Greed Is Dead Politics After Individualism

Two of the UK's leading economists call time on selfishness as the engine of prosperity

The idea that people are basically driven by individualism and economic incentives, and that prosperity and good societies come from top-down leadership, has dominated politics for the last thirty years (from some perspectives, much longer).

This book shows that the age of homo economicus and centralization is coming to an end. Instead, Collier and Kay argue that community and mutuality will be the drivers of successful societies in the future - as they are already in some parts of the world. They show how politics can reverse the move to extremes of right and left in recent years, that the center can hold, and that if we think differently we can find common ground to the benefit of all.

Paul Collier is the Professor of Economics and Public Policy at the Oxford Blavatnik School of Government. He is the author of The Future of Capitalism, which won the 2019 Handelsblatt Prize; The Bottom Billion, which won the Lionel Gelber Prize and Arthur Ross Prize of the Council on Foreign Relations; The Plundered Planet, Exodus and Refuge (with Alexander Betts). Collier has served as Director of the Research Department of the World Bank, and works with governments around the world.

John Kay is one of Britain's leading economists and a fellow of St John's College Oxford. His career has spanned academia, business, finance and public policy. He was the founding head of the Oxford Said Business School and the Institute for Fiscal Studies - Britain's most respected think tank. He is the author of The Truth About Markets, Obliquity, Other People's Money and other books and for twenty years contributed a regular column to the Financial Times.