1

The Shape of Things to Come

Over the past fifty years or so new ideas about how we should behave have corrupted our thinking. We have come to see black as white, bad as good: it’s moral to be immoral. The change has been huge yet it has been achieved through many subtle, barely discernible steps.

Of course, we’re not intrinsically less virtuous than past generations. And this is not a straightforward story about people knowingly behaving badly. Instead, it is about how we have been encouraged to believe that various actions and activities are acceptable, natural, rational, woven into the very logic of things – when just a few generations ago they would have seemed stupid, perplexing, harmful or simply wicked. There has been a transformation in the way we understand many of the ideas and values we live by: ideas about trust, justice, fairness, freedom of choice and social responsibility – ideas which profoundly shape our economy and society. Although these developments are relatively recent, they are now so ubiquitous and deep-rooted in everyday life that we are barely aware of them.

Take the global financial crisis that began back in 2007. It is widely agreed that much of the blame for the crisis lies with the regulators, the people employed by government to police the activities of banks and other financial institutions. ‘Blame the regulators’ is now a familiar argument – but it ought to shock us. We do not blame the police if our home is burgled. So why blame the regulators for the bankers’ reckless (and sometimes criminal) behaviour? ‘Bankers will be bankers’ is the essence of the reply: there is no point in blaming them for it. And if one banker shows self-restraint, another will step in to exploit the opportunity. And markets rely on greed to function properly. Through the spread of these dangerous ideas, we have granted bankers an excuse to be greedy, permission to play the system: a Licence to be Bad.

It is not just bankers. Our troubles go much wider and much deeper. Look at Volkswagen. How did the biggest car-maker in the world morph from the modest, cautious manufacturer of a single model into a corporation which carefully plotted a cynical, large-scale deception of its customers?

At least part of the answer must surely reflect the change in corporate culture encouraged by a Chicago economist named Milton Friedman. In 1970 Friedman – who would later advise US President Ronald Reagan and Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in the UK – wrote a landmark article in The New York Times entitled ‘The Social Responsibility of Business is to Increase Its Profits’. In case of doubt, Friedman explained that profit was the only responsibility of business.

The influence of recent economic ideas has not been limited to the corporate and financial worlds. At around the same time that Friedman reframed the responsibilities of business, new ideas were reframing the responsibilities of individuals too.

Take an idea known as ‘free-riding’. This theory implies that it is often irrational to cooperate because, even if you do, no one else will – and in any case your contribution is too small to make any difference. Although the theory’s influence on society remains largely unacknowledged, its essential ideas have filtered out into our ordinary thinking, overthrowing the common sense of ‘doing your bit’. We have all been corrupted, down to the small choices of daily life. We have come to believe that it is pointless to vote, harmless to access music, news and other online content without paying, and inevitable that people will exaggerate their insurance claims or avoid paying tax whenever possible. And we walk along busy city streets absorbed in our smartphones, paying little attention to avoiding collisions with other people. In all these cases we rely on the efforts or contributions of others, without which the collective activity in question would be impossible. On other occasions, there is no serious collective activity, because free-rider thinking leads us to abandon hope before we even begin. Many people despair about climate change in these terms.

How did we get to this? And how did we become a world in which, while the rich countries have become even richer, many more of their citizens rely on soup kitchens and food banks? Is it partly because we’ve been told that making the rich richer is good for the economy but making the poor richer is bad? How did so many of us come to believe all these things when, not so long ago, we had very different beliefs and values?

Whatever your views about bankers, corporate profits, voting, free online content, climate change or inequality, we often seem locked into our present way of thinking (some commentators have called it ‘neoliberalism’, but you won’t see that word again in this bookfn1). Economics appears to constrain the choices available to us. More than that, it shapes the questions we ask and the problems we see. The acceptable answers are influenced by our economics-derived morality. So if we hope for change, an essential first step is to understand how we came to this – where these powerful new economic ideas came from and how they came to have such a hold over us.

The answer is far from obvious. After all, by turns, we seem to ridicule economics and then defer to it. We did not adopt our present way of thinking through deliberate choice. But it didn’t happen by chance. It wasn’t a conspiracy, but from some angles it looks like one.

