Everyman

The Untold Story of Economics

De: Antara Haldar

From the mind of decorated economist Antara Haldar, Everyman is a bold new novelistic retelling of the story of capitalism. Treating economics’ core concepts as characters driving the drama, it challenges the orthodoxy and asks: by replacing strawmen with flesh-and-blood protagonists, can we change the plot and avert tragedy?

For 250 years, Adam Smith’s invisible hand, ghostly and bloodied, has written the script of our lives. Everyman makes legible the ethereal ink in which it is etched by embodying economics’ exemplar, the textbook “rational actor”—the solitary, self-interested homo economicus—as Neo. Blending fact and fiction in dazzling ways, it traces the arc of global capitalism from boom to bust through its key characters: the leading man of economics, Neo, and his reckless apostles—model “finance bro,” Finn; ambassador of globalization, Davos; Neo’s envoy to distant lands, Wash; and quintessence of the tech industry, Tek. In a saga spanning generations and continents, Neo’s epic journey takes us from Chicago to New York to London, from Scotland to the Swiss Alps, from Wall Street to Burning Man, from the Greek debt crisis to the factories of the Rust Belt to the farmlands of India. Along the way, we meet the economic minds and political figures who have shaped our world, everyday people, and even runaway monsters.

An entertaining magical realist romp through economics, 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 disciplines ranging from moral psychology to philosophy to evolutionary biology, it animates the possibilities for how we might build on our innate human capacity for cooperation to reinvent our broken institutions—and ourselves. By breaking form to ignite our moral imaginations, Everyman aims to inspire hope that by rewriting the modern-day mythology that is our economic theory, we can turn the narrative of our lives into a redemption story and alter the destiny of our civilization.