The Untold Story of Economics: Antara Haldar & Jonathan Blake on Everyman
For 250 years, economics has told our story through a fiction: the self-interested "rational actor," homo economicus. In Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics, Berggruen Institute Planetary Fellow Antara Haldar gives that fiction a body — reimagining him as a character named Neo, whose journey from Chicago to Wall Street to Burning Man traces capitalism's arc from the Great Depression to the 2008 crisis to the populist backlash of today.
In this conversation, Haldar joins Jonathan Blake, director of Berggruen's Planetary program, to talk about what it means to rewrite the myths our institutions are built on. Blake and Nils Gilman's own work on the Planetary — most recently in Children of a Modest Star — argues that the independent, self-interested individual at the center of Western liberal thought can't hold up against how entangled we really are, with each other and with the planet's systems. Haldar's Neo is that same fiction, seen from inside economics: what happens when we stop pretending people are rational actors and start telling economics as a human story?rely by material goals and has no attachments but has these kinds of superpowers. Is cognitively infinite, has access to all information.
Transcript
Jon: Antara, I'm delighted to be talking with you about your phenomenal new book, Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics. It really was a total pleasure to read. I was texting you beforehand that I ripped through it, I read it so quickly. It was super fun, and so full of ideas and made me think. It's just phenomenal. I can't wait for it to be out to the world. So, welcome.
Antara: Thank you, Jon, and absolute pleasure to be here. Always a pleasure to talk to you. And especially when it's about Everyman. And thank you for those kind comments. Thank you for reading. Means a lot. Really does. Yeah.
Jon: I mean, it was like I said, couldn't have been more fun. To begin on Antara, who are you? Tell the good people.
Antara: Happily, I am. My name is Antara. I am a professor of Law and Economics at the University of Cambridge. I have a visiting position in Harvard at Harvard Psych. I write a monthly column for Project Syndicate that is published in hundreds of countries around the world. Or at least 150. And most importantly, I am a Berggruen Institute Planetary fellow.
Jon: Yes you are. We'll get to that. So you've spent your career years now thinking about writing, about researching economics, law, philosophy across kinds of all these traditional economic right academic fields. But now with Everyman, you've written a novel. What was behind that? What made you think? Not another research paper, not another, you know, white paper, but. But a novel. What were you thinking?
Antara: As you knew Jon, I'm part theater kid and part professor. And I really tried to most of my life to keep those two things separate, to keep them siloed, to color within the lines. When I do my academic work, to write those academic papers, to write those white papers, and then to sneak off to the theater, the National or or in London or Broadway in New York and watch plays and read plays and read novels and, you know, go to, you know, the picture houses and watch art films and, and really, really keep those aspects of myself separate and, you know, away from each other.
But I sort of started to experience that as very artificial. You know, this, this notion that economics is its own thing and that culture is in a separate, separate sphere. And I think it's this kind of separation of economics from its neighboring disciplines, from the arts, from the humanities, and from the world more generally. That I think is part of the problem with the discipline.
I mean, that was that, you know, motivation lurking in the background, but also, frankly, the assumptions of economics are just so absurd some of the time that that sort of staging it as the theater of the absurd and the fluidity of the form of writing it, novelistic, of treating it, of fictionalizing its story, I think, allows me to foreground some of the absurdity in a way that the traditional means of engaging with economics just forecloses.
Jon: Amazing. I have my handy copy right here. And, you know, love the bull. I mean, it's an amazing cover. Like it's so striking. And so again congratulations on that getting and the design team there. So the third line of the book, Everyman is a true story. Specifically, it is a story of the ideas that run our world.
So how did you navigate between as a work of fiction? But also it is a true story. And one of the things I really love throughout is that you include actually quite prominently, real quotes from real people. The characters are many of them are real people, even if they're fictionalized version of them. But you have them saying the words that they've actually said in the world.
