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Soros' Theory of Reflexivity Isn't a Theory At All 
Book Summary - One Good Point
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br /Save your money and I summarize the one valuable nugget to be mined from this book: It's impossible to predict financial markets using scientific statistical based theories (as all financial experts try to do) because those theories are part of what you're trying to predict. (i.e. they are reflexive in that they refer to themselves.) Thus financial markets are inherently unpredictable.
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br /Other authors, I have Taleb's "The Black Swan" in mind here, have covered this same territory much deeper. But I don't want to discount Soros' modest contributions here. Soros gives examples that, at least for financial markets, are more intuitive then Taleb's. For example, you can't necessarily base financial decisions on "fundamentals" because if you are in a credit bubble, like we were previous to 2008, you have essentially ghost earnings and earnings growth. Thus there is no way (at least in the short term, I haven't entirely discounted Shiller's P/E10) to tell what the value of a company is worth.
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br /Unfortunately Soros' takes 50 to 75 pages to say what I just said in two paragraphs because, to be blunt, he doesn't really understand his own "theory." Lacking any clarity for his vague ideas, he slogs along giving example after example and quoting philosopher after philosopher. Worse yet, he misunderstands the implications of his own "theory" in dangerous ways.
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br /Soros' Misunderstandings of His Own "Theory"
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br /For example, Soros insists that one implication of Reflexivity is that we need to regulate markets more. But if we actually follow Reflexivity to its logical end (which Soros never does) this isn't necessarily the case.
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br /Reflexivity, if true, actually suggests that regulation is as likely to cause problems as fix them because regulation is also a manipulative function. A free markets proponent (which I am not) will notice this gap in reason immediately and, I'd imagine, claim that actually it's a bit of regulation known as the Fed that created the bubble in the first place and that if we just let markets to themselves we'd avoid superbubbles altogether. My point here is not that this is true (I have no idea and no one else does either) but that Soros never even anticipates this obvious objection nor notices that both explanations are equally suggested by Reflexivity. (Or in other words, Reflexivity suggests and denies neither course of action.)
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br /Likewise, consider this gem (check your irony detector here) of a statement from the book: "In large part the excesses in the financial markets are due to the regulators' failure to exercise proper control. Some of the newly introduced financial instruments and methods were based on false premises."
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br /But wait! How did Soros, our "Theory of Reflexivity" guru, miss the fact that Reflexivity states you can't know the underlying premises of the market with certainty? In other words, Reflexivity predicts that regulators can't know which financial instruments are based on false premises until after they bust. Then it's obvious. (Or maybe not even then.) So please tell me how to logically reconcile those two sentences above. They are meaningless from a Reflexivity word view.
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br /Then Soros goes on to insist that Reflexivity predicts that it's not true markets naturally seek equilibrium. Huh? Why would reflexivity say something as ridiculous as that? If markets don't seek equilibrium (which they do) we could boom forever so who is worried? But our bust is proof that markets do indeed naturally seek equilibrium.
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br /What Reflexivity actually suggests is that it may take decades before a market seeks natural equilibrium, long enough for us to forget what equilibrium actually looked like and mistake a bubble for equilibrium, complete with seeming "fundamentals" changes to back up the illusion. Thus (Soros gets this part right) markets are not a random walk from equilibrium, they boom and bust all over the place and over long periods of time. (Shiller likens this to microphone feedback that lasts for decades.)
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br /While this is scary, it's not the same as what Soros insists upon and it's not clear at all what regulations could fix the problem, if at all, nor how Reflexivity helps us pick good regulation to avoid future problems. After all, the Bush administration actually had more regulation than any previous administration (Sarbanes Oxley anyone?) but the super bubble still happened. We don't need more regulation per se, we need regulations that forsee what's going to go wrong next. In other words we need regulators with ESP so that they can regulate *before* the market Reflexivly seeks a new way to boom falsely in some currently unregulated area.
