NBN Interview with Paul Donovan: Profit & Prejudice

Prejudice is bad for business. That’s the long and short of it. Paul Donovan amply documents this in his recent work of Shiller narrative economics, Profit and Prejudice: The Luddites of the Fourth Industrial Revolution (Routledge, 2020). With that out in the open, shouldn’t prejudice in business cease? Well, that’s a tall order. Not every business person is a profit maximizing Fisherian with an MBA from the University of Chicago. Pointing out to prejudiced business people that they are leaving money on the table is, on its own, unlikely to put an end to their discriminatory practices.  Culture matters, as do the conscious choices that people make beyond the cold calculation of revenues and costs. You can hear the New Books in Finance interview here.