It is a novel, but, you know, true to form, it has footnotes. How did you navigate? We could talk about how obsessed I was with footnotes later, but that's maybe a personal obsession of mine. How did you navigate the writing between fiction and nonfiction?
I mean, one of the things I love the most, and I think that it just makes it so effective, is the way in which those two forms are blurred. And I found myself so often thinking that this is a work of nonfiction, and then I'd be like, I'm like, wait a minute, this is not, you know, this is actually a fictional story.
Vice versa. I'd be reading something and be like, oh my God, what an amazing quote. Like, she's such a good writer, only to find out that actually. Oh, you're just like, you know, actually quoting someone's real words. How do you navigate that, that blurring of form?
Antara: Thank you Jon. Predictably, a wonderful and a very astute question. And really thank you for reading as you did. The idea is for it to have a slightly mind bending quality, because I think when one is in a particular genre, one approaches it in a certain way where and what I wanted to do was in a sort of Brechtian vein, to kind of shake the reader out of their state of complacency.
One of the ideas that has really intrigued me, for the entirety of my life, is how fact can be stranger than fiction. What is happening in Nepal now? I mean, the footage is like something out of a disaster movie. Last year, the wildfires in LA were really something like out of Paramount Studios, except that it was real.
COVID was like that. It had this weird sort of contagion, you know, the film Contagion quality to it, you know, the wildfires in Europe this year. I think how you staged the material has a lot to do with how we respond to it. And sometimes we distance ourselves from very difficult realities by turning them into these kinds of disaster narratives or sci fi narratives.
It's a kind of cognitive device that we rely on as humans. I mean, I think we defacto by telling stories, and I wanted to foreground the storytelling part of it to show that economics. And, you know, you know, social scientists have this notion of fictions. Fictions are things that are not entirely necessarily objectively true. They're things that gain their quality of truth from the fact that we collectively believe in them.
Everything from the economy to the nation state to law to money, to governments, all of these are fictions in that sense. And I wanted to foreground that in the book by treating it as partially a work of fiction. But what I want to illustrate here is that because we wrote this script, it has an emancipatory potential, because it's in our hands and in our minds to rewrite it.
I have a lot of fun with that. And I had I mean, there was I mean, some of that stuff that, that, that you will use to it's bizarre that it's actually real. And what I did is kind of thread the 250 year story of capitalism together, finding those nuggets and, and stitching them together in a form that really only made sense as a novel in a sense, you know, in one way, but all of it is real.
Every plot point is based on facts that are by definition true and quotes that are often verbatim. I think it was just taking that, you know, one of the ideas in the book is that statistics and storytelling actually have way more in common than we give them credit for.
In both cases, they're literally a line drawn through dots. In one case, it's plot points, and in one case it's fitting, you know, a line to…
Jon: Plotted points.
Antara: Exactly, exactly. It is this idea that we can get to choose what that line is. And through that we get to choose the interpretive lens. And in every man I've gone through a very veiny interpretive lens. But it's all true. You know, I mean, it was in chapter six where Neo, the protagonist of the book, meets Eugene Fama and is confronting Eugene Fama on why economics cannot explain crises.
The quotes from Eugene Fama are actually real quotes from a John Cassidy interview in The New Yorker. And I mean, you can't make this shit up, you know?
Jon: It takes a work of fiction to confront the fictions that are there. And I think you do it extremely successfully.
Antara: That's exactly right. I'm going to use that. Actually, it takes a work of fiction to confront the fictions. Trademark Jon Blake.
Jon: In addition, though to characters like Eugene Fama or Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Yanis Varoufakis, these real life people who, you know, you're fictionalizing some of the situations they're in often or the conversations they're having, even if you're using real verbatim quotes. You also have fictional characters, Neo, who you mentioned, who's the stand in for neoliberal thought and practice.
There's Finn, the finance bro. Davos, the man of globalization. Tina. Anyway there are lots of these other characters.
So I'm curious out of all of them who was the most fun to write and maybe who surprised you the most as you were writing them?