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br /Soros Makes No Meaningful Recommendations
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br /Soros' final chapter on policy recommendations literally starts with an excuse for why he isn't going to make any recommendations, so it seems Soros himself realizes Reflexivity doesn't help us out with policy making. He makes a single good recommendation in that chapter: We should admit that large companies will always be bailed out by the government if their size will take down the system, so we tax them differently.
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br /Conclusion - Reflexivity Isn't a Theory at All
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br /Which brings me to my real problem with the book: the "theory of reflexivity" isn't a theory at all, it's only a *theory spoiler*. To use an analogy, if Soros were living at the time of the black plague he just (correctly) discovered that putting leaches on your body doesn't actually cure the plague. So he's replacement theory is to NOT put leaches on your body. It's correct but has no practical value, at least not by itself.
Excellent book 
Amazing! This book manages to speak about complicated things like credit derivatives and bubbles in prices in a fairy simple way. Chapters on philosophical concepts are interesting but not that clear.
br /In any case, no matter what your background is, if you are interested in reading something meaningful about current crisis - that is your first choice!
I have read them all 
I have read all of the latest books on the financial crisis. I can say without fear of contradiction that this is the worst of them all. It generates literally no insights into the crisis. It is the work of a wanna be philosopher who"s money making ability over the years has generated a market for his pseudo-philosophical assessments of the world.
Tenderness of the wolf. 
My main purpose to read this book was to get a better understanding of Soros' theory of Reflexivity. I find it a true theory, while writing-wise he is repeating himself a few times in the book.
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br /What is important to keep in mind, though, is that he is the GREATEST market speculator, and therefore anything he says should be taken with a suspicion.
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br /Someone who is so well educated in economics definitely knows that oversupply leads to price depreciation. Yet at the end of the book, he approves of USA government efforts, especially those of Barney Frank, to keep housing crisis ongoing by artificial measures, while those foreclosed houses should have been simply liquidated to eliminate excessive supply and stabilize housing pricing and prevent deflation.
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br /Thus, as always with market makers, I find his views contradictory. Some points make sense, and others don't appear to be so, unless we admit that Soros has substantial real estate investments and is in favor for the Government to minimize his losses. Privatise profits, socialise loss. And old and proven principal of the financial elite.
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br /I also do think that deep inside indeed he may be an admirer of the communist regime, as he father was in Soviet Union during the revolution. These must be very private reasons, but according to his own theory, irrational may become rational.
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br /Inconclusive book, in my opinion.
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Interesting, readable, novel concepts.
George wants to share his theories. They are good theories. He is a great practical philosopher and he likes to see novel concepts and give them new names. He is so right, it is so important to do so. This is what makes this book worthwhile. George has also given a lot back to this sad old world, I read elsewhere, but this book is not about that.
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br /Apparently economists like to pretend that they are all caring and sharing and give out accurate information and that events tend to equilibrium like in a healthy body. George explodes these myths with his concepts of reflexivity, radical fallibility, and super-bubbles.
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br /While economists pretend to be like medical physiologists, their roles are more akin to military strategists- all sides are actually on the attack against each other, usually by the same misinformation tactics used by the military (my analogy not George's). They have a veneer of respectability, which most of them deserve, except for the fact that their science has been proven to be useless, particularly by recent events and also by Taleb's wonderful books.
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br /Also, not being trained in medical physiology, economists and perhaps George, do not realise that in physiology only NEGATIVE feedback loops lead to equilibrium, whereas POSITIVE invariably lead to disease or death, as we are now seeing.
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br /George likes to allude to the Heisenberg uncertainty principle- so I presume he is the man Taleb is berating when Taleb savages this approach- though I see George is correct in principle.
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br /I do wonder why George and Taleb both ignore Catastrophe Theory- such a simple easy model. It could be taught in senior high- unlike the messy Chaos Theory. It only takes 2 pages to learn.
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br /So this book is different, it is educational and interesting. And how often do you get the genuine opinions of somebody who actually shaped modern world finance, as opposed to some impoverished academic.
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