By Jonathan Aldred
How economic ideas reshaped morality
Subject
Themes
Over the past half-century, a handful of economic ideas have quietly reshaped the moral foundations of Western societies. What was once considered selfish, reckless, or antisocial has been redefined as rational, efficient, and inevitable. The transformation began in 1947, when Friedrich Hayek assembled a group of intellectuals at Mont Pelerin in Switzerland to launch a long-term project: changing how people think about economics, government, and human nature. Hayek's vision, amplified by allies such as Milton Friedman and funded by entrepreneurs like battery-chicken magnate Antony Fisher, eventually produced a global network of think tanks. By 1979, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were translating these ideas into government policy, dismantling the post-war Keynesian consensus.
Over the past half-century, a handful of economic ideas have quietly reshaped the moral foundations of Western societies. What was once considered selfish, reckless, or antisocial has been redefined as rational, efficient, and inevitable. The transformation began in 1947, when Friedrich Hayek…
Published in 2019, *Licence to be Bad* arrived at a moment of intensifying public debate about the role of economics in shaping modern society. The financial crisis of 2007-2008 had severely damaged the credibility of mainstream economics, with prominent economists either failing to predict the…
One of the most unsettling insights running through the critique of modern economics is that economic theories do not merely describe human behaviour; they actively reshape it. Unlike the laws of physics, which operate independently of whether anyone understands them, economic ideas change the…
Modern economics presents itself as a value-free science, yet ethical assumptions and political judgements are embedded at every level of the discipline. This concealment is not incidental; it is structural. By cloaking moral choices in mathematical formalism and the language of efficiency,…
The transformation of Western economic thinking over the past half-century was not a spontaneous evolution of ideas. It was, at least in significant part, the product of a deliberate, well-funded, and carefully orchestrated campaign to change how people understand markets, government, and their own…
A recurring thread connects several of the most influential economic ideas of the past half-century: the systematic undermining of collective responsibility. Game theory teaches that cooperation is irrational. Free-rider theory argues that individual contributions to collective goods are…
One of the most far-reaching consequences of modern economic thinking has been the relentless expansion of markets into domains of life previously considered beyond the reach of commerce. Queue positions, organ transplants, democratic access, human relationships, criminal behaviour, and even the…
Over the past half-century, a quiet revolution in economic thinking has transformed the moral landscape of Western societies. Ideas about trust, fairness, freedom, and social responsibility have been reshaped so thoroughly that behaviours once considered wicked or foolish now appear rational and…
In the autumn of 1948, a cocky nineteen-year-old mathematics student arrived at Princeton and promptly arranged a meeting with Albert Einstein. John Nash spent nearly an hour writing equations on Einstein's blackboard, explaining his ideas about gravity, friction, and radiation. Einstein listened…
Picture a job interview. Ron, the applicant, has been given a government letter offering the employer a cash bonus for hiring him. He awkwardly presents the offer. The manager, baffled and suspicious, wonders what is wrong with this candidate. Rather than helping Ron get a job, the scheme…
In the summer of 1948, the RAND Corporation handed a deceptively simple question to its lowliest employee: can a group's preferences be determined rationally from the preferences of its individual members? The intern, a twenty-seven-year-old named Kenneth Arrow, proved mathematically that the answer…
On 22 July 2013, ninety television crews camped outside a London hospital waiting for the birth of Prince George. The BBC's website recorded its highest ever traffic that day. In the midst of the frenzy, a BBC reporter expressed grave concern about the intense media interest that would surround the…
For around $130 an hour, a company called DreamTours Florida will provide a disabled guide to pose as a member of your family at Disney World, allowing you to skip every queue. One Manhattan mother boasted about being escorted through the park in a motorised scooter: "This is how the 1 per cent does…
In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor sent his assistant to the Watertown Arsenal in Massachusetts armed with a stopwatch. Taylor, an aristocratic Philadelphian later dubbed "the Isaac Newton of the science of work," had been hired to increase productivity and stop "soldiering" (the contemporary term…
On 5 October 1960, three visiting business executives watched as the alarm indicator in NORAD's war room began to climb. A "1" was nothing to worry about, they had been told, but higher numbers meant trouble. The display reached "5," the highest level possible, meaning a 99.9 per cent probability of…
In 1950, the highest-paid chief executive in the world was Charlie Wilson, head of General Motors, earning the equivalent of about $10 million in today's money. By 2017, the top-paid CEO earned over $100 million. Meanwhile, the earnings of the bottom 90 per cent in both the United States and the…
The public's relationship with economics is deeply unequal and troubled. On one side, ordinary people routinely ridicule economic forecasts that turn out to be spectacularly wrong. On the other, they defer to economists on matters of enormous consequence, from tax policy to trade agreements,…
By Jonathan Aldred
Subject
Themes
Over the past half-century, a handful of economic ideas have quietly reshaped the moral foundations of Western societies. What was once considered selfish, reckless, or antisocial has been redefined as rational, efficient, and inevitable. The transformation began in 1947, when Friedrich Hayek assembled a group of intellectuals at Mont Pelerin in Switzerland to launch a long-term project: changing how people think about economics, government, and human nature. Hayek's vision, amplified by allies such as Milton Friedman and funded by entrepreneurs like battery-chicken magnate Antony Fisher, eventually produced a global network of think tanks. By 1979, Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan were translating these ideas into government policy, dismantling the post-war Keynesian consensus.