Library of Mistakes: a place where thousands of books explain how to avoid (another) Great Recession.

Historically, in both 1929 and 2008, economic experts everywhere claimed to know exactly what they were doing.
However, not a single person could fix the series of mistakes that crashed the world’s economy, touching so many lives, from the Great Depression in the 1930s all the way through the 2008 credit crunch.
And so, how does one tell the misdeeds and misfortunes of Wall Street characters, day-trading crooks and hedgefund fraudsters who have royally screwed the economy, destroyed people’s pensions and created pyramid schemes?
Well, to avoid future financial catastrophes, a library in Edinburgh, Scotland has collected a series of sensible economic literature that aims to educate the next generation of economists.
And Edinburgh might be seen as the right place for such an institution, being the base of Fred Goodwin while he presided over the fall from grace of the Royal Bank of Scotland!

The little, cozy room that makes up the Library of Mistakes boasts over 2,000 books, all relating to economics and finance, packed with books by writers like Karl Marx, Milton Friedman, Paul Krugman, and Michael Lewis, and the collection addresses every country on the planet.
It was inspired by the 2008 Great Recession, which served as a perfect example of how, according to the library’s curators, smart people keep doing stupid things, promoting the belief that quantitative economic algorithms provide a false sense of objectivity, and that trusting these imperfect models is a recipe for disaster.
The books offer readers a chance to turn to financial history as a way to learn from past errors instead of relying on how economics should theoretically function under unrealistic assumptions.
Mistakes can sometimes be serendipitous, but even when they are not, their study still has value as human progress is based upon learning from them.
Its mission is also to provide university students with a more accurate economic education, a real understanding of financial history, and a grasp of how to use books as a resource to prevent another recession. Or another disaster.
Another aim is to move the study of economics away from the dry mathematical models, characterising the so-called “dismal science” in school and university, and the audiences are the professions that would be bankers and fund managers, students as well as the public.
In short, If you’re someone who cares about the world’s economy, there should be no doubt in your mind that visiting the Library of Mistakes would be no mistake!

Images from web – Google Research