One of the contributors to my book workshop this week was Richard Grossman, who spoke about this forthcoming book entitled "WRONG: Nine Economic Policy Disasters and What We Can Learn from Them". In this book, Richard looks at policy mistakes made by governments because they were blinded by ideology rather than clearly seeing the economic problem at hand. For example, he looks at how the British government's policy during the Great Famine was wrong and how Britain's return to the gold standard in 1925 was wrong. He also looks at wrong economic policy in the run-up to the subprime and Euro crises. His book is due out soon and can be pre-ordered at Amazon by clicking here.
My colleague and former PhD student Gareth Campbell has created a website about the British Railway Mania - click here . This episode has been described by the Economist as probably the greatest bubble in human history. Gareth's website provides background on the Mania and posits some explanations for the 'bubble'. In his explanation of why the bubble happened, Gareth places a lot of emphasis on investor myopia regarding future dividends and uncalled capital. His study of investors during the episode does not support the view that this episode was fuelled by naive and irrational investors.