Everyman: The Story of Economics in Three Acts by Cambridge economist Antara Haldar. (Generated using AI)Imagine Homo economicus as a full-blooded character. Call him Neo. This character is a utility-maximising, or usually profit-maximising, character — rational, priding himself on a tough realism about the world, assuming everyone acts mostly on self-interest. He sees the world as a series of price points, measures every opportunity cost, and is sentimental about only his unsentimentality.He further believes that everyone acting like this rational actor will, through a miraculous feat of coordination, produce public benefits and untold prosperity. His avatars have a different machismo about them. One is called Finn, a finance bro who uses the power of money to make and unmake worlds; a Davos Man, who dislocates economies in opening them up; or Tek, the guy who believes that boundless technology combined with boundless capital can create a new humanity. All believe that markets will somehow coordinate these machismos.The outcome will be untold public benefit. But in reality, the world they create is Darwinian: some win, some lose. The losers might want the helping hand of the State, might resent the power of the winner, might even agitate for equality. But in reality, they are whiners, holding back humanity. Imagine further an Everyman, who just might think human beings are more complex: less rational, subject to behavioural influences, not single-minded in their motivations but, above all, slightly more decent and capable of cooperation. Not everything has a price; cooperation can produce more public goods and a better society than gladiatorial competition, and demanding a little equality is hardly whining, but the demand of justice. Imagine if these characters collided in a psychodrama in the real world; these social theories became character types who show up in historical crises, from deindustrialisation to depressions. It would make for a fascinating fable of sorts.This, broadly, is the premise of Cambridge economist, Antara Haldar’s engaging, Everyman: The Story of Economics in Three Acts. Written in part as intellectual history, part fable, Everyman is meant to be an indictment of economics, the world of Neo, caught in its own limitations. John Stuart Mill had two critiques of Bentham.Using Carlyle’s memorable turn of phrase, he said Bentham “had the completeness of limited men.” But his second objection was that if everyone thought everyone was only self-interested, we would indeed all become only self-interested. Our construction is self-fulfilling. Something like this thought underlines Haldar’s fable. Neo does not describe human nature. Neo is a construct we have created and let shape us. Neo is not all bad; there is a kind of tragic cast to him. As one character tells Neo, “You are like Spock from Star Trek and we are like Homer Simpson from The Simpsons. But I bet it can be hard on you as well — even being the personification of reason — to live up to the ideal.”But this is the only sympathy Neo will get. Neo is an imperialising figure who has no answers to deep problems of precarity, inequality, ecological devastation and economic volatility. He is deluded: It is social cooperation and the visible hand of the state that is needed for the public good. But, mostly, he is psychologically stunted: ignorant of the mