The Shortest History of Economics

The Shortest History of Economics Plot Summary

Introduction

In prehistoric times, artificial light came solely from wood fires. Producing as much light as a modern lightbulb gives in an hour would have required our ancestors to spend fifty-eight hours gathering timber. By 1800, using candles, this had improved to about five hours of work for the same amount of light. Today, less than one second of work buys an hour of electric illumination. This 300,000-fold increase in lighting efficiency illustrates two powerful economic forces that have transformed human history: better technology and higher worker productivity. Economics is not merely about money—it's about how societies organize themselves to solve the problem of scarcity. The economic story of humanity is one of remarkable transformation. From hunter-gatherer tribes to agricultural societies, from feudal manors to industrial factories, and from nation-states to global markets, economic forces have shaped the course of civilization. This journey reveals how trade networks connected distant lands, how technological revolutions reshaped human potential, and how ideas about markets, money, and value evolved over millennia. Through examining these economic forces, we gain insight into why some nations prospered while others stagnated, how crises and conflicts reshaped the global order, and what challenges await us in a world of rapid technological change, persistent inequality, and environmental constraints.

Chapter 1: Early Foundations: From Hunter-Gatherers to Agricultural Societies

Around 300,000 years ago, modern humans evolved in southern Africa. Unlike earlier primates, Homo sapiens developed language and abstract thought, enabling collective learning and knowledge sharing. Yet for most of human history, our ancestors lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers, following seasonal food sources and moving on when local resources were depleted. This lifestyle was far from idyllic—archaeological evidence suggests that violence was common, infant mortality reached 40 percent, and life expectancy hovered around thirty-three years. Many would have faced constant hunger and exposure to the elements. The agricultural revolution, which began independently in several regions around 10,000 BCE, marked humanity's first great economic transformation. In the Indus Valley civilization, archaeological sites like Kalibangan show evidence of sophisticated farming practices, with plowed fields arranged in patterns suggesting crop rotation. Farming created food surpluses, allowing communities to build permanent settlements and enabling some individuals to specialize in crafts, construction, or other non-agricultural pursuits. The plough was particularly revolutionary—by harnessing animal power to turn soil, it made farming five to six times more productive than foraging. Agricultural surpluses also created new social and economic structures. With food storage came the concept of property, wealth accumulation, and increasing social stratification. While hunter-gatherer societies were relatively egalitarian by necessity, agricultural societies developed hierarchies. Some early farming communities, like those in the Indus Valley, distributed resources relatively equitably, but in many regions, elites emerged who controlled land and commanded the labor of others. Contrary to romantic notions about pre-agricultural life, evidence suggests that early farming actually reduced human health in some ways—average heights dropped by about 10 centimeters, and diets became less diverse. The shape of continents significantly influenced how agricultural innovations spread. Eurasia's east-west orientation allowed crops and farming techniques to diffuse across similar climate zones, while Africa and the Americas' north-south orientations meant that agricultural knowledge had to cross multiple climate zones to spread. Eurasia also happened to have more plants and animals suitable for domestication. These geographic advantages gave Eurasian civilizations a head start in agricultural development, which would later translate into technological and military advantages that enabled colonization. The agricultural revolution had profound economic consequences beyond farming itself. It enabled the rise of cities, which became centers of trade and innovation. Early cities like Ur in Mesopotamia and Mohenjo-daro in the Indus Valley developed specialized economic roles, complex division of labor, and early forms of accounting and record-keeping. Money emerged as a medium of exchange, first as standardized commodities and later as precious metal coins. By 3000 BCE, early civilizations in Mesopotamia, Egypt, the Indus Valley, and China had developed writing systems largely to track economic transactions—records of harvests, taxes, and trade. While the transition to agriculture initially created new hardships and inequalities, it ultimately laid the foundation for all subsequent economic development. By freeing some people from food production, it allowed the emergence of specialized craftspeople, merchants, scholars, and rulers. This specialization, in turn, accelerated innovation and knowledge creation. The agricultural surplus enabled the construction of monumental architecture, the development of metallurgy, and the establishment of long-distance trade networks. Through these interconnections, ideas and innovations could spread more rapidly, setting the stage for the economic transformations that would follow.

