The Delusions Of Crowds: Why People Go Mad in Groups

Product Description
From the award-winning author of A Splendid Exchange, a fascinating new history of financial and religious mass manias over the past five centuries
“We are the apes who tell stories,” writes William Bernstein. “And no matter how misleading the narrative, if it is compelling enough it will nearly always trump the facts.” As Bernstein shows in his eloquent and persuasive new book, The Delusions of Crowds, throughout human history compelling stories have catalyzed the spread of contagious narratives through susceptible groups—with enormous, often disastrous, consequences.
Inspired by Charles Mackay’s 19th-century classic Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds, 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 polarized America; 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 colorful 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: for example, belief in dispensationalist End-Times has over decades profoundly affected U.S. Middle East policy. Bernstein observes that if we can absorb the history and biology of mass delusion, we can recognize it more readily in our own time, and avoid its frequently dire impact.
Review
Praise for The Delusions of Crowds:
Named a Most Anticipated Book by Literary Hub
“Bernstein, a trained neurologist and the author of several investment books, is particularly well suited to the task of updating Mackay, and his Delusions of Crowds is a worthy supplement to the original.” —Edward Chancellor, New York Review of Books
“Bernstein wants us to understand that human beings are not remotely as smart or as rational as we would like them to be. Only rarely are people truly analytical about anything. We make things up constantly, then claim that our inventions are true . . . But we don’t need a poll to confirm Mackay’s and Bernstein’s conclusion that people tend to believe what they want to believe, whether or not hard facts and cold reason support their views. We know, for example, that on Nov. 3, more than 74 million Americans voted to reelect a man whom a slew of serious historians have already identified as the worst president in American history . . . Explains Bernstein: ‘When compelling narrative [Make America Great Again, for example] and objective fact collide, the former often survives, an outcome that has cursed mankind since time immemorial.’” —Robert G. Kaiser, Washington Post
“Authoritative . . . Bernstein’s command of detail is capacious; his ability to weave the facts into a limpid narrative is equally sure handed . . . Bernstein’s lucid and entertaining history is a warning that the primitive mind lurks under the sheen of alleged rationality, and that a departure into the comforting certainties of groupthink is closer than we may realize.”—Los Angeles Review of Books
“Fascinating . . . Bernstein is an entertaining chronicler and analyst of these human failings.” —David Aaronovitch, Times (UK)
“Mackay’s 1841 work has been brilliantly updated for the 21st century by the investment writer William Bernstein.” —Reuters
“An intriguing contemporary update of Charles Mackay’s 1841 classic, Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions . . . Readers will wince at the often bloody hysteria that accompanied the Reformation, roll the