The Last Liberal Art · 2nd Edition

Offering a picture of investing within the larger world, this title explains how investment managing works by borrowing the big ideas from other complex disciplines: biology, economics, mathematics, philosophy, physics and psychology. In the biology chapter, Hagstrom analyses the central nervous system and the immune system as complex adaptive systems and then draws parallels with the behaviour of the economy and the stock market. In the physics chapter, he explores a mathematical distribution and considers the advantages of scale in relation to the bigger is better models that define the business strategies of Wal-Mart, McDonald's and Home Depot.