Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How it all Went Wrong

Description

A comprehensive examination of the continually changing world of money, economic theory, and how we got things so wrong in the run-up the 2007 recession-and how we can rebuild confidence for our financial future. Imagine one day you went to a cash machine and found your money was gone. You rushed to your bank 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 the topic of economics for a new era-one filled with both danger and opportunity.

John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the intersection 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.