I absolutely loved this book. The graphic descriptions, and the action made me feel like I was in the middle of it all. I also would recommend this book to anyone. I LOVED IT!

Life in a Wild West Show gives a brief history of the American West. It gives an account of the Wild West Shows that toured the country, and lets the audiences have a taste of the western life during the days of early settlement. It also tells about life and living conditions of the actors. I would recommend this historical book to 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, as well as teachers and parents.

This is the perfect book with which to begin a study of Bible translations. A good source book for High School or even some Middle-Schoolers; not in-depth enough for use on a collegiate level. Indexed with bibliography. I wished for larger magnification of some of the early Bible artwork. The author did glance upon the some of the symbolism of the artwork used in the early Bibles--but this is exactly what this book is meant to do: whet the appetites of young scholars. "Words that Changed History" is a good series of books for small school libraries which have a limited amount of "primary material" on hand.

What I especially appreciate about this work is that anyone can read the essays and enjoy them, even if they have never picked up a fly rod in their life, although fly-fishermen will laugh harder at the humor.

Each essay adds a piece of the puzzle to the secrecy of the life of a fly-fisherman. This art/science/sport is shrouded in mystery and lore. It is rare that a Master will let you into his world so intimately. All of Gierach's books seem to have that 'eastern' feel to them, as if they could have been written by Lao Tzu. The Essay "Zen and the Art of Nymph-Fishing" almost brought tears to my eyes. It is a classic work.

The most cherished aspect of this book (and almost everything written by Gierach) is that it exposes fly fishing for what it is. It is not just a sport. It is not just 'fishing'. Fly Fishing is a metaphor for life. Non-fly fishers will probably not understand this. Fly Fishing is the western man's tai chi. I believe that if everyone could fly fish, life in our country would be a whole lot less stressful and happier. Of course, I hope everyone doesn't fly fish. That would screw it up for the rest of us. Gierach captures the essence of life as a fly fisherman. The solitude. The peace. The at-oneness with nature. The appreciation of one of God's coolest creations (i.e. fish). And if fly fishing is a metaphor for life, then fly tying is a metaphor for art. Gierach paints fly tying as a cross between meditation and painting.

I recommend this book to anyone who fly fishes, and anyone who knows anyone who fly fishes, or even anyone who is interested in fly fishing in general, but doesn't think they ever will.

John's travels and travails with A.K. Best and a world class Trout addiction are literate, light and great fun to read when you can't be fishing yourself

This is a terrific book. Bite-sized, hilarious chapters. required reading for fly fishers, but captivating for everyone else as well

Summary of opinion.
The risk management concepts developed by Shiller are far fetched. The likelihood of any being ever implemented is low. Thus, this book is not the best use of a reader's time. You are better off reading Shiller two earlier excellent books: Market Volatility, and Irrational Exuberance.

Abstract.
Shiller develops economic concepts to reduce important risks within our society. These include:

1)Livelihood insurance against poor career choices.
2)Home value insurance.
3)Income-linked loans for reducing the risk of hardship and bankruptcy.
4)Inequality insurance. Protecting the distribution of income.
5)Intergenerational Social Security: Sharing risks between Young and Old.
6)International Agreements for Risk Control.

Below I will briefly evaluate these concepts.

Livelihood insurance.
Workers could get coverage against the decline in income that workers in the same field have experienced. The decline in income for the workers in this specific field would be measured whether the worker has remained in this given field or not. Take a cohort of 100 professional violinists. If 50 exit the field, and make their living as bartenders, this cohort of 100 violinists income would really reflect the income of 50 professional violinists and 50 bartenders. By the end, what would this income index really tell you? Shiller underestimates the liquidity of our labor markets. Today, you can find as many astrophysicists in consulting firms, and investment banking. The same is true for engineers. Many engineers end up as consultants in fields often not directly related to engineering, instead of working for engineering firms.

Home value insurance.
Homeowners could buy insurance against the value of their homes. So, if the value of their homes went down, they would receive payments from the insurer. This product runs into two hurdles. First, if priced correctly, this product would be very expensive. Few homeowners would be willing to pay per year the several percentage points on the value of their homes to insure them against a decline in value of their homes for just a 12 month period. It is essentially the price of a Put option on the value of your home. Secondly, the brunt of this risk is not born by homeowners but by creditors. To conclude, this insurance product would be expensive to cover a risk that is mainly born by another party (creditors).

