Twilight of the Money Gods: Economics as a Religion and How It All Went Wrong

John Rapley

Hul 2017 · Simon and Schuster

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This brilliant assessment of how the field of economics came to resemble a religion is “a must-read for all” (Avinash Persaud, Prospect).

Imagine one day you went to a cash machine and found your money was gone. You rushed to your branch, where a teller said that overnight people had stopped believing in money, and it all vanished. Seem incredible? It happened, and it could happen again.

Twilight of the Money Gods is the story of economics, told not as the science it strove to be, but as the religion it became. Over two centuries, it searched for the hidden codes that would reveal the path to a promised land of material abundance. While its prophets, from Adam Smith to John Maynard Keynes and Milton Friedman, concerned themselves with the human condition, its priesthood gradually grew remote from its followers, until it lost sight of their tribulations. Today, amid a crisis of faith in their expertise, we must reimagine an economics for a new era—one filled with both danger and opportunity.

“Fascinating.” —Giles Fraser, BBC

“Wide-ranging and entertainingly written.” —David Orrell, World Finance

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John Rapley has made a vocation of working, and living, at the intersection where theory meets practice. After beginning his career at Oxford University’s International Development Centre, he left for the developing world, where he spent the next two decades working as an academic, journalist and ultimately the co-creator and director of a policy think tank. Along the way, he worked at universities on three continents and, upon returning to the UK, lectured at the University of Cambridge’s Centre of Development Studies. He now lives in London as a writer.