To see where it all began, travel to Geneva, Switzerland. Take a train going east, running along the edge of Lake Geneva (Lac Léman). At Vevey, alight and take the funicular railway which ascends Mont Pèlerin. Your hotel is just two minutes’ walk from the top station of the funicular railway. In 1947 about fifty people made this journey to what was then called the Hôtel du Parc. Most of them were university academics, along with a few journalists and businesspeople. They were united by fear and loathing of the direction that many countries seemed to be taking.

At that time, in almost every country the state was assuming a bigger role than before. The Depression and mass unemployment of the 1930s was still a vivid memory; economic crisis had played a part in the rise of fascism and the subsequent catastrophes of the Second World War. As peace returned to Europe, no one wanted a return to mass unemployment, and the new economics of John Maynard Keynes showed that governments had the power to prevent it. Keynes, who laid the foundations for modern macroeconomics, is probably the most influential economist of the last hundred years. It was Keynes who was responsible for the now-familiar idea that, in an economic downturn, governments should increase public expenditure or cut taxes to stimulate the economy. Keynesian economics complemented New Deal-style policies in the United States and the emergence of the welfare state in Britain following the Beveridge Report of 1942. Economist William Beveridge had been asked by the government to study unemployment insurance and related services and make recommendations. His landmark report argued for ‘cradle-to-grave’ state-provided social insurance.

Ironically, it was Beveridge who, back in 1931, had given a job to a man who would dedicate his life to undermining almost everything Beveridge believed in. When Beveridge, as Director of the London School of Economics, offered a lectureship to a little-known Austrian economist named Friedrich Hayek, he could not have foreseen the consequences. It was Hayek who organized the Mont Pèlerin meeting in 1947.

Hayek had been catapulted from obscurity to celebrity after the publication of his book The Road to Serfdom in 1944. His core argument was that the prevailing trend towards central planning and a larger role for government in the economy would set Britain on a road that ultimately led to the totalitarianism of Nazi Germany. The Road to Serfdom sold out within a few days of publication, and wartime paper shortages meant that reprints over the next year or so never kept up with demand. The book’s controversial message led it to be turned down by three US publishers, until a Chicago economist – the aptly named Aaron Director – persuaded the University of Chicago Press to take it on.

Director published relatively little under his own name but, as well as his role in The Road to Serfdom, he was a guiding hand behind the work of several key thinkers, including Milton Friedman, his brother-in-law. As an undergraduate at Yale, Director had been an anti-establishment iconoclast who, with his close friend the painter Mark Rothko, produced an underground newspaper called the Yale Saturday Evening Pest. In later life, though, Director was sufficiently conservative that he described Friedman, adviser to conservatives Reagan and Thatcher, as ‘my radical brother-in-law’.1

The Road to Serfdom was a great success in the United States. Just as in Britain, the publishers had to battle the paper-rationing authorities to print enough copies to meet demand. But in April 1945 the Reader’s Digest published a condensed twenty-page version with a print run of several million copies. At that moment, Hayek was on a ship bound for New York. When it docked, he was told the modest academic plans for his US visit had been cancelled in favour of a nationwide lecture tour. It began in New York Town Hall, packed to its capacity of 3,000, with many more listening in adjoining rooms.

In light of his burgeoning influence and celebrity, it was unsurprising that Hayek came to be seen as the intellectual leader of the group assembled at Mont Pèlerin (soon to be known as the Mont Pèlerin Society). Both Friedman and Director were in attendance. On 1st April, the first day of their meeting, Hayek set out the task they faced – saving Britain and the United States, among other countries, from what he and his fellow travellers saw as a descent into totalitarianism. The growing interference of government in the economy, Hayek believed, constituted a direct threat to individual freedoms, freedoms which could be restored only through the long, slow, patient rolling back of government intervention and the eventual return to a true free-market economy. Hayek was clear about the scale of the challenge.

Hayek saw that Keynesian economics was much more than just a set of policy recommendations for controlling unemployment. There was a rapidly emerging consensus in which a primary duty of government is to maintain full employment. (Even the bankers seemed to agree: in a government memo, Keynes noted that international financiers would disapprove of significant unemployment in Britain.)2 More than that, Keynes insisted that governments have a duty to regulate and supplement market forces for the sake of wider social benefits. And it was taken for granted that governments were mostly competent, knowledgeable and could be trusted to pursue the greater good. This was the lens through which people now viewed the economy. Hayek realized that overturning Keynesian orthodoxy would require a different perspective – changing how people thought about the economy and government at a fundamental level. He concluded that the Mont Pèlerin Society should be ‘concerned not so much with what would be immediately practical, but with the beliefs which must regain ascendance’.3 It was a long-term project to change people’s underlying ‘common sense’ beliefs. In other words, to lead us to a different way of seeing the world.

