I was going to give this book 3 stars as I was not particularly impressed. Midway through the book, I could already see that it had two very big flaws. First, there's not as much meat as I was hoping for. In particular, he goes in for very long tangents unrelated to Wall Street, e.g., the creation of nylon and the Manhattan Project. Those are great topics, but if I wanted to read about that there are many fine books about the Manhattan Project (don't know about the creation of nylon). I wanted to read about the physics of Wall Street. Second, he is extremely overly enamored with the idea of the use of physics in financial markets. He strongly implies that if you have the right model you can predict financial markets. He talks about randomness a lot, but he seems to be thinking of it as if it were statistical mechanics, where exact predictions can nevertheless be made. He remains blissfully unaware of the nature of financial risk and the unpredictability (rather than randomness) of financial markets.However, what made him lose one more star was his epilogue. He quotes Taleb and his mistrust of financial models. I am not a fan of Taleb, whose writings consist mainly of belaboring the bleeding obvious. However, the obvious point about extreme fat tails and the unpredictability of extreme events seems to have totally eluded the author. He actually reasons by analogy that if Taleb were right then we'd never build a skyscraper because it could be hit by a meteor. At the risk of breaking out the hand-puppets for Dr. Weatherall, the difference between those two situations is obvious. A meteor striking a skyscraper is an externality. The engineering models used in constructing the building never intended for the building to survive a meteor impact. Financial extreme events, on the other hand, are an intrinsic part of what's being modeled. Surviving October 1987 or the Great Recession is precisely what Weatherall's mythical models are supposed to do.Bottom line: This book is not worth reading, either by the layman or the specialist. To be perfectly honest, I don't have the slightest idea who is the target audience of this book. I doubt it is economist, because the Econ-theory explained in the book is at best rudimentary and at worst miss guided. And it can't be the general public because of the authors gliding over the more complex mathematics. Ergo must the target audience be physicists that are looking for a historical overview of the influence of physics on to economics. One thing is sure, the author isn't succeeding in his stated goal of convincing the readers that the solution to the problems of bad models are more models.
What do You think about Wall Streetin Fysiikka (2013)?
physics and financethe physicists seem to be really smart
—beby
Decent as a quick overview, as the title suggests
—Eve
Slightly better than junk. But i could be wrong
—keyeng