Chapter 2: Trade Networks and the Birth of Capitalism (1300-1700)

By the 14th century, water-based transport had become essential to economic development. China's Grand Canal, stretching over 1,600 kilometers between the Yellow and Yangtze Rivers, facilitated massive internal trade. Built during the Sui dynasty (581-618 CE), it initially enabled the government to collect grain taxes but eventually transformed China into the world's most prosperous region. Meanwhile, Europe's coastal cities like Venice, Genoa, and Lisbon became thriving centers of commerce. In Venice, financial innovation flourished with the development of the "colleganza"—a risk-sharing arrangement allowing poorer merchants to finance sea voyages by sharing profits with investors, creating pathways for upward mobility. This period saw significant technological advancements that transformed commerce. Reading glasses, invented in Italy around 1290, spread rapidly across Europe. The movable-type printing press, invented in Germany around 1440, revolutionized information dissemination—more books were produced in the following fifty years than in the previous thousand. China's invention of paper money in the 11th century represented another crucial innovation. While European trade still relied heavily on precious metal coins, these financial instruments laid the groundwork for more sophisticated economic systems. These technologies illustrate the economic concept of "non-rivalry"—unlike physical goods, ideas can be shared without diminishing their value. Religious and social changes profoundly affected economic development. The Protestant Reformation encouraged literacy as followers were urged to read the Bible themselves, indirectly boosting economic development in Protestant regions of Germany. Jewish communities, often excluded from landholding, developed expertise in finance and money transfer, while Islamic merchant networks fostered trade across vast territories through bonds of trust. These patterns demonstrate how religious institutions shaped economic behavior and specialization, creating networks of trust that facilitated commerce across cultural boundaries. The catastrophic Black Death, which killed approximately one-third of Europe's population between 1347 and 1351, also had unexpected economic consequences. The resulting labor shortage doubled European real wages, reduced land rents, and shifted the balance of power away from landowners toward peasants. As historian Şevket Pamuk observed, the plague essentially "killed feudalism." The economic shock also affected production patterns—with labor scarce and expensive, farmers shifted toward land-intensive activities like sheep farming. Worker diets improved as higher wages allowed for increased meat consumption. This grim episode illustrates how economic principles like supply and demand operate even in the most tragic circumstances. The age of exploration beginning in the late 15th century connected global economies in unprecedented ways. Portuguese and Spanish expeditions established new trade routes, while improvements in shipbuilding and navigation made longer voyages possible. These developments facilitated the "Columbian exchange"—bringing corn, potatoes, and chilis from the Americas to Europe, and oranges, sugar, and livestock to the Americas. However, the exchange also brought devastating diseases to indigenous populations and enabled the horrific trans-Atlantic slave trade, which trafficked over 12 million people. The economic impact was immense—Spain's influx of silver from the Americas created inflation throughout Europe, while slave-based plantation economies transformed agriculture in the Caribbean and Americas. By the 17th century, early forms of capitalism were emerging through innovations like joint-stock companies. The Dutch East India Company, formed in 1602, became history's largest corporation, controlling armed forces, building forts, and dominating Asian trade. As the first publicly traded company, it allowed investors to pool risk across multiple ventures rather than betting everything on a single ship. Similarly, insurance markets developed to manage commercial risks. These institutional innovations spread risk and mobilized capital on an unprecedented scale, enabling more ambitious commercial ventures. Meanwhile, financial centers emerged in Amsterdam, London, and other trading hubs, developing sophisticated credit markets that would eventually finance the industrial revolution. The period concluded with the dramatic tulip mania in 1630s Netherlands—often cited as history's first speculative bubble—signaling both the potential and perils of financial markets.

Chapter 3: Industrial Revolution: Transforming Production and Society (1750-1900)