Income linked loans.

Borrowers would repay loans as a fixed percentage of their income. So, if their income goes down, the debt burden goes down, and vice versa. This product will never reach a critical mass because it is unworkable for banks. Banks try to match the cash flows from their assets with the ones from their liabilities. An income linked loan would have such an unpredictable cash flow that it could not be matched by any bank liabilities cash flow. You figure the deposits and bonds issued from banks are not income linked. As a bank depositor or a bondholder, you demand a very predictable cash flow stream, not one dependent on the income of the bank's borrowers. Thus, I don't see income linked loans becoming part of "The New Financial Order."

Inequality insurance, protecting the distribution of income.
Here the tax structure would be automatically adjusted to maintain a predicated distribution of income. This would have horrendous implications for financial planning. You would be uncertain as to your ultimate tax burden at the end of the year when the distribution of income would be recalculated.

Intergenerational Social Security: Sharing risks between Young and Old.
This product would overhaul the structure of Social Security. Now, the Social Security system is structured as a pension system. Currently, social security contributions far exceed the payments. This is to build up the Social Security trust fund for when the large Baby Boomer generation retires, when payments will far exceed contributions. With Shiller, the income earned by active workers would be shared on a prorated basis with retirees. He states that currently retirees represent 11% of the population. So, the workers contribution would be 11% of their wages to support the retirees. But, this percentage will double in just a few decades. So, the 11% contribution will become 22%. This is unfair to the next generation. The current system of prefunding the social security trust to get set for higher social security payments in the future is better. It equalizes the burden of supporting retirees between current workers and their next generation. Shiller concept does the reverse.

International Agreements for Risk Control.
Countries would enter agreements that would hedge against their economies under performing in the future. So, let's say that India's GDP is expected to increase by 4% per year over the next 10 years. India would enter into a contract with a group of countries (U.S., UK, Germany, etc...). The group of countries would make a payment to India anytime India's GDP would grow by less than 4%. But, India would have to make very large payments to the group of countries whenever its GDP rose by more than 4% per year. It is unclear how India would come up with that extra money. Would it have to raise taxes on its citizen? The resulting counterparty risk associated with India making such payments would be unmanageable.

Bob Shiller, economics professor at Yale University, is a shoe-in for a Nobel Prize in Economics within a decade. The reason: capital markets are at the center of today's global world, and Bob Shiller, perhaps more than anyone, understands them.

Talk about timing! His previous book, Irrational Exuberance (echoing Fed Chair Alan Greenspan's famous 1996 phrase), hit the book stores in mid-March 2000 -- six days after the NASDAQ peaked at 5,100 and the new-economy bubble burst. In it he explained why misperception of risk and our abysmal mismanagement of it brought stock prices far above sustainable levels. Of course, he wrote that long before the rest of us (except for Alan Greenspan) started to lose sleep over it.

His new book appears, again perfectly timed, when most of us feel more insecure than ever. There is no argument that with globalization the world has become a riskier place. The same opportunity that let the hedge fund Long Term Capital Management speculate and arbitrage globally also threatened the entire world, when at one point its liabilities were said to approach 10% of America's annual GDP. I co-authored a case study of a leading investment bank that pioneered a new state-of-the-art approach to risk management (known as value-at-risk) -- and was bankrupted by it.

Have we learned our lesson? I doubt it. A popular Silicon Valley bumper sticker says: "Oh Lord -- please, just one more bubble". Based on history, the prayer will be answered -- there will be many more bubbles. And more economic crises, because every economic crisis in history began with financial collapse.

Economists are great at diagnosing problems, but generally poor at solving them. But in The New Financial Order, Shiller offers a brilliant solution to our dismal inability to deal with risk and uncertainty, written in a style ordinary people can understand. His book is about "applying risk management technology to the major problems of our lives". In the words of his publisher Peter Dougherty, this is economics that tries to improve the culture. Here is Shiller's basic argument.

In the 1980's economic theorists played with an idea known as 'missing markets' -- the notion that if only there were markets for everything, including every kind of risk, we would all be far better off and the economy would function smoothly. In inventing the 'missing markets', people who hate risk find those willing to bear it, at an appropriate price. The mechanism of supply and demand finds that price of risk-bearing (insurance) that makes both risk-buyer and risk-seller happy and better off. But despite the boom in derivatives -- the market for a variety of exotic risk-bearing assets -- most of the risks ordinary people encounter cannot be insured.