Antara: I had a lot of fun with Tina. So Tina, in the book stands for “There Is No Alternative”, which was Margaret Thatcher's slogan, you know, announced at the Conservative Women's Conference in 1980. And she sort of became iconic as this notion, which we confront all the time, even today, that, you know, it's great, you know, critiques of capitalism are all well and good.
I mean, you know, critical theorists sit in the ivory towers scribbling their notes on what's wrong with this, with this system. But really, what is the alternative? And in a sense, fundamentally, the story of every man is the story of the confrontation between Tina, who is incredibly glamorous and incredibly posh, but represents essentially nihilism, this idea that this is all we've got.
And her face off with one of my favorite characters in the book. Also, Jara, who represents the notion that there are alternatives. And in a sense, I think that is the central debate of 2026. Is the trajectory that we find ourselves on this inevitability, this inescapable inevitability, or is there an alternative out there?
What was really fun? I mean, Tina has some of the best lines in the book, I think. And she was just this really kind of being an Oxbridge professor, she was an easy character for me to write because I have dinner with all the time. But I think in a very real way, she represents the glamor and the seduction of nihilism.
You know, so there's a deeper point. There it is. It is kind of very tempting to say, you know, let's just drink some champagne, get a manicure, and watch the world collapse around us. You know, or however it is that you want to confront the end of the world.
Jon: So against that, that nihilism, against that idea that there is no alternative. What are some of the alternatives that Antara represents?
Like what are some of the other stories that we could tell ourselves?
Antara: One of my favorite lines from the book is where Elinor Ostrom makes a cameo right towards the end, and she introduces Eve, the other protagonist of the book, to Ostrom’s law and Ostrom’s Law is the idea that what can exist in reality can exist in theory. And I think we find ourselves in this slightly surreal moment of seeing examples out there on whatever scale.
Certainly micro, certainly meso, and to some extent even macro of, of models that have worked, alternative ways of being, whether it's the Scandinavian welfare state or the Southeast Asian version of state capitalism, all the way to things like Montauban and, you know, Grameen and Brac in, in Bangladesh and other sort of, you know, cooperative experiments in cooperatives to micro community level initiatives that do really illuminate empirically the possibility and the reality of other ways of being.
But Tara is not alone in this quest. She is supported by a Sabio, my stand in for the Ibn Khaldun sort of concept of solidarity and groups. That is the secret sauce of the success of groups through history, who provides a lot of the psychological arsenal and ultimately the notion of the recovery of human agency. I don't want to give up, give away too much of the book.
But I mean, the idea here is that there is real psychological evidence pointing toward a different way of structuring our institutions that we need to take seriously. And there are empirical examples of what those institutional structures would lead to. So this notion of Tara's existence and the validity of our arguments is not a pie in the sky by any stretch of the imagination.
Jon: For all you follow along at home, I've had connectivity issues, so now I have a less glamorous background of just the white wall. But here we are. Here we are. This is a little continuity text, so the real hardcore fans.
Let's just continue. What? Tell me about your soul shriveling and you know all that.
Antara: Okay, so the thing that I find most stunning about economics in my journey through the discipline, from having been formally trained in it to teaching law and economics to writing this book, is that on the one hand, economics writes like in a very literal way, the script of all of our lives, right from the price of coffee in the morning to where we can afford to rent, to what city you can contemplate moving to as a young person, to whether you can get on the housing ladder if that is important to you.
You know every part of our lives where you can go to dinner on a Friday night, what kind of daycare you can afford for your kids. I mean, what kind of health care you can afford for yourself and people that you love? I mean, economics determines all of that. Like from morning to night. This is the thing that is driving how we spend our days, how we live our lives.
At the same time, when you try to talk to anybody about economics. Their eyes glaze over. They're just like, you know, get away from me. You know, I don't want to engage with this thing. I find that utterly stunning. And I think in a sense that that is the genius of the high priests of economics who've turned it into this dry, quantitative enterprise that excludes the people whose lives it determines from the conversation.
