The Best Business Books Of 2000

The pendulum swing in technology is rocking the world of books. During 1999, publishers were smitten with all things digital, which meant topics far removed from Silicon Valley were neglected. This year, though, saw the return of an old favorite: volumes focused on finance and the markets. Indeed, such titles represent more than half of BUSINESS WEEK's picks for the top business books of 2000.

Who would have believed that one of the hottest books of the year would contain 296 pages of unbridled number-crunching by an Ivy League economist, published by an academic press? Arriving just as the Nasdaq began its slide, Irrational Exuberance (Princeton University), by Yale University economist Robert J. Shiller, preaches that stocks have been ridiculously overvalued--thanks, in part, to pronouncements of New Economy believers in the media, various B-school professors, and, strangely enough, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan. Together, says Shiller, they turned what is unquestionably a good story--high productivity and corporate earnings--into a fairy tale featuring soaring price-earnings ratios and ever-higher stock prices. In fact, Shiller predicts that the current stock slump is likely to turn into a prolonged period of stagnant returns. A sobering scenario, in a volume that BUSINESS WEEK Chief Economist William Wolman called "dazzling, richly textured, provocative" and "by far the most important book about the stock market since Jeremy J. Siegel's 1994 Stocks for the Long Run."