How Economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of Economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape.
Twitter @DianeCoyle1859.
She lives in London.
Her books include GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History , The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters , and The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters (all Princeton).
About author(s): Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge.
Filled with original insights, Cogs and Monsters offers a road map for how Economics can adapt to the rewiring of society, including by digital technologies, and realize its potential to play a hugely positive role in the twenty-first century.
Just as important, the discipline needs to correct its striking lack of diversity and inclusion if it is to be able to offer new solutions to new problems.
In response, Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether Economics can ever be objective, since it influences What it analyzes.
What is worse, by treating people as cogs, Economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces.
But the digital economy is much more characterized by "monsters"--untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns.
Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are "cogs"--self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts.
In Cogs and Monsters , Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems--but also opportunities--facing Economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world\'s crises, from pandemic recovery and inequality to slow growth and the climate emergency.
How Economics needs to change to keep pace with the twenty-first century and the digital economy Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of Economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape
