By Justin Fox

'Myth of the Rational Market' is a New York Times Notable Book

Myth made it on the New York Times Book Review's list of the 100 Notable Books of 2009, which will be published this weekend. It's in alphabetic order, by title, so I'm right ahead of Andre Agassi's Open: An Autobiography.

Talking efficient markets with Robert Kleinschmidt, Jerry Senser and Consuelo Mack

I hadn't realized that my appearance on Consuelo Mack WealthTrack in October was available in embeddable form. Thanks to Prieur du Plessis for showing me the way:

There's also a transcript where you can read semi-coherent utterances such as this one (it's better on TV):

JUSTIN FOX: It's funny, even though my book is critical of this whole idea coming out of academic finance, I spent enough time talking to all these finance professors that I immediately think to myself, "yeah, but do those guys really know where these stocks are headed?" But my thought is yeah, I should hope some people do because that's what makes, it's the work of Jerry and Robert that makes markets more efficient over time. My thinking is more power to them because I'm no good at that.

Amazon calls 'Myth of the Rational Market' the best business book of 2009, plus Fama, Bartlett, Samuelson

As part of its big end-of-year (even though it's only early November) best-of rankings, the book editors at Amazon.com have determined that Myth of the Rational Market is the best business book of 2009. I think the ranking is a little dubious because ... aw, I'd better shut up about that now. Thanks, Amazonians!

Also, the great Gene Fama has chosen to promote the book, with a blog post criticizing it. Thanks, Gene! Here's my response.

Finally, I'll be "debating" economic policy with Bruce Bartlett and Robert Samuelson at the Lincoln Triangle Barnes & Noble on Monday night (Nov. 9). Our views run the gamut from, uh, center to center-right. So I'm sure fireworks will ensue.

The 76th-best book of the year

That's the verdict of the editors at Amazon.com, who put The Myth of the Rational Market just ahead of Audrey Niffeneger's Her Fearful Symmetry and just behind Seth's George Sprott: 1894-1975 on their 100 Best Books of 2009 list. Hey, I beat Thomas Pynchon (Inherent Vice is #94) and William Vollmann (Imperial is #97)! Which says something about the absurdity of such rankings. Although you can't think a best-of list is absurd if your book is on it, right?

In other book-related news, the nice people at the Canadian Broadcasting Corp. gave me yet another chance to flog Myth on the radio, in an 80th-anniversary-of-the-1929 crash segment on The Current Thursday with economist Ken Rogoff. Also, my first review for the New York Times Book Review appeared on Sunday.