Tomas Sedlacek has shaken the study of economics as few ever have.
Named one of the "Young Guns" and one of the "five hot minds in
economics" by the Yale Economic Review, he serves on the National
Economic Council in Prague, where his provocative writing has
achieved bestseller status. How has he done it? By arguing a
simple, almost heretical proposition: economics is ultimately about
good and evil. In The Economics of Good and Evil, Sedlacek
radically rethinks his field, challenging our assumptions about the
world. Economics is touted as a science, a value-free mathematical
inquiry, he writes, but it's actually a cultural phenomenon, a
product of our civilization. It began within philosophy-Adam Smith
himself not only wrote The Wealth of Nations, but also The Theory
of Moral Sentiments-and economics, as Sedlacek shows, is woven out
of history, myth, religion, and ethics. "Even the most
sophisticated mathematical model," Sedlacek writes, "is, de facto,
a story, a parable, our effort to (rationally) grasp the world
around us." Economics not only describes the world, but establishes
normative standards, identifying ideal conditions. Science, he
claims, is a system of beliefs to which we are committed. To grasp
the beliefs underlying economics, he breaks out of the field's
confines with a tour de force exploration of economic thinking,
broadly defined, over the millennia. He ranges from the epic of
Gilgamesh and the Old Testament to the emergence of Christianity,
from Descartes and Adam Smith to the consumerism in Fight Club.
Throughout, he asks searching meta-economic questions: What is the
meaning and the point of economics? Can we do ethically all that we
can do technically? Does it pay to be good? Placing the wisdom of
philosophers and poets over strict mathematical models of human
behavior, Sedlacek's groundbreaking work promises to change the way
we calculate economic value.
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