You know, it's called “the dismal science”, and it's called the dismal science for a good reason. My book, by contrast, is called Everyman after the sort of stock character in fiction. The ordinary character who you sort of could easily miss, but who is whose defining characteristic is being relatable. This is an attempt to make the story of economics convert the story of economics from being this dry technical enterprise to being a story in which the ordinary person can see themselves.
And the moral imagination. Most fundamentally, that I want to reinsert is this notion that the economy is something that we have collectively created, and therefore is something that we can collectively remake.
Jon: That's right. So. So why don't you tell us a bit about the character of the book, who has been the product of the high priests of economics, Neo and then in contrast, especially with Eve, the Everyman.
Antara: The notion of economic man goes all the way back to the writings of the classical economists, goes all the way back to Adam Smith and J.S. Mill. It was this kind of prototype of this self-interested, solitary actor whose driven entirely by material goals and has no attachments but has these kinds of superpowers. Is cognitively infinite, has access to all information.
Thank you for that text yesterday, by the way, describing Neo as hot. I hadn't quite thought about him in that vein, but he is and he's hot in a really kind of salient sense in that he is this sharp suited figure with these superpowers and access to infinite resources. And he set up as a model for all of us.
He is the character embodied in the equations of economics textbooks or, you know, the calculations of the Fed when they decide the interest rates. And he is held up and refined and put on a pedestal for all of us to imitate. That's the Neo character.
Jon: Tell us more about how Neo as a character plays out in our real lives. You know, I think any of us who have taken economics, you know, have, have, have studied, study the models and understand how we kind of can make some calculations in a classroom. But what are some real ways that this assumption, this assumed character plays out in real life?
Antara: In literally every sphere of our lives, our actions are held up to the benchmark of what Neo would have done in a particular situation. So new is through these kind of these miraculous abilities he has, he has always able to find the right price for a particular situation, and that is what determines demand and supply and resource allocation throughout our society.
So at any given point in time, literally in every decision that we make, certainly every economic decision, but it radiates out from there. We are being compared to Neo, and we are our failures relative to Neo, our sort of pointed out to us. So in a sense, what we've done is taken this script that was written 250 years ago, The Wealth of Nations, and we have turned it into this sort of canonical scheme that is geared to this fictional character, which is economic man or homo economicus, in my book, Neo.
We're living in a very, very real sense in Neo's world, what every man is urging us to do is look at the psychological evidence that we have from the cognitive sciences, from the affect of sciences, from social and moral psychology that allows us to understand much better who we are as flesh and blood human beings, in contrast to this strawman that is “economic man” and construct our institutions for us instead of Neo.
I think a lot of us feel like we're a square peg in a round hole in our everyday lives. But that's because our institutions were not constructed for us. Our institutions were constructed around this figment of the imaginations of a small coterie of economists that was meant to be a device, but has become this bizarre kind of… fact is stranger than fiction, you know, scenario where that is what has, there's a line from the book, “We live in a world in which monopoly money has reduced people to pawns or human chess men.”
It is this bizarre tail wagging the dog upside down, kind of topsy turvy scenario of our institutions existing for a character that does not live and breathe.
Jon: And so who is the character that lives and breathes?
Antara: Eve, our “why” man, is a stand-in for all of us in the book. She has the struggles that most of us confront on an everyday basis. She has to ride the bus to work and she works in retail with a difficult boss and picks up extra hours for colleagues and does things, you know, altruistic, everyday things that we all do that economics has, has no model for.
And she thinks herself completely balanced, she does not think very much of herself. And every man is the story of how she ultimately goes through a journey to recover her agency, and is meant to model for us what we could do to wrest control of our things.
Jon: And interestingly enough, one of the kind of central themes throughout the book, or kind of underline the book, is that Adam Smith wrote famously, The Wealth of Nations, which is the origins of Neo, the origins of this idea of a rational, calculating man. But he also wrote another book, Theory of Moral Sentiments. How does that other Smith play into this story?
