Everyman - Antara Haldar, at Heffers Bookshop

Join Antara Haldar, in conversation with Gillian Tett, to discuss her brand new book 'Everyman: the story of Economics in three acts'. For 250 years, a ghostly hand-bloodied and invisible-has scripted our lives. Telling the story of Economics like never before, Everyman makes legible the ethereal ink in which it's etched. A character-driven psychological drama, it presents economics' leading man, Neo, the textbook rational actor - with his apostles, Finn, the model 'finance bro,' Davos, globalisation's ambassador, Wash, envoy to distant lands, and Tek, the quintessence of the tech industry - tracing their rise through the most significant moments of global economic history: the birth of capitalism to the Great Depression, the Financial Crisis to the ascent of populism. But with the by-the-book Gini and her sister, Palma, protesting the system, Tek contemplating a coup, Ordinary Joe losing patience, and a runaway monster, are they on the edge of a precipitous fall? Kaleidoscopic like global capitalism, Everyman blends fact and fiction, future and history, tragedy and comedy. It combines novelistic flair and cutting-edge research to offer a bold new vision, built on emotion and social cooperation. If we replace a strawman-economics' apocryphal protagonist--with flesh-and-blood, could we avert tragedy and alter the plot of capitalism? And, as Economic Man and Everyman battle for its soul, who, ultimately, is economics for? Antara Haldar is a professor at the University of Cambridge and Visiting Faculty at Harvard University. She writes a globally syndicated monthly column for Project Syndicate, and has been published in the Atlantic, Times Literary Supplement, WIRED, The Independent and elsewhere. Her award-winning research has received millions of dollars in funding, been covered by major media platforms like Financial Times and NPR and cited by the World Development Report and White House. Gillian Tett OBE is Provost at King's College Cambridge. She writes for and serves on the Editorial Board for the Financial Times. She hosts the Story of Money podcast and is the author of several books including Anthro-Vision, Fool's Gold and The Silo Effect.