The industrial revolution, beginning in mid-18th century Britain, marked the most profound economic transformation in human history. Before this period, living standards had barely changed for millennia—income levels in Japan were virtually identical in 1000 CE and 1700 CE. Most people lived lives that were, in economic terms, not materially different from their ancestors on the African savannah. The industrial revolution shattered this pattern of stagnation. Since then, life expectancy has doubled, real incomes have increased fourteen-fold, and average heights have grown by around 10 centimeters. This revolution wasn't a single innovation but rather a series of interlocking developments in agriculture, urbanization, commerce, and technology. Technological breakthroughs drove unprecedented productivity gains. James Hargreaves' spinning jenny revolutionized textile production, making the process of spinning cotton thread 100 times more efficient within a generation. The iron industry was transformed by the use of coke rather than charcoal and the development of new smelting processes. Most significantly, Thomas Newcomen invented the steam engine in 1712, which James Watt refined in the 1760s. Coal-powered steam engines ultimately revolutionized factories, shipping, and transportation, though their full impact took decades to materialize. When Watt's patent expired in 1800, British factories were still using three times as much water power as coal power, illustrating how slowly even revolutionary technologies can transform economic systems. The intellectual foundations of modern economics emerged alongside these material changes. On March 9, 1776—just one day after James Watt's first profitable steam engine entered the market—Adam Smith published "The Wealth of Nations," a foundational economic text. Smith's analysis of a pin factory illustrated how division of labor increases productivity. Working alone, a person might make one pin daily, but with ten people specializing in different tasks, they could produce 4,800 pins per person. Smith also articulated how markets coordinate self-interest for social benefit: "It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest." Yet Smith wasn't a market fundamentalist—he worried about monopolies and business collusion, writing that "people of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public." The industrial revolution transformed labor and class relations. Initially, workers saw few benefits—British wages barely grew for the first half-century of industrialization, and life expectancy in early industrial cities was lower than in rural areas due to poor sanitation and crowded conditions. Child labor was common, and working conditions were often dangerous. This led to social unrest, including the Luddite movement of the 1810s, which protested mechanization by destroying textile machinery. The British government responded harshly, making machine-breaking a capital offense and mobilizing more troops against the Luddites than against Napoleon. By the 1840s, wages finally began rising substantially, but industrial capitalism created new forms of economic insecurity that the old feudal system, for all its injustices, had not. New social institutions emerged to address these challenges. Trade unions formed to demand better wages and conditions, though they faced fierce opposition—in 1834, six English agricultural workers (the "Tolpuddle Martyrs") were transported to Australia for forming a union. Gradually, unions gained legal recognition and bargaining power. Welfare systems evolved from the harsh workhouse model under Britain's 1834 Poor Law to more comprehensive approaches, including Bismarck's introduction of health insurance and old-age pensions in 1880s Germany. These developments illustrate how economic progress often necessitates new social arrangements to distribute benefits more equitably. The industrial revolution accelerated global integration through trade and imperialism. Improvements in transportation dramatically reduced costs—by the late 19th century, it was cheaper to ship wheat from Chicago to Liverpool than to transport it 30 miles by wagon. David Ricardo's theory of comparative advantage, which showed how trade benefits countries even when one nation is more productive across all sectors, provided intellectual justification for trade liberalization. The repeal of Britain's Corn Laws in 1846 marked a decisive turn toward free trade. Meanwhile, industrial powers sought colonial markets and raw materials—Britain forced China to accept opium imports through military action, while the United States pressured Japan to open its markets. These examples illustrate how economic and military power became increasingly intertwined. By the close of the 19th century, the world had been transformed. Railways crisscrossed continents, telegraphs transmitted messages instantly across oceans, and electricity was beginning to illuminate cities. Mass production techniques were emerging, most famously in American factories producing standardized goods. Alfred Marshall's 1890 textbook "Principles of Economics" formalized the supply and demand model that would become central to economic analysis. Living standards in industrialized nations had risen substantially, though unevenly. Meanwhile, the economic gulf between industrialized and non-industrialized regions had widened dramatically—a division that would shape global politics throughout the coming century.

Chapter 4: Global Crises and Economic Theories (1914-1945)