In this, Hayek and his Mont Pèlerin colleagues would eventually succeed far beyond their expectations. They knew they faced an enormous challenge to shift the prevailing worldview. In 1947, though, the Mont Pèlerin crowd were far outside the political and economic mainstream – not quite seen as cranks, perhaps, but not far off. It would take another three decades for their ideas to break through. With the benefit of hindsight, the turning point is easy to identify.

Today no one doubts that the 1979 election of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, and Ronald Reagan soon afterwards in the US, marked a fundamental shift in politics and economics. With the arrival of Thatcher and Reagan, the post-war Keynesian consensus was swept away. Thatcher had been elected leader of the British Conservative Party in February 1975. The Conservatives were hungry for power and, at a strategy meeting that summer, it was proposed that future party policy should explicitly follow a ‘middle way’, avoiding extremes of Left and Right. Thatcher interrupted, pulling one of Hayek’s books from her bag and holding it up for all to see. ‘This is what we believe,’ she announced, and then slammed it down on the table.4

BATTERY CHICKENS FOR FREEDOM

When a British dairy farmer named Antony Fisher read the Reader’s Digest version of The Road to Serfdom, it made a great impression on him. Hayek seemed to share Fisher’s own gut instincts about individual freedom being under threat. Fisher wrote to Hayek to ask what he could do to help, and wondered whether he should go into politics. Hayek told Fisher that he could do something more valuable, explaining that a more powerful role in the ideological battle was played by ‘second-hand dealers in ideas’ – the journalists, political advisers, commentators and intellectuals who shaped and shifted public debate and political thinking. Hayek advised Fisher to work with the Mont Pèlerin Society to set up research institutes with the aim of influencing these second-hand dealers. In 1952 Fisher went to America to visit one of these fledgling institutes, the Foundation for Economic Education. Its co-founder was economist ‘Baldy’ Harper, who had been at the Mont Pèlerin meeting five years before. And, since Fisher was a farmer, Harper showed him a new farming method too. It was a new breed of fast-growing chicken, the broiler, which was being reared in tiny cages. With battery-chicken farming then unknown in the UK, Fisher saw there was a fortune to be made. So he brought broiler chickens to the UK.fn2 He borrowed £5,000 to start a battery-farming business. By the time he sold it fifteen years later it was worth £21 million.

Fisher used his growing wealth to make Hayek’s dreams come true. He began in 1955 by founding the Institute of Economic Affairs – a ‘think tank’, a research and lobbying organization set up to pursue the project laid out by Hayek at the first meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society. It was this institute which, twenty years later, arranged for Thatcher and Hayek to meet for the first time – months before Thatcher waved Hayek’s book in the air at the Conservative Party gathering. The one-to-one meeting between Thatcher and Hayek took place in the institute’s boardroom. It lasted about thirty minutes, after which the staff of the institute gathered around Hayek for his verdict. After a long pause he said with obvious emotion, ‘She’s so beautiful.’5

The Institute of Economic Affairs is just one part of the Atlas Economic Research Foundation established by Fisher in 1981 to nurture similar think tanks around the world. It has become a large international umbrella organization, a network which has grown over the years and now numbers more than 500 organizations in over 90 countries. As well as advocating free-market economics, the network includes specialist groups ranging from climate-change denialists to pro-tobacco-industry lobbyists. A common theme across the network is the reliance on funding from big corporations and plutocrats.

At this point, the conspiracy theories emerge. Beginning with the Mont Pèlerin Society, and culminating in the Atlas Foundation, the conspiracy theorists see the lofty philosophical ambitions of these organizations as mere cover for a secret, long-run plan to protect and then enhance the wealth and influence of rich and powerful business elites. And it is true that these organizations, while formally independent of the rich and powerful, have been bankrolled by them at every step. In a deeper sense, too, the Mont Pèlerin Society saw politics as subservient to economic interests. Hayek didn’t just want laissez-faire, the old idea that politicians should leave the market and business well alone. Hayek didn’t see markets and economics as something separate, existing in a different sphere from the rest of human life. For him, markets and economics were all of life. Hayek saw all human motivation as economic: ‘there is no separate economic motive’.6

Hayek’s ideas have come to shape contemporary culture as much as they have shaped our politics: over the last four decades the penetration of market economics deep into our daily lives has transformed what we value and how we think.

