The Wisdom of Finance: Discovering Humanity in the World of Risk and Return

In his book The Wisdom of Finance, economist and Harvard professor Mihir Desai takes up the cause of restoring humanity to finance, an industry whose reputation has been bruised and battered from decades of greed and corruption. Desai employs the humanities and draws on a rich knowledge of literature, film, history, and philosophy—from Jane Austen to Greek mythology to Working Girl—to explain the inner workings of finance in a unique manner. Desai’s position— that finance is inherently moral and deeply rooted in our very humanity—directly challenges popular positions by critics who explicitly demean the values of the marketplace and money and who say dealing in finance often drives out a sense of ethics. Mihir A. Desai is the Mizuho Financial Group Professor of Finance at Harvard Business School and Professor of Law at Harvard Law School. He received his Ph.D. in political economy from Harvard University; his MBA as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School; and a bachelor's degree in history and economics from Brown University. In 1994, he was a Fulbright Scholar to India. Professor Desai's areas of expertise include tax policy, international finance, and corporate finance. His work has emphasized the appropriate design of tax policy in a globalized setting, the links between corporate governance and taxation, and the internal capital markets of multinational firms. He is a Research Associate in the National Bureau of Economic Research's Public Economics and Corporate Finance Programs, and served as the co-director of the NBER's India program. He has testified several times to Congressional bodies on various tax policy questions.