I grew up under Reagan/Thatcher and believed in a left-right trade-off between social justice and economic efficiency. At the end of university, where I had dropped Economics for a Politics degree I found it so uninspiring, I went on holiday and read Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath.
The Joads were lured to California by a bogus promise of well-paid work, as tractors transformed the rural economy and the bank foreclosed on their farm. This made me realise that markets are not neutral or fair but can be weaponised. The Joads and countless others were used as commodities, their misery exploited to create a glut of workers and drive down wages.
I learned my way through various jobs, working economics out from first principles. Like many converts, I wanted to share the joy more widely and set about writing Creative Destruction. I became an economist at a big bank years before I got an economics degree and I believe this gives me an unusual perspective.
To begin with, I wanted to locate economics within the wider social context. This is what I eventually came up with, showing the fundamental building blocks of society and those with agency to change it.
We must build a fairer, freer, greener world, and an economy in which people matter, unlike the Joads in Steinbeck’s novel. The Grapes of Wrath made me realise that the social and moral context of economics matters and that a novel is a great way to explore it. When I wrote the first draft of Creative Destruction in the late 1990s, the social collapse that triggers the novel was scheduled for a distant 2033.
It went through various iterations but, alarmingly, I only blurred that timeline in the final re-write post-Brexit and Covid. Even then it was only because the infrastructure the novel needs was no longer plausible and not because our society seems too strong to fail so soon.
In terms of social cohesion and sustainability, we are in real trouble. Western societies are deeply divided and the international environment is becoming more hostile. A big part of the problem is that we have got capitalism wrong – a key theme in Creative Destruction.
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