Antara: This is absolutely fundamental to the story and sets the story in motion. So famously, as you said, Adam Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, kind of a significant year because it's also the other Americas founded, and the steam engine becomes sort of commercialized, setting the industrial revolution off on its journey. But before that, he wrote a book that he actually held in high regard, A Theory of Moral Sentiments.
And the protagonist of The Wealth of Nations is self-interest. The protagonist of A Theory of Moral Sentiments is sympathy. So? So he thinks that the sort of congealing agent for human society is sympathy. We all remember, and we all know about The Wealth of Nations and the foregrounding of self-interest, this idea that each of us acting in pursuit of our own self-interest privately will somehow mutate miraculously into public well-being.
What we've forgotten completely is, is what I refer to in the book as self-interests lost sibling, which is sympathy. This is actually, if you'll allow me, a nerdy digression for a second economic philosophy.
Jon: How dare you?
Antara: [Laughs] Economic philosophers call this Adam Smith problem, and it's the question of how these two books relate to each other. And I think that to the extent that Adam Smith has been treated as the father of capitalism and has been kind of appropriated as the symbol of a self-interested society based entirely on economic outlook through a very narrow lens.
I think we get a very different sense of our Genesis story. If we also remember the book that he held dear to himself, that foreground sympathy as the ameliorating factor to self-interest, I truly believe we would be in a much better position to confront the challenges that we face today, including the existential threats of climate change. Rogue AI. Pandemics run amok.
If we remembered that self-interest works best when balanced with sympathy. You know, there's another really interesting story about Smith that's in the book, which is that both sympathy and self-interest, Moral Sentiments and Wealth of Nations were part of a larger body of work that he had embarked on the principia of man, you know, sort of opus that he wanted to develop, which was going to include law, the arts, literature, as part of his account of how individuals relate to institutional structures. He didn't complete it and, and burnt his unpublished works.
Everyman is an attempt to imagine what the world would have looked like if we based our Genesis story on the full script rather than one act of that script, which is Wealth of Nations and self-interest.
Jon: So what's the story of how we ended up in the world of self-interest and with sympathy completely buried, buried beneath? How did the world of only one Adam Smith of the poor, Adam Smith, emerge?
Antara: So Smith writes his work his magnum opus, which is one of them Nations and his other book, which was published and refined through his lifetime, burns the rest of his works. The classical economists fetishize the Wealth of Nations foreground that and really put theory of Moral Sentiments in the background.
Classical economics is ascendant for a long time, and then confronts the biggest economic crisis of, you know, the sort of modern era, broadly interpreted, which is the Great Depression, which occurs in the period between the two world wars, when the world is in a broader state of crisis. That's really the first time that the brutality of classical economics is confronted.
Because of the historical moment that we find ourselves in, in a sense, you know, my mentor, Joe Stiglitz wrote a piece for The Economist recently where he argues that capitalism was saved by two people, FDR and John Maynard Keynes, who are also characters in the book. And this is the first moment that governments start to grapple with their role in the societal sort of fallout of the economic process.
And Keynes theorizes that instead of markets being these kinds of mechanical entities that naturally gravitate towards efficient outcomes, that really what could be running them is animal spirits. Hence the guy up here.
Let me introduce you to the Minotaur of the GF Watts painting. This notion that our psychological impulses, our social connections are as much a part of the economic process as are the more mechanistic elements that sort of determine prices of the classical economists we're focusing on.
The tussle begins there. For a while, Keynesian economics is ascendant. And then there's a twist in the tale. In 1947, when the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek organizes the Mont Pelarie meeting and starts to give credence to the idea of reviving the lost hero of Wealth of Nations and giving a new life to to economic, to homo economicus. But what's interesting about that is that the meeting happens in 1947, and it's only in the late 60s, early 70s when Starfleet hits the US, that this idea of the Chicago School of Law and economics, that the idea of neoliberalism becomes ascendant only really with the Reagan/Thatcher moment and the political primacy that is given to those ideas in that era.