And yet the impact has not been quite what Hayek might have imagined at that inaugural meeting of the Mont Pèlerin Society, because economics has itself changed greatly since then. The rise of the society turns out to be just a small part of the story. And this is where the conspiracy theories break down.

Many of the most influential thinkers behind the triumph of market economics were Mont Pèlerin Society members, including Gary Becker, James Buchanan, Ronald Coase, Milton Friedman, Richard Posner and George Stigler. But they did not always share Hayek’s views. And a few economists, such as Ken Arrow and Tom Schelling, were equally influential yet had a very different political outlook to the Mont Pèlerin gang.

In the following chapters I explore how the radical ideas of these thinkers did so much to make modern mainstream economics. It was these new ideas, more than a conspiracy by the rich and powerful, which produced the market-driven world we live in today. I focus on what’s called microeconomics (as opposed to the macroeconomics of how national economies function) because most of the major developments in economics since the Second World War have been in microeconomics. Microeconomics is economics at the individual, human level so, unsurprisingly, it has played a greater role in shaping how we, as individuals, see the world.

First, though, we need to peer through the fog of claim and counterclaim about modern economics. An important reason why we seem locked into current economic thinking is that the debate about it typically presents us with a choice between two equally unconvincing alternatives. On the one side, economics is a science uncovering truths about how we naturally, inevitably, think and behave. On the other, economics invokes a fantasy world populated not by plausible representations of people but by selfish, endlessly calculating decision-making robots – also known as homo economicus. The debate may be unsatisfactory, but the status of economics is of more than academic interest. The global financial crisis reminded us that bad economics can bite. If economic theories – used widely by financial institutions and their government regulators, among others – are fundamentally flawed, then no wonder we can have a global financial crisis and face the continuing risk of another one coming along at any moment.

From the 1950s onwards increasing numbers of economists began suffering from ‘physics envy’ – a yearning to re-make economics in the mould of a mathematical science like physics. And economics certainly started to look more scientific: mathematics became the privileged language in which economic arguments are expressed. Clearly, the use of mathematics can bring precision and rigour. A valid mathematical proof is indisputable; it seems to raise the tantalizing prospect of cutting through the tortuous on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other arguments often characteristic of economics, to give a straight answer. As Chief Economist of the World Bank, Larry Summers (later US Treasury Secretary and President of Harvard) exuded this confidence: ‘Spread the truth – the laws of economics are like the laws of engineering. One set of laws works everywhere.’7

But, of course, mathematics cannot give us laws of economics like the laws of nature or engineering. Mathematics can help make economic theories logical and consistent. It does nothing to ensure that these theories tell us something about the real world. Another problem with Summers’s view is that it seems to banish political and ethical questions from economics because answering them involves unscientific value judgements which don’t ‘work everywhere’. Yet the questions still remain, because political and ethical considerations are inescapable in economics. So these value judgements are still made, but usually implicitly and obliquely. Much modern economics proceeds with a hidden political and ethical agenda but masquerades as an objective science. The result is an economics with an influence on our twenty-first-century lives which is all-embracing – and yet often far from simple or obvious.

A big part of that political and ethical agenda seems to build on a view of humans as essentially selfish. This brings us back to the complaint that economics is a set of highly unrealistic stories about selfish, hyper-rational homo economicus. In truth, many economic theories allow a wider range of human motivations than selfishness. And the problems of modern economics are not straightforwardly solved by making it more realistic.

Many economists proudly see themselves as unsentimental, straight-talking and brutally honest. For decades, the default starting point of mainstream economists has been to assume that selfishness is the natural, dominant determinant of human behaviour. This idea is there in the shadows behind slogans as varied as ‘business is business’ and ‘rising inequality is inevitable in a market economy’. These economists and their supporters from outside economics (there are many) point to the founding father of economics, Adam Smith, who built his magnum opus The Wealth of Nations (1776) on the rock of humans as essentially selfish creatures. Modern economics has returned to this classical tradition, they conclude, after the aberration which began with Karl Marx and ended with the fall of the Berlin Wall, despite the best efforts of John Maynard Keynes to postpone the inevitable.

