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Summary: How America became a speculator economy
Comment: Lewis has done an excellent job in this book .The conclusions are as relevant today(2008) as they were when the book was written in 1991.Only the cast of characters has changed.Lewis demonstrates that " ...success was money,and money was made with debt,tax games,,paper shuffling,and arrogance.The people listened.And an insidious side effect of the chrome-plated Reagan boom may yet to be fully realized :the average American has been left with a whole new notion of how to succeed ".(1991,p.135).Lewis's prediction has been verified consistently over the last 17 years .Americans now seek to live based on generating profits without production.The average American has been transformed into a housing/stock market speculator who thought that one could live on the equity that he/she could effortlessly cash out of the supposedly ever rising value of their homes and stocks.Homes were transformed into a financial asset or piggy bank that would fund the good life forever .Lewis essentially breaks up the book into a series of chapters that concentrates on discussing the individuals who helped create the speculator view of life.Lewis covers Ivan Boesky,Michael Milken,Henry Kravis,Leona Helmsley,Lousis Rukeyser,T Boone Pickens,etc.Lewis could have titled the book as " The Wall Street Crowd ".
There is one substantial flaw in the book.Lewis apparently accepts the badly flawed claims of Burton Malkiel.Supposedly," Malkiel first demonstrated the statistical truth of what he called "the narrow form " of random walk ... "(1991,p152;see also p.154 where Lewis states that he sees no reason not to accept Malkiel's claim).Malkiel's hypothesis is that price changes over time in stock markets can be correctly modeled as being normally distributed.Unfortunately,there is not a single piece of evidence supporting this claim.Benoit Mandelbrot has demonstrated continuously,since the late 1950's,that the time series data fits the Cauchy or Power Law Distibutions.The data does not come close to being either normally distributed or " approximately " normally distributed.You will not see a single goodness of fit test referenced in any edition of Malkiel's book.The Normal distribution can't explain the boom-bust nature of financial capitalism.The Cauchy or Power Law distributions explain the facts perfectly.
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Summary: Sadly, Badly, Hopelessly Dated
Comment: I bought this looking for a sequel to Lewis's highly entertaining LIAR'S POKER. What a disappointment.
Unlike the on-target and amusing later effort, drawn from Lewis's own experience, this little book of essays slides into editorial pontification and personal agenda point-of-view. One year as a junior player in the industry certainly does not make one an expert on all things, and that lack of perspective makes "The Money Culture" read more like a personal agenda driven act of hubris.
That, and so many of the vignettes are so badly dated that they have to be footnoted that "This piece was originally written in 199x" to keep them from looking like they were written with the benefit of hindsight but without the enlightenment history can provide. I thought at least the 2-3 page length of the essays would make this a good carry-along read, to pick up whenever I had a minute or two. Even that slid, to where by the end of the book they turned into much longer articles/chapters.
I had hoped for a prequel to the highly successful Liar's Poker, but was disappointed enough to now believe that Liar's Poker was probably a lucky fluke.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Not Lewis's Best Work
Comment: Michael Lewis wrote one of the great popular books about Wall Street, Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street. It is a classic of what life was like on Wall Street during the time when mortgage backed securities, something we're hearing a lot about currently, was just getting off the ground. He also wrote the bestseller Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, which is a great baseball book. This collection of pieces written right before and after Liar's Poker is all right, but it is not his best work.
I have a high tolerance for bad writing if I am interested in the subject manner, but even I had trouble getting through some of the early pieces in here. Perhaps Lewis had to get all this poor sophomoric writing out of his system before he could write decent books. If the pieces collected in Money Culture are what it takes to get to Moneyball, then so be it.
Still, from a reader's standpoint, don't bother with this one, read Liar's Poker and Moneyball instead.
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Summary: Must Have
Comment: A very entertaining book, and it gives you a really great look behind the curtains of Wall St.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Good book, but not Lewis's best
Comment: This is really a collection of essays Lewis wrote for magazines and newspapers, many of them before he wrote "Liar's Poker". As such they are a mixed bag both in content and writing style. Perhaps the most entertaining are his accounts of the coming of American-style finance and ambition to Europe, and I also enjoyed the essays on Japan. However other essays are best simply because they are short.
If you are a Lewis fan and want a little light reading, fine...read this book. If you haven't read his other books, go read those first.
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