Why Are Economists Topping the Non-Fiction Charts?

Feature by Holly Rimmer-Tagoe | 02 Sep 2016

This year’s Manchester Literature Festival has a good number of events looking at economic ideas and how they shape us, from Yuval Noah Harari speaking about his new book on inequality to Richard Hines on the story behind Kes. Why is economics seeping into the literary sphere?

The year 2008 should have been the death knell for economists. The overwhelming majority of them failed to predict the financial crisis that has since caused massive upheaval in countries all over the world, ushering in an era of slash-and-burn for the state and creating the conditions for the rapid rise of unlikely political figures Jeremy Corbyn, Donald Trump, Yanis Varoufakis and Bernie Sanders.

But rather than quietly cowering in a dark corner, financial discourse and its propagators have thrived. Broadcaster and writer Paul Mason talked to a sell-out crowd at last year's Manchester Literature Festival about the future of the economy and technology; Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century, exploring the historical data of inequality, became a number-one bestseller; and talk about deficits, debt and stagnating wages has become a national obsession, dominating news headlines and leading to Twitter memes and a wave of activism as part of the Occupy movement.

How did Piketty’s 700-page book about statistics move so easily from dense analysis reserved for economic experts to a mainstream bestseller?

There appears to be a huge appetite from readers – moving on from autobiographies by YouTube ‘sensations’ and ways to cook a meal in 0.5 seconds to educating themselves about the obscure terminology that clouds economics. The national mood, post-expenses scandal and post-Brexit, seems to be increasingly riding on a wave of anti-status quo sentiment, with widespread distrust in the national institutions of Parliament, banks and broadsheet journalists. This distrust provides the backdrop for a swathe of armchair economists keen to consume statistics and offer their own take, who are no longer convinced by the fundamentals outlined by the Treasury and financial authorities.

Piketty joins a number of luminary economists and social scientists growing in prominence, who lean to the left. The likes of Paul Krugman (End This Depression Now!, 2012), Joseph Stiglitz (The Price of Inequality, 2012), Kate Pickett and Richard Wilkinson (The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better, 2009) and Ha-Joon Chang (23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism, 2010) have moved from the fringes of academia to become prominent media pundits and non-fiction writers. In many ways, the field of economics has always acted as a form of wish fulfilment: when the zeitgeist is a rejection of the current financial order, we get a raft of critical commentators trying to offer evidence for a viable alternative.

These books provide an outlet by fostering a kind of counterculture (with a lot less drinking, fun and flowy dresses) that breaks the economic consensus of deregulation, consumer debt and growing house prices, while also outlining the bigger picture for those who feel they are falling behind financially. We read fiction in the expectation that we’ll dive into a story full of emotional and human circumstances that we recognise, but are also detached from. Similarly, books about prevailing economic trends give the reader a sense that they’re part of a community – such as millennials being crunched by their baby-boomer parents – while also veiling their life in dull statistics, making problems that seem individualised real and structural.

With the current vein of politicians trying to imitate The Thick of It more and more with every passing minute, the semi-coherent abuse hurled at ludicrous spin doctor Stewart Pearson seems to sum things up: “It's the economy, Stewpot.” The economy now dominates every narrative, and the appetite for doing economics differently shows little sign of abating. 


Yuval Noah Harari, The New Inequality: Will the 21st Century Be the Most Unequal Era in History?, The Dancehouse, Manchester, 8 Sep, 7.30pm
Working Class Writing Walking Tour with Anne Beswick, People's History Museum, Manchester, 19 Oct, 1pm
Kes with Ian McMillan & Richard Hines, Central Library, Manchester, 18 Oct, 1pm

http://manchesterliteraturefestival.co.uk