Consider Joseph Q. Public. Joe wanted to study philosophy in college, but his mother persuaded him to became a mechanical engineer instead, because as a philosopher he might not make a living. He owns a three-bedroom Colonial in suburban Newton, MA., but worries its value will decline. He works for a small quality-assurance company and worries, in this global downturn, that he may soon be out of work. If he loses his job, he also loses his family's health insurance. All these risks are uninsured, because no such insurance exists; there are 'missing markets'. The irony is that, like a majority of Americans, Joe is heavily over-insured for the least worrisome or likely of all risks -- death. He has $700,000 worth of life insurance, even though, as a non-smoking 42-year-old who jogs, the chances he will die this year are less than one in five hundred -- far less than the chance of losing his job, picking the wrong career, or seeing his home equity tank.

How can Shiller's insights help Joe Public and the world in general? By devising markets that insure risks that really matter -- markets big enough, so that risk is widely spread and broadly diversified, minimizing the chance any single risk-bearer will go broke. Such as livelihood insurance -- the chance I may not make a living. Home equity insurance -- the chance my house will drop in value. Income-linked loans -- contingent on my having enough income to pay them pack. Inequality insurance --insurance for the risk income inequality will create too many poor people. Intergenerational social security -- pooling risks held by different generations, some of them who work, some who are supported by those who work. And a huge database that supports these new markets, with new indexes and units of measurement that quantify the risks so they can be bought and sold and efficiently insured.

Even if only a few of these new markets for risk existed, Joe Public could sleep a lot more soundly. It is time for banks, insurance companies, governments and the World Bank to invent them.
People love to ask economists like Shiller, if you're so smart -- and understand capital markets so well -- why aren't you rich? And if you know the solutions, why don't you do something?
Well, in fact, he is! And he does. In 1991 Shiller and partners founded Case Shiller Weiss Inc., to facilitate devices to manage the risks to our homes. This is done by the Case Shiller Home Price Index, a repeat-sale home price index that enables people to insure against a fall in home values. The company was sold at a high but undisclosed price to Wisconsin financial services firm Fiserv in 2002. Shiller has now founded a second firm, Macro Securities Research LLC, to create new risk management vehicles.

As a pioneer in what is now known as 'behavioral finance' -- the application of psychology to understanding behavior in capital markets -- Shiller has a secret weapon, his wife Virginia, a child-clinical psychologist. I suspect he and I had the same experience -- discovering that our wives knew far more about economic behavior than we did, because while we studied equations and numbers, they worked with, and helped, real people, every day.

The NEW FINANCIAL ORDER outlines an ambitious plan for reworking the ways we control financial risk. Shiller "democratizes" the subject of risk by addressing, among other things, the vulnerability of "ordinary riches" like the value of our homes and our choice-of-career incomes. These risks are various, unpredictable, and unevenly distributed through time and geography. That unevenness (unfairness, Shiller might say) means the risks can be insured, securitized, and traded. The moral dimension to this is Shiller's intention to hedge inequality that is "gratuitous, random, and painful".

Changes in a nation's economy and the unknowable effects of technological advances are two long-term, systemic risks we all face. By comparison, the risk to an investor's wealth of a company's stock missing its projected quarterly earnings is small in measure to the seismic shifts in the net worth of a much broader base of homeowner stakeholders. Now, if the stock market is not an adequate proxy for the overall wealth of the economy, then why not create "macro markets" for securities that swap out the risk of one nation's aggregrate output (GDP) for another's. Some will argue that the stock markets in the U.S. and other developed countries are already proxies for their economic prospects. But given the thin liquidity and relative immaturity of many other markets, securities tied to a more fundamental metric such as GDP or all real estate values are a clear positive.

Shiller does a good job of suggesting the challenges government and the private sector will confront to implement a new risk infrastructure. There is an interesting anecdotal history in Part Five of how various financial and insurance plans came into being as with our social security system modeled after the German system in the 1880's. The development of sophisticated "global risk information databases (GRIDS)" will provide a resource for writing appropriate contracts in the future. Privacy advocates will shudder, but part of the point is that the ways we control risk have evolved over time and can be modified to work better. This is a provocative book because of the wealth of its vision. With this much innovative thinking it seems reasonable that additional studies will build on Shiller's work and pave the way for some of these ideas to be adopted.