Anyway, this is a very long winded history that tells us that the ideas that we consider to be absolutely impossible to challenge in our world, the idea that self-interest and the market and the price mechanism is the best allocated device and the best social logic of social organization is actually very young. It's only about a little over 40 years old. And the cracks in the system started to show up already by 2008 when, when the world went through the second biggest financial crisis after the Great Depression.
Thank you for humoring my whistle stop tour through the economic history of the world in the last 250 years.
Jon: For people interested in hearing it in a slightly more fictionalized version. Of course, they can pick up Everyman and read it for themselves. It tells the story in like a really delightful way. You know, having read plenty of histories of the battle between Keynesianism and, and free market economics, this is really like a totally new and fun spin on it.
So speaking of new systems, another new system that we find ourselves in is the world of the n nation state. We think that the nation state is this thing that's been around forever, that there is no alternative to it, that we've been.
You know, it's totally the way the world works, always has worked and always should work. But one of the things that we think about a lot in the Planetary program that you and I have thought a lot about is thinking beyond the nation state, thinking of other models of governance. So I'm curious then, how have these discussions and thinking of politics informed your thinking about economics and the relationship between political institutions and economic institutions?
How do those play out?
Antara: Look at the core of it. I think of myself as an institutional theorist more than anything else. The silos of economics and politics are secondary for me relative to my conviction that institutions should exist to serve every man, not the other way around. And this is an idea that goes back all the way to my favorite economic sociologist, the secret hero of Everyman, the Hungarian theorist Karl Polanyi, who talked about how before the Industrial Revolution.
It was the case that society served the person and then the Industrial Revolution unleashes this, this creature that then enslaves the person and which is. And that creature is, of course, capitalism and the economy. So, you know, and this is a conviction that every man and your book with Nils Gilman shares this notion that our institutions exist at exactly the wrong level, in a sense.
Work by the primatologist Robin Dunbar establishes that we can only really care about 150 people, or so, at a time. In a sense, the institutional structures that we have are too big for us to feel really deeply invested in them, for us to have a sense of participation and power over them. And that's how we end up with characters like Ordinary Joe in the book, who's been violently let down by the system, who is blamed by liberals like us for some of his actions and some of the anger that he feels.
But in the realm of the book, I understand where he's coming from. I cannot condone his actions, but he feels completely powerless in Francis Fukuyama end of history moment, where we're told that liberal democracy and neoclassical economics will just deliver peace and prosperity. It did not deliver on that. And I think part of why it didn't deliver on that is because of the incorrect skill on which we fetishize our institutions, which are, as you so beautifully put it in your book, insufficiently local and insufficiently global.
So they're not small enough for us to actually care about them and feel like we have power over them. At the same time, they're not big enough to deal with the very real, inescapable planetary scale problems that we are confronting in this era. And so I think we're in agreement. Sorry ran will end in just half a second. We don't want to get rid of the nation state or national economies in the way in which they currently exist.
We want to make them one ring in a Russian doll configuration of concentric circles, where we also have planetary institutions, and where we also have really embedded local institutions.
Jon: This obviously reflects a lot of the conversations that we've had based on my research and another thing we've done on the Planetary program. So I'm curious though, like, I mean, are there other ways that thinking in planetary terms helped you think about this book to help you write the book and then even more specifically, like you wrote some of this book while you were a fellow at the Planetary program.
And I'm curious how that influenced for purely self-interested reasons. I'm curious how that influenced your your thinking and your writing.
Antara: Classify that as enlightened self-interest, almost tipping over into sympathy.
This is actually central to the themes of the book as well, because the book is, in a sense, an ode to friendship. And so it's particularly gratifying to be having this conversation about the book with a friend and the idea that in the context of friendship, the notion of self-interest does become blurred because the interest of the other becomes a dimension of the interest of self.
