James K. Baxter reviews a new book, Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics, by Antara Haldar, that reckons with the origins of economics and the purpose behind it

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 to both questions in a new book, Everyman: The Untold Story of Economics.

Her account is fabulous, and in more ways than one. It is a fable, structured (in three acts) as a play with allegorical characters (Neo, Tina, Tek, Finn, Davos, and so forth), and told in a mix of literary styles (with homages to John Steinbeck, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway, among others) that put the dreary conformism of mainstream economists to shame. The result is a “story” of economics like no other: equal parts imagination and truth.

Haldar tells a tale of two families—each of equal dignity. One harks back to the metaphor of the “invisible hand” in Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, as interpreted by Friedrich August von Hayek, Lionel Robbins, Milton Friedman, and the Mont Pèlerin Society. The other begins with John Maynard Keynes, and passes through his Circus (Joan Robinson, Richard Kahn, Nicholas Kaldor, Piero Sraffa) before tacking back toward Hayek in the person of Paul Samuelson and then fading out, having failed to deliver the Golden Calf promised by Keynes.

The tale Haldar tells is one of mainstream academic Anglo-American economics (and, to a small degree, its post-colonial peripheries in South Asia and Latin America), as inflected by hardline mid-20th century refugees from central Europe. (Notably, Marx and his followers are left aside.) It is therefore about the rise and so-far-incomplete decline of “Neo”—homo economicus. Thorstein Veblen already described this abstracted, amoral homunculus at the turn of the 20th century as “a lightning calculator of pleasures and pains, who oscillates like a homogeneous globule of desire of happiness under the impulse of stimuli that shift him about the area, but leave him intact.”

Haldar’s Neo is sired by Friedman and grandfathered by Hayek, who drew on Smith even though the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments can also be counted as a distant ancestor of Keynes. The distinction between Smith’s two great works is supposedly relational: in The Wealth of Nations, progress stems from self-interest and the magic of the market. In Moral Sentiments, Smith was more concerned with social connections.

Other proponents of a relational view, notably Veblen and the American Pragmatists and Institutionalists, do not appear here. (My father, John Kenneth Galbraith, is mentioned as “left-wing,” though in his prime he was an established leader of what was then called the “liberals.” Haldar’s other reference to him as a “luminary” is generous and just.)

Flitting around the edges of this mainstream story are dissidents who were appalled by the damage Neo—and Tina (Margaret Thatcher’s “there is no alternative”), Tek (technology), and Finn (finance)—had wrought. They include the metaphorical sisters Gini (a measure of inequality) and Palma (named for a ratio created by a Cambridge economist), and the “world-builder” Tara (“there are real alternatives”). These sprites offer the muddled Eve (Eve R. Y. Man) hope for a better mental model and a better world. As Palma says to Eve: “you’re not lost—you’ve been disoriented deliberately. By him [Neo]. For him, you’re a rat in a maze. Controlled with carrots and sticks.”

The economic historian Karl Polanyi is a key inspiration for Haldar and her heroines. She conjures him as a “slender, bespectacled” figure with “twinkling eyes, and an aura of warmth, humanity, and endless curiosity.” He speaks up from the sidelines at an imaginary 1946 christening of Keynes’s “grandchild” to warn against “the topsy-turvy state of the world in which the ‘fiction’ of money dictated the ‘facts’ of labor and land.”

Haldar’s Polanyi anticipates that the “human psyche” will rebel against what Neo has wrought, and he offers as his gift to the child “embeddedness in the community”—a message that Haldar herself fully endorses. I encountered this passage on a Saturday and carried it with me the next day on a drive from southern Vermont to a nursing home in Montreal, where I read it to Kari Polanyi, Karl’s daughter, who is now 103 and in her last days.

Haldar’s core moral teaching comes through. Neo was a confection, his intellectual triumph was a chimera, and the policies he inspired have brought instability, precarity, inequality, and crisis. His friend Finn has been hit by cardiac arrest, and Neo himself—though still in full control of the academy—has lost real-world status to Tek, a descendant of Joseph Schumpeter. Creative destruction is all the rage today—the more uncontrolled, wanton, and vicious, the better.

Yet the forces of doubt and, potentially, of justice (Gini, Palma, and Tara) are not slumbering. Can they prevail and lead Eve back toward Polanyi’s light? Or will the disaffected, demagogue-led mob triumph? I confess that I was still unsure at the end, perhaps because the story isn’t finished. But I have no doubt that Haldar has delivered a powerful blow to Neo—one from which he will not easily recover if this book gets around.

I’ll close with a quibble. It concerns the defining metaphor of Neo’s creation myth, the invisible hand. Haldar describes it as “a motif for a force that gives strange concord to the deeds of men otherwise unconnected.” But this is a mistake, one that is obscured here (and in most quotations) by an ellipsis. What Smith wrote, in full, was:

“By preferring the support of domestic to that of foreign industry, he intends only his own security; and by directing that industry in such a manner as its produce may be of the greatest value, he intends only his own gain; and he is in this, as in many other cases, led by an invisible hand to promote an end which was no part of his intention.”

In other words, the invisible hand works precisely because people are connected, in this case as compatriots. The “nation” in Smith is a community. There are not two Smiths, and his two books are not divergent twins. His conscription as the patron saint for Neo (and for Davos) was a kidnapping. Perhaps when the spirit of Polanyi and his allies finally triumphs, Smith will be liberated from their grip and allowed to rejoin the ranks of the economists who can honestly claim him as their own.

*James K. Galbraith is Chair in Government/Business Relations at the LBJ School of Public Affairs, University of Texas at Austin and the co-author (with Jing Chen) of Entropy Economics: The Living Basis of Value and Production (University of Chicago Press, 2025). Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2025, and published here with permission.