Unfortunately, this version of history goes wrong from the beginning. Adam Smith’s ideas reflected the eighteenth-century intellectual society he lived in and don’t easily translate to our world. The cornerstone of his Enlightenment thinking was the idea of enlightened self-interest, which is not at all the same as selfishness. Smith’s enlightened self-interest required the development of cultivated behaviour, good manners and ‘moral sentiments’. Smith worried, for example, that people’s ‘disposition to admire the rich and the great, and to despise or neglect persons of poor and mean condition’ would lead to ‘the corruption of our moral sentiments’.8 This is far from the ‘look after Number One’ caricature of Smith used to justify selfishness today. Modern economics, then, has not returned us to some eternal truth laid down by Adam Smith. It has taken us somewhere different altogether.

The aforementioned straight-talking economists assume that we are always and everywhere narrowly selfish (but if that is true, why should we listen to these economists? Won’t they simply be saying whatever they hope will get them a promotion/pay rise/Nobel Prize?). Other economists acknowledge that people may act altruistically, not just towards family and friends but in their kindness to strangers too: many people try to return a lost wallet found in the street.9 However, seemingly altruistic behaviour is often interpreted as disguised selfishness. You give a gift to your girlfriend only because of what it might get you in return, according to Greg Mankiw (President George W. Bush’s chief economic adviser and author of one of the bestselling economics textbooks of recent times). You act altruistically to signal your virtuousness to others, so that they will trust you enough to buy from you or employ you (and you can always cheat on them later). This approach mixes absurdity and tautology: every act can be interpreted as ‘ultimately’ selfish, but the broader the interpretation of selfishness, the less meaningful it becomes.

In an attempt to sidestep these difficulties, many economists today avoid talking about selfishness. Instead their theories and models assume that people are rational, a word given different meanings by different economists. More significant than the exact definition is the slippery power of the word, providing the opportunity to slide evasively between descriptive and prescriptive meanings. Labelling behaviour as rational might be descriptive – rational behaviour as normal or typical. Or it can be prescriptive – you ought to be rational. When faced with overwhelming evidence from psychology and behavioural economics that we often act irrationally, economists can respond that economic theories merely explore the ‘what if?’ implications of assuming everyone conforms to the economists’ ideal of rational behaviour. These theories are not supposed to be accurate descriptions of reality. This seems innocuous enough, but the effect is that ‘rational’ provides scientific-sounding cover for the assumption that we ought to act like homo economicus, obsessively calculating in all our decisions – and that this calculating reasoning is somehow praiseworthy or superior, regardless of what we decide to do. Bad behaviour is licensed because it has been redefined as rational.

A general pattern begins to emerge here. Economic ideas – such as the idea of what it means to be rational – change us to become more like hyper-rational homo economicus. How can this happen?

We say that the most successful politicians ‘make the weather’: that is, they shape and bend our understanding of reality to fit their vision and values. The economists we meet in subsequent chapters have changed the weather too – and for the long term. Their ideas give us a way of seeing the world which, if we adopt it, becomes true. In other words, some economic ideas are at least partially self-fulfilling. Believing them goes a long way to making them true. If everyone assumes that everyone else is selfish, then everyone becomes more selfish. If all the buyers and sellers in a particular market assume that some economic theory of that market is true, then they behave more in accordance with the theory, and so market behaviour moves closer to that described in the theory. Some markets, notably in the financial world, couldn’t even exist without an economic theory to explain them and give them rules: the financial products being traded are so complex that without a theory (or its manifestation as a computer model) to consult, traders cannot tell whether prices are cheap or expensive.

When economists see the chasm between economic theory and real-world behaviour their solution is often to change the world, not the theory.fn3 Economist Richard Thaler recently won the Nobel Prize for his work leading to the Nudge idea. Nudge economists seek to change the environment in which we make choices, to steer us to choose as homo economicus would do – to make us behave in accordance with economic theory, even though we don’t think like that. This approach, making our choice environment human-proof, assumes human decisions are generally inferior, and never superior, to those of machine-like homo economicus. We would want to choose what homo economicus does, the economists assume, if only our error-prone natures would let us.

This brings us to a more direct way in which economics can make the weather. It gives us a guide, a set of rules for living, which we are encouraged to follow. Sometimes these rules are peculiar.

DESIGNS FOR LIVING

In 1954 Dennis Robertson, a leading economist of his day, gave a lecture entitled ‘What does the economist economize?’ Robertson’s answer was: Love. This answer would surely have met with approval from the Mont Pèlerin Society (Robertson himself was not a member, but his closest colleague and protégé Stanley Dennison was a friend of Hayek and a society member from the beginning).

