeless power of humanistic ideas to make finance understandable. Mihir Desai masterfully achieves two goals - bringing great clarity to how finance works and why it is important, and shining a bright light on how the humanities helps us to better understand our lives and world." - Clayton Rose , President, Bowdoin College