In a new preface, Shiller reflects on some of the challenges facing narrative economics, discusses the connection between disease epidemics and economic epidemics, and suggests why epidemiology may hold lessons for fighting economic contagions.

From Nobel Prize-winning economist and New York Times bestselling author Robert Shiller, a groundbreaking account of how stories help drive economic events--and why financial panics can spread like epidemic viruses

"Shiller’s thesis subsequently offers a predicative power that many contemporaneous studies lack. . . . [and] is timely because it exposes earlier studies on contagious phenomena."---Tony D. Sampson, American Literary History