The early 20th century witnessed unprecedented economic turbulence as global integration gave way to conflict and crisis. World War I (1914-1918) shattered the interconnected world economy that had developed over the previous century. Despite strong commercial ties between European powers—Lloyd's of London insured most German shipping in 1914—nations sleepwalked into a devastating conflict. The war's economic dimensions were significant: the Allied powers (Britain, France, Russia and their allies) possessed five times the population, eleven times the territory, and three times the income of the Central powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary and their allies). These material advantages ultimately proved decisive, though inept generalship prolonged the conflict for four years. The peace settlement imposed severe economic penalties on Germany, requiring reparations of 132 billion gold marks—equivalent to roughly half the country's pre-war wealth. Unable to meet these obligations through normal economic means, Germany resorted to printing money, triggering catastrophic hyperinflation. By 1923, a single loaf of bread cost billions of marks, and Germans sometimes needed wheelbarrows to carry their wages. This economic trauma left lasting scars on German society and contributed to political instability. Though Germany enjoyed relative prosperity in the late 1920s after currency stabilization, the memory of hyperinflation made policymakers excessively cautious when confronting the Great Depression, worsening its impact and creating conditions for Hitler's rise to power. The October 1929 stock market crash initiated the most severe economic crisis in modern history. By 1932, the U.S. stock market had fallen 89 percent from its peak. Unemployment reached 25 percent in the United States, while industrial production collapsed across the developed world. Tent cities sprang up in London's Hyde Park, New York's Central Park and the Sydney Domain. The crisis deepened as nations erected trade barriers—the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act raised U.S. import duties on over 20,000 products, prompting retaliatory measures from trading partners. Countries also restricted immigration and international capital flows, further constraining economic activity. What had begun as a financial crisis became a prolonged depression due to policy failures and the breakdown of international cooperation. This catastrophe spurred intellectual innovation in economics, most notably through John Maynard Keynes's work. Keynes argued that recessions occurred because people's actions affected one another in unexpected ways—when consumers cut spending during hard times, they reduced the income of others, triggering further cutbacks in a downward spiral. He likened this to a bee colony where individual thrift leads to collective misery. Keynes proposed government spending as a solution to restart economic activity, directly challenging the prevailing orthodoxy that markets would self-correct if left alone. Austrian economist Friedrich von Hayek offered a contrasting view, seeing downturns as necessary corrections for previous excesses and warning that government intervention would only distort economic signals. This intellectual debate between Keynesian activism and Hayekian restraint continues to shape economic policy discussions today. The Depression also transformed economic measurement and policy institutions. Simon Kuznets and the National Bureau of Economic Research developed systematic national income accounts, while economists like Joan Robinson challenged assumptions about perfectly competitive markets. Robinson's 1933 book "The Economics of Imperfect Competition" introduced the concept of monopsony—when buyers (like employers) have market power over sellers (like workers)—providing theoretical justification for minimum wages and labor protections. In the United States, Frances Perkins became the first female cabinet member as Secretary of Labor, helping design Social Security and other New Deal programs that created lasting safety nets. These institutional innovations laid the groundwork for managing modern economies. World War II (1939-1945) ultimately ended the Depression through massive government spending on armaments, illustrating Keynesian principles in practice. The war itself was fundamentally an economic contest—the Allied powers outproduced the Axis in virtually every category of war materiel. When peace finally came, policymakers were determined to avoid repeating the mistakes that followed World War I. The 1944 Bretton Woods conference established a new international economic architecture, including the International Monetary Fund and World Bank, designed to promote stable currency exchange and finance reconstruction. These institutions, along with the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, created a framework for the postwar economic order based on managed capitalism and gradual trade liberalization—a middle path between unfettered markets and state control that would deliver unprecedented prosperity in the decades to come.

Chapter 5: Post-War Prosperity to Market Revolution (1945-2000)

