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| Introduction: It Had Been Working So Exceptionally Well | |
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| Early Days | |
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| Irving Fisher Loses His Briefcase, and Then His Fortune | |
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| The first serious try to impose reason and science upon the market comes in the early decades of the twentieth century. It doesn't work out so well. | |
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| A Random Walk from Fred Macaulay to Holbrook Working | |
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| Statistics and mathematics begin to find their way into the economic mainstream in the 1930s, setting the stage for big changes to come. | |
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| The Rise, of the Rational Market | |
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| Harry Markowitz Brings Statistical Man to the Stock Market | |
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| The modern quantitative approach to investing is assembled out of equal parts poker strategy and World War II gunnery experience. | |
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| A Random Walk from Paul Samuelson to Paul Samuelson | |
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| The proposition that stock movements are mostly unpredictable goes from intellectual curiosity to centerpiece of an academic movement. | |
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| Modigliani and Miller Arrive at A Simplifying Assumption | |
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| Finance, the business school version of economics, is transformed from a field of empirical research and rules of thumb to one ruled by theory. | |
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| Gene Fama Makes the Best Proposition in Economics | |
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| At the University of Chicago's Business School in the 1960s, the argument that the market is hard to outsmart grows into a conviction that it is perfect. | |
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| The Conquest of Wall Street | |
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| Jack Bogle Takes on the Performance Cult (And Wins) | |
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| The lesson that maybe it's not even worth trying to beat the market makes its circuitous way into the investment business. | |
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| Fischer Black Chooses to Focus on the Probable | |
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| Finance scholars figure out some ways to measure and control risk. More important, they figure out how to get paid for doing so. | |
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| Michael Jensen Gets Corporations to Obey the Market | |
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| The efficient market meets corporate America. Hostile takeovers and lots of talk about shareholder value ensue. | |
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| The Challenge | |
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| Dick Thaler Gives Economic Man A Personality | |
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| Human nature begins to find its way back into economics in the 1970s, and economists begin to study how markets sometimes fail. | |
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| Bob Shiller Points Out the Most Remarkable Error | |
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| Some troublemaking young economists demonstrate that convincing evidence for financial market rationality is sadly lacking. | |
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| Beating the Market with Warren Buffett and Ed Thorp | |
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| Just because professional investors as a group can't reliably outperform the market doesn't mean that some professional investors can't. | |
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| Alan Greenspan Stops A Random Plunge Down Wall Street | |
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| The crash of 1987 exposes big flaws in the rational finance view of risk. But a rescue by the Federal Reserve averts a full reexamination. | |
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| The Fall | |
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| Andrei Shleifer Moves Beyond Rabbi Economics | |
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| The efficient market's critics triumph by showing why irrational market forces can sometimes be just as pervasive as the rational ones. | |
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| Mike Jensen Changes His Mind About the Corporation | |
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| The argument that financial markets should always set the priorities-for corporations and for society-loses its most important champion. | |
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| Gene Fama and Dick Thaler Knock Each Other Out | |
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| Where has the debate over market rationality ended up? In something more than a draw and less than a resounding victory. | |
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| Epilogue: The Anatomy of A Financial Crisis | |
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| Afterword | |
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| Cast of Characters | |
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| Acknowledgments | |
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| A Note on Sources | |
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| Notes | |
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| Index | |