“Economist Haldar debuts with a unique and enchanting treatise styled in the form of a novel. Harkening back to the allegorical economic treatises of the early modern period, Haldar sets out to ‘illuminat[e] the distortions’ and ‘reengage [the] moral imagination’ of her field. . . . In chapters themed around allusions to canonical stories and storytellers, from Macbeth to Hemingway, Haldar weaves her allegorical figures together with long passages of historical and theoretical context, so that, in a typical passage, the reader gets a discourse on the Eurozone and Davos, peppered with references to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain and the music of ABBA. The result is charming, often funny, and wonderfully overstuffed with ideas.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Description
A bold retelling of the story of capitalism that treats the core concepts of economics as living, breathing beings, blending fiction and fact to upend 250 years of economic orthodoxy.
For a quarter of a millennium, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, ghostly and bloodied, has written the script of our lives. Everyman makes the ethereal ink in which it is etched legible by embodying the solitary, self-interested homo economicus—or “rational actor”—as Neo.
Told as an imaginative novel, Everyman traces global capitalism’s arc from boom to bust through Neo and his reckless apostles: Finn, the archetypal finance bro; Davos, the ambassador of globalization; Wash, the envoy to distant lands; and Tek, the quintessence of the tech industry. In a dazzling saga spanning generations and continents, Neo’s epic journey takes us from Chicago to New York to London, from Wall Street to Burning Man, from the factories of the Rust Belt to the farmlands of India, introducing us to the economic minds and political figures who have shaped our world, everyday people, and even runaway monsters.
An entertaining magical realist romp, Everyman touches on the most significant economic events in global history, from the Great Depression to the 2008 Financial Crisis, Britain’s Brexit vote to the inexorable rise of populism globally. Drawing on moral psychology, philosophy, evolutionary biology, and beyond, it animates the possibilities for how we might build on our capacity for cooperation to reinvent our broken institutions—and ourselves. By breaking form to ignite our moral imaginations, it presents a vision for rewriting our modern-day mythology, our economic theory. Everyman asks: by recasting economics’ strawman protagonist as a flesh-and-blood character, can we turn the plot of our lives from an inevitable tragedy to a redemption story and alter the destiny of our civilization?
Reviews
“A novel—and novelistic—approach to recounting the emergence of modern economics. . . . [Haldar’s] real subject is the rise of capitalism and ideas that all too often seem to be fixed laws of the universe rather than socially agreed upon arrangements. . . . A lively short course in economic history, and a subtle critique of its eternal verities.” —Kirkus Reviews
“How did a world emerge in which we give extraordinary powers to a human-made god we call ‘the market,’ and then allow that god to rule, even subdue, us? Everyman is a piercing and deeply learned condemnation of how thinking about economic life became impoverished by fantastic assumptions about human nature and efforts to divorce the understanding of economic life from society. A tragedy told in the mode of an epic, Haldar’s book is indispensable reading for anyone trying to come to terms with our contemporary economic and political dilemmas.” —Sven Beckert, Pulitzer Prize finalist, author, and Laird Bell Professor of History at Harvard University
“Everyman is not a book. It is an exorcism. For 250 years, economics has armed the bloodied hand that clenches our throat. Antara Haldar's new book is a psychological drama unveiling an oppressive pseudoscience, a tragedy that refuses its own curtain. Read it and you will no longer ask who economics is for.” —Yanis Varoufakis, former finance minister of Greece, author of Technofeudalism: What Killed Capitalism