Robertson used ‘Love’ as a shorthand for kindness, solidarity, generosity and other altruistic virtues. He argued that by promoting policies, laws and organizations which rely only on selfishness, economics and economists avoided wasting ‘that scarce resource Love’. Robertson saw love and our altruistic virtues as akin to scarce resources depleted by each use – so they should be carefully hoarded for use in emergencies, rather than recklessly squandered in everyday life. Many eminent economists share this same strange misunderstanding of humanity. In arguing that blood should be supplied through a market rather than a donation system, Nobel Prize-winner Ken Arrow worried about relying on donations: ‘ethical behaviour’, he stated, should ‘be confined to those circumstances where the price system breaks down … We do not wish to use up recklessly the scarce resources of altruistic motivation.’10 Similarly, Larry Summers defended economists’ reliance on selfishness: ‘We all have only so much altruism in us. Economists like me think of altruism as a valuable and rare good that needs conserving.’11

It’s true that a society in which people are endlessly exhorted to show solidarity with fellow citizens/comrades will soon discover the limits of altruism. But altruism is not depleted through use. That would be like the motorist who, after giving way to another driver in the morning rush hour, says, ‘I have done my good deed for the day; for the remainder, I can act like a bastard.’12 Our altruistic virtues are not like this. On the contrary, they are more like muscles which wither and atrophy if not regularly exercised. Aristotle emphasized that virtue is something we foster through practice: ‘we become just by doing just acts … brave by doing brave acts.’13 Nowadays, we put it less poetically: Use it or lose it.

Again we see how economic behaviour can be self-fulfilling. By focusing on our selfishness, economics leads to the decline of our altruistic virtues, so we become more selfish – yet the irony is that all this is done in the name of preserving those altruistic virtues.

The neuroscientist Antonio Damasio made pioneering studies of patients suffering from damage to the part of the brain responsible for emotions. Damasio was trying to arrange the date of his next meeting with one such patient. While consulting his calendar for almost half an hour, ‘the patient enumerated reasons for and against each of the two dates: previous engagements, proximity to other engagements, possible meteorological conditions … [H]e was now walking us through a tiresome cost-benefit analysis, an endless outlining and fruitless comparison of options and possible consequences …’14 This ended only when Damasio interrupted and simply told the patient when the next meeting would be.

We all know that no one can live as homo economicus does. And if being rational means engaging in endless calculations of costs and benefits, then we can’t be rational either. So why have the economists’ designs for living become so influential?

The interests of the rich and powerful of course have a major role to play but, as government insiders frequently report, no one gets to determine government policy by blatantly arguing ‘because it will make me rich’.15 They need a respected language in which to frame their demands. Economics has become that language.

Keynes concluded his most influential book with a declaration on the power of economic ideas:

… Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back. I am sure that the power of vested interests is vastly exaggerated compared with the gradual encroachment of ideas … But, soon or late, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good and evil.16

Hayek, Keynes’s intellectual enemy in many respects, agreed: he included this quotation from Keynes in his opening address to the Mont Pèlerin Society in 1947. It later became the motto of the Institute of Economic Affairs.

It is no exaggeration to see modern economics as partly filling the gap left by the decline of religion in modern societies. In the twenty-first century our way of seeing the world is unconsciously conditioned by its concepts and values. The language of economics profoundly limits the political and moral questions which can be asked. With modern economics as our guide, we just don’t see the other questions. To change our society, or simply to decide whether change is necessary, we need to understand how constrained our thinking has become – how, without even realizing it, we veto or ignore alternatives to current orthodoxy.

And so we must look back to how these economic ideas emerged and spread. In subsequent chapters we follow a diverse range of economists on their intellectual journeys to become the high priests of our time. Like the real journeys we make, these economists often fail to take the shortest route. There are detours, accidental and otherwise. And, en route, some stops: ideas which get parked and left, motionless for years or decades, before their sudden reappearance in contemporary life. Some ideas begin well but are grossly distorted or misapplied by later thinkers. Some ideas are flawed from the start. In all this messy diversity we see the interplay of politics, culture and chance in shaping the spread of ideas. And the paradoxical quality of appealing, seductive ideas which turn out to do great damage. The stories of these high priests are varied, but together they show how economics has come to dominate our lives.