And so you don't really have a hard line between those things. And really, Jon, you know, when we were texting about this yesterday, I, you know, I was thinking of you as our own personal savior because what you did with the planetary program is bring together disconnected people, you know, so the dots existed all the fellows of the planetary program.
But you woven thread through us and congealed us into a community. And really, those conversations and that journey with you and with the other planetary fellows has been absolutely integral to writing the book, not only in the sense of allowing myself and giving myself permission to come out of the closet and declare myself as planetary in the sense of being focused both on on planet and people, rather than these arbitrary sort of manmade institutions that have become more dominant than either of those two natural sort of configurations, but also in terms of the nuance of the thinking.
Children of a Modest Star was critical in terms of helping me articulate that, that global local, those missing dimensions of both the economy and and the polity and those really in-depth, really convivial conversations that we've been having for at least the last two years have been integral to fleshing out what the world that Tara is hoping to build might look like, and provide the intellectual arsenal to be able to make that a credible bid.
Jon: I'm obviously delighted to hear and of course, share, share all the sentiments.
So I'm curious why now? Why did you feel that this was the moment to put this, this, this book out in the world? There's a lot of political and economic discussions going on. Things seem to be shifting. So I'm curious kind of, of your view of how things in the, in the kind of the politics of the economy and the economy itself are shifting and why this made it the right time to write this book.
Antara: Thanks for that question. So I think it's a series of factors to begin with. 2026, like I alluded to already, is a sort of bookend to 1776, where I think that the story starts and three things happen in 1776 that set the world in motion, and that where three events take place the divine, our world to this day, the writing of the Wealth of Nations, and the launching of economics as a formal discipline, the founding of America, both its its promise and its failures, which were confronting in the 250th anniversary of the birth of the nation and, in a sense, an inflection point in the Industrial revolution, when the steam engine becomes ascendant and it really, you know, which feels like it has strong parallels with the AI moment that we find ourselves in. So it seemed like a good stock taking moment on the system 250 years in. But it's also been increasingly obvious to me that that the paradigm that we exist in, or the systems that have and the ideas that have dominated our world are getting increasingly exhausted.
In the US, we are in a really stunning moment of economic history where we are at war with our neighboring state. You know, I mean, trade wars are back. We sort of tossed out the Smitheon in Free Trade Handbook, and we've gone back to a version of mechanical. And it's easy to criticize these actions. And I think that there is a lot to criticize, but I do, on a psychological level, I understand the rejection of the paradigm because it's simply has not succeeded in working for ordinary people. It has written one too many checks that could not be cashed. So I think the paradigm feels exhausted. I think we are grasping for meaning. I think we are grasping for new ideas that can better explain the events around us, but even more importantly, better serve the people that they're meant to serve.
And I also think, and this is something we talked about a lot in the context of the Planetary program, that we are in a moment of genuine existential crisis in climate terms, in technological terms and in psychological terms. And so, you know, when I was in grad school, pre financial 2008, I was already secretly harboring some of these ideas.
But I couldn't say it out loud. I just could not question the system. It really was widely believed that the problem of human progress had been permanently solved. And I remember Anne-Marie Slaughter saying, you know, at our Florence meeting, “welcome to the new permanent disorder”. And it really is stunning that in just over 15 years we have gone from this wide consensus that we figured it all out, which I never bought to realizing on a more sort of on a wider scale that we're very, very far from that.
The book feels very, very, very urgent at this point. And the ideas in it feel, feel really important to get out there right now. Yeah.
Jon: So this is certainly a novel of ideas, but it's also a novel, which means, you know, the psychological dimension, the emotional dimension are there. So I'm curious. We've talked a lot about kind of what some of the ideas that you hope that people get out of it, but what's the what are the what do you want people walking away feeling after after they read the book?
