How Antara Haldar Turned 250 Years of Economics Into a Human Drama

The Tale of Economics

TOWNSHEND, VERMONT—The legitimacy of economics as an academic discipline and policymaking tool has been under sustained attack at least since the 2008 financial crisis. But few critiques seek to reckon with the origins of the discipline and the purpose behind it. Now, Antara Haldar, a legal studies scholar at the University of Cambridge, has called attention […]

How Antara Haldar Turned 250 Years of Economics Into a Human Drama

Economics has long masqueraded as an absolute science—a world governed by cold spreadsheets, sterile formulas, and the fictitious Homo Economicus, a creature driven purely by rational self-interest. But in her audacious new book, Everyman: The Story of Economics in Three Acts (Allen Lane), Cambridge economist Antara Haldar shatters this fragile illusion. She invites us to view global capitalism not through dry data, but through a distinctly huma…