Does this sound familiar? “Economists predict no recovery until 2013.” “Politicians and economists agree on the need for savage cutbacks.” “Economists don’t think people are rational.” (All real news stories.) These and a thousand other news stories reflect the high status economists have in the modern world. There is a Nobel prize for economics but [...]
Two books on my summer reading list are causing my consternation. One is Beinhocker’s ‘Origin of Wealth’; the other is Jackson’s ‘Prosperity without Growth’. In different ways, both play into a current obsession of mine: that economics is a big part of what is stopping transformation in the climate change context. The title of Tim [...]
Economist and business expert John Kay has a new book out called Obliquity. The main message is that we have got too caught up in numbers and measurement, and this has left us pursuing goals whose main justification seems to be that they can be spelt out in equations. Kay calls this ‘bogus rationalisation’ and [...]