What’s Inside

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Part One – A Critique of Impure Reason

  • Chapter One – Do-Gooders Gone Bad
  • Chapter Two – Love in the Time of Viagra
  • Chapter Three – The Transit of Venus

Part Two – Witch Hunts and War Drums

  • Chapter Four – The Devil Made Them Do It
  • Chapter Five – Words of War

Part Three – Militant Messiahs

  • Chapter Six – War and Rememberance
  • Chapter Seven – Empire of Delusion
  • Chapter Eight – Heroes of the Revolution

Part Four – Flattening the Globe

  • Chapter Nine – The Number Game
  • Chapter Ten – The Flat Earth Society
  • Chapter Eleven – What the Yonghy-Bonghy-Bo Didn’t Know

Part Five – The Bubble Kings

  • Chapter Twelve – Fin de Bubble
  • Chapter Thirteen – The Million-Dollar Trailer
  • Chapter Fourteen – Central Bank Bamboozle
  • Chapter Fifteen – The Mother of the Mother of All Bubbles

Part Six – Far from the Madding Mob

  • Chapter Sixteen – How Not to be Chumped by Wall Street
  • Chapter Seventeen – The Dupe of Hearts

Notes

Index

Excerpt from Chapter One:

“It’s a shame that the world  improvers don’t set off some signal before they go bad, like a fire alarm that is running out of juice. Maybe some adjustment could be made. Insteadm the most successful of them — such as Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler — actually gain market share as they get worse. Their delusions are self-reinforcing, like the delusions of a stock market bubble, the higher prices go, the more people come to believe they make sense.”