Economics for the Twenty-first Century: The Economics of the Economist-fox

This title was first published in 2001. To be effective, economics must take into consideration the complex nature of human beings and the contextual, institutional, social and historical factors at play. This text is designed to help economists to be economic foxes by increasing the range of economists' tools, drawing on the knowledge and experience of other disciplines, to cope better with the extraordinary complexity of the modern economy. The objective is to provide the same kind of revelation in understanding an economy that an artist possesses in the visual arts. A beginner looking at a still life sees a green bottle, a red apple and a yellow cloth on a table top. An artist, however, can point out to him all the nuances of colour. Following a rapid dissection of the canonical hypotheses of contemporary economic theory, different sectors of the real economy are explored: the corporation; corporate governance; services; the public sector; civil society; professions; social capital; national cultures; and the tropics.