Antara: That's a really wonderful question. It was also written as a novel precisely for that reason. Because I think action comes not just from thinking but feeling. I want people to feel on this journey, most of all, I want people to feel that they're a part of this story and that all is not lost and that we don't, you know, there are alternatives to burning the house down, which is almost literally what we're doing with climate change.
I mean, it's not even really a metaphor, you know? I mean, it's, you know, it feels like we are lighting a match and setting fire to it all because it just feels so overwhelming and hopeless. So my overriding aspiration is that people read this book and feel a sense of hope and feel empowered to do something about the trajectory of the world that we live in and save our civilization.
Jon: What's thinkers crossed, right? Let's end with a little fun. So in the film adaptation, which we have to assume will happen again. Fingers crossed. Who do you want to play Neo?
Antara: Leaving the civilization film adaptation. You know. Similar amount of investment to open?
Jon: Exactly, exactly. Who do you want to play Neo?
Antara: Timothée Chalamet.
Jon: Younger than I would have thought.
Antara: He's the Dorian Gray figure, right? So he has internal youth thing going on. Striking, but yet invisible. You know, I think.
Jon: No, absolutely. So who plays Eve?
Antara: Sally Hawkins. Maybe.
Jon: It's such a striking cover. Can you tell us a little bit about it? Who this guy is?
Antara: Yeah, with quick delight. So it is my pleasure to introduce you to GF. What's the minotaur? Do you have thoughts? Is a very interesting Victorian painter. There's. This guy is actually at the Tate Modern. Dave Britain in London. And it was painted. It's an odd painting by the painter who did the painting Hope, which inspired Obama's campaign slogan, actually.
And the picture itself was very, you know, was a big influence on him. It's the only painting of the Minotaur, the mythical character who's half ball half man from Greek mythology that is sympathetic, that buttress the Minotaur in a sympathetic light, as you can see right here. And it inspired the Argentinian writer Louis Borges to write a story called the House of Estienne about the Minotaur.
Again, the only sympathetic treatment of the Minotaur. So, you know, it really captures the essence of the book for me because, you know, I think the iconography of the bull is ubiquitous, but I think the sort of Hoffman economic man whose, you know, Hoffman Ball is really the central character of the book. And the book is about emotions and about the ups and downs and emotions that are an inextricable part of our stories.
And so you'll have to read the book to find out more.
Jon: You will, because bulls. There are bulls. It's got a bull, let's say that.
It really comes to this crescendo and then I forget, like the I just, I don't know, especially, you know, like, obviously not all readers will like, be familiar with all the individuals you're introducing. But like, you know, like I forget who it was all the different. Oh, yeah.
Like Mark renovator and Jon, Jonathan Mark and Paul Ekman coming in. It was like it was just like for me it was just like funny.
Antara: I'm glad you enjoyed that. I had a lot of fun with those scenes.
Jon: My very first, an actually role only game theory paper I ever wrote for the game theory class I took built on one of granite models.
Antara: Excellent choice if you're going to do game theory ones. That is the way to do it.
Jon: Yeah I agree. Yeah. All right. So you know this has been really phenomenal. So I'm just you know the last question what's next for you? Which I guess is kind of a cruel question for someone who just finished an amazing and enormous book. But the people want to know what's next.
Antara: Anything for the people. Well, if all goes well, I think I want to do a trilogy of magical realist novels about our institutions and our dominant ideas. So this is the economics one. But hopefully there will be sequels on law and philosophy.
Jon: And that would be amazing. And the people, the people are already demanding it. So I think, you know, I speak for all of us when I say we can't wait. The book again, Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics. You've already gotten a huge amount of praise for it, and it's not even out as we're recording. I'm sure as people get in the hands, they'll be even more praise.
Congratulations Antara. It's really a phenomenal book, and it's been a total delight to speak with you about it.
Antara: Thank you so much for having me on, Jon. And I really mean it when I say, couldn't have done it without you. So thank you for so many things.
Jon: You're welcome.