The three decades following World War II witnessed extraordinary economic expansion across much of the developed world. The French called this period "les Trente Glorieuses" (the Glorious Thirty), the Italians referred to "il boom economico," and Germans celebrated "das Wunder am Rhein" (the Miracle on the Rhine). This era saw full employment, rising wages, and expanding middle classes in Western Europe, North America, Japan, and Australia. Several factors drove this prosperity: reconstruction needs, technological innovations developed during wartime, pent-up consumer demand, and a stable international monetary system under the Bretton Woods Agreement. Perhaps most significantly, governments embraced Keynesian policies to manage economic cycles, using fiscal and monetary tools to smooth out downturns. This period transformed daily life through rising consumption and technological diffusion. Televisions, refrigerators, washing machines, and automobiles became commonplace in middle-class households. Home ownership expanded dramatically—in Britain, the proportion of owner-occupied housing rose from 23 percent after World War I to nearly 58 percent by the late 1970s. Women entered the paid workforce in unprecedented numbers, supported by labor-saving household technologies and changing social norms. Air conditioning enabled population shifts toward warmer regions in many countries. The franchise model, pioneered by McDonald's in the 1950s, revolutionized retail by combining standardized products with local ownership. These developments illustrate how economic growth translated into tangible improvements in living standards. The welfare state expanded substantially during this era. Building on wartime solidarity, many countries established comprehensive social security systems providing healthcare, unemployment insurance, and retirement benefits. Taxation became more progressive, with top income tax rates exceeding 90 percent in some countries (inspiring the Beatles' song "Taxman" with its complaint about keeping "one for you, nineteen for me"). Trade unions reached peak membership and influence, helping ensure that productivity gains were shared with workers. Inequality declined in many advanced economies as education levels rose faster than technological change demanded, and as the return on capital remained below the economic growth rate—a rare historical condition that economist Thomas Piketty later identified as crucial for reducing wealth concentration. Meanwhile, much of the developing world pursued different economic strategies with mixed results. India, after gaining independence in 1947, adopted centralized planning with extensive regulations—what became known as the "license raj." This approach stifled entrepreneurship and resulted in what economists termed "the Hindu rate of growth"—slow expansion that failed to significantly reduce poverty. China under Mao Zedong experienced even more disastrous outcomes. The Great Leap Forward (1958-1962) forced farmers to produce steel in backyard furnaces while neglecting agriculture, contributing to a famine that killed tens of millions. The subsequent Cultural Revolution (1966-1976) further disrupted economic development by attacking intellectuals and shutting down educational institutions. These tragedies demonstrated the catastrophic potential of ideologically driven economic policies divorced from market realities. A significant turning point came in the late 1970s with China's market reforms under Deng Xiaoping. The transformation began in Xiaogang village in 1978, where eighteen farmers secretly signed a contract dividing communal land into family plots and allowing households to keep surplus production. The resulting harvest exceeded the previous five years combined. This experiment spread nationally, with agricultural output soaring as incentives improved. Subsequently, China gradually permitted private businesses, foreign investment, and export-oriented manufacturing. Within a decade, these reforms lifted approximately 10 million Chinese annually out of poverty—demonstrating how policy changes could unleash tremendous productive potential. Similar market-oriented reforms spread globally in the 1980s and 1990s. Margaret Thatcher in Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States reduced government intervention, cut tax rates, privatized state-owned enterprises, and weakened labor unions. India liberalized its economy in 1991, abolishing most licensing requirements and opening to foreign investment. The collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 led former communist countries to embrace market economies with varying degrees of success. International trade expanded dramatically through successive rounds of tariff reductions, and the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1994 formalized global trading rules. By the century's end, market mechanisms had become the dominant approach to economic organization worldwide, though significant variations remained in how countries balanced markets with social protections.

Chapter 6: Modern Challenges: Technology, Inequality and Climate Change

The 21st century opened with a series of economic shocks that challenged confidence in market systems. The burst of the technology bubble in 2000 was followed by the far more devastating global financial crisis of 2007-2009. This crisis began in the U.S. housing market, where lenders had extended mortgages to increasingly risky borrowers, assuming house prices would continue rising indefinitely. These loans were bundled into complex securities and sold throughout the financial system. When prices fell, the resulting chain reaction nearly collapsed the global banking system. Governments responded with massive bailouts for financial institutions and fiscal stimulus packages for their economies. The crisis revealed the dangers of inadequate regulation and highlighted how interconnected the global financial system had become. Inequality has emerged as a defining challenge of our era. Since the 1980s, wealth and income gaps have widened substantially in many countries. In the United States, the share of income going to the top 1 percent more than doubled between 1980 and 2020. An influential visualization known as "the elephant curve" shows how global income growth from 1980-2016 was distributed: strong gains for the middle class in emerging economies (especially China), minimal growth for the working and middle classes in advanced economies, and spectacular increases for the global elite. Multiple factors drive this trend: technological change favoring skilled workers, declining union membership, reduced tax progressivity, increased market concentration, and globalization patterns that exposed some workers to intense competition while shielding others. This rising inequality has contributed to political polarization and populist movements across many democracies. Technology continues to reshape economic possibilities. Artificial intelligence represents the latest general-purpose technology with transformative potential comparable to steam power or electricity. Machine learning systems can now perform tasks requiring pattern recognition, language processing, and even creative production at levels approaching or exceeding human capabilities. While previous waves of automation primarily affected routine physical tasks, AI threatens to disrupt knowledge work previously considered safe from technological displacement. Economists debate whether this will create widespread technological unemployment or whether new jobs will emerge as in previous transitions. Meanwhile, digital platforms have created new forms of work and consumption while raising concerns about market concentration—tech giants like Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Amazon have achieved unprecedented scale and influence over daily life. Climate change presents an unprecedented economic challenge that economist Nicholas Stern described as "the biggest market failure the world has ever seen." The burning of fossil fuels imposes massive costs on society—through sea level rise, extreme weather events, agricultural disruption, and health impacts—that are not reflected in market prices. Economic analysis increasingly shows that the benefits of reducing emissions substantially outweigh the costs, yet coordination problems and short-term thinking impede action. Carbon pricing mechanisms like taxes or cap-and-trade systems have been implemented in various jurisdictions to internalize these externalities, but global cooperation remains elusive. Meanwhile, renewable energy costs have fallen dramatically, making clean electricity increasingly competitive with fossil fuels even without accounting for climate damages. Data-driven approaches are transforming both economic practice and policy. "Big data" and improved statistical techniques allow researchers to identify causal relationships with greater precision than ever before. Harvard economist Raj Chetty has used tax records for nearly the entire U.S. population to analyze economic mobility across generations, revealing stark geographic differences in opportunity. Randomized controlled trials, pioneered in development economics by researchers like Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, provide rigorous evidence about which interventions actually improve wellbeing. Behavioral economics, building on psychologist Daniel Kahneman's work on cognitive biases, has demonstrated systematic ways that human decision-making deviates from traditional rational models. These methodological advances have made economics more empirical and less ideological, though heated debates continue about the appropriate role of markets versus government. The COVID-19 pandemic that began in 2020 represented the most severe economic shock since the Great Depression, with global output falling by 5 percent in a single quarter. Governments responded with unprecedented support to affected workers and businesses, adding the equivalent of two months of global output to public debt levels. Central banks dropped interest rates to zero and purchased trillions in financial assets to maintain liquidity. As lockdowns lifted, supply chain disruptions and pent-up demand triggered inflation not seen in decades, prompting monetary tightening that continues to reverberate through global markets. The pandemic accelerated trends toward remote work, e-commerce, and automation while exposing and exacerbating inequalities—those in face-to-face service jobs suffered most, while knowledge workers and asset owners often thrived. These divergent experiences have intensified debates about how to ensure economic security in a world of increasing technological change and global integration.

Summary

The economic journey of humanity reveals a profound tension between market forces and social needs. Markets have demonstrated remarkable power to coordinate human activity, incentivize innovation, and generate unprecedented prosperity. From the specialization enabled by agricultural surpluses to the productivity explosion of the industrial revolution, from global trade networks to digital platforms, market mechanisms have consistently expanded human capabilities. Yet markets alone consistently fail to address critical challenges—they generate inequality, externalize environmental costs, and prove vulnerable to cycles of crisis. The greatest economic progress has typically occurred when societies found effective ways to harness market dynamism while constraining its destructive potential through appropriate regulation, social insurance, and public investment. This economic history offers crucial insights for navigating contemporary challenges. First, technological innovation remains the primary driver of long-term prosperity, but its benefits must be widely shared through education, progressive taxation, and social supports to avoid destabilizing inequality. Second, environmental sustainability requires making market prices reflect true social costs—through carbon pricing, pollution regulations, and investment in clean alternatives. Finally, economic resilience demands strong institutions that can adapt to changing conditions while maintaining public trust. The central economic task of our time is not choosing between markets and government but designing systems where each complements the other's strengths while compensating for its weaknesses. As climate change, technological disruption, and demographic shifts transform the global economy, these lessons from economic history provide essential guidance for creating prosperity that is both dynamically innovative and broadly inclusive.

About Author

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Andrew Leigh

Andrew Leigh is a member of the Australian Parliament. He holds a PhD from Harvard University, and is a fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia. Before being elected in 2010, he was a professor of economics at the Australian National University. His books include The Shortest History of Economics, The Luck of Politics and Randomistas.

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