The Twilight of the Money Gods

Auteur
John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the frontier where theory meets practice. After beginning his career at Oxford University's International Development Centre, he left for the developing world, where he spent the next two decades working as an academic, journalist and ultimately the co-creator and director of a policy think tank. Along the way, he worked at universities on three continents and, upon returning to the UK, lectured at the University of Cambridge's Centre of Development Studies. He now lives in London as a writer.

Texte du rabat

Imagine one day you went to a cash-machine and found your money was gone. You rushed to your branch, where a teller said that overnight people had stopped believing in money, and it all vanished. Seem incredible? It happened, and it could happen again.

Twilight of the Money Gods is the story of economics, told not as the science it strove to be, but as the religion it became. Over two centuries, it searched for the hidden codes which would reveal the path to a promised land of material abundance. While its prophets, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, concerned themselves with the human condition, its priesthood gradually grew remote from its followers, until it lost sight of their tribulations. Today, amid a crisis of faith in their expertise, we must re-imagine an economics for a new era - one filled with both danger and opportunity.

Résumé
Of all the spate of recent books seeking to shed light on the sometimes arcane world of economics, we still need a narrative that would map the evolution - or rather, rollercoaster - of ideas about economics on to a broader history-loving audience. This is that book.