Everyman (The Untold Story of Economics)

A bold retelling of the story of capitalism that blends 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 as Neo. Telling the tale as a novel, Everyman traces global capitalism’s arc from boom to bust through its key characters: economics’ textbook “rational actor,” Neo, and his reckless apostles—model “finance bro,” Finn; ambassador of globalization, Davos; envoy to distant lands, Wash; and the quintessence of the tech industry, Tek. 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?