The Stories that Drive the Stock Market

The way we understand the eras we live through — from world wars, to the rise of the internet in the 2000s, to the pandemic of today — also directly impacts the economy. That’s according to Robert Shiller, a winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in economics, a professor of economics at Yale, and the author of “Narrative Economics: How Stories Go Viral and Drive Major Economic Events.” He argues that the big events we experience and our perception of them shape the stock market in serious ways, often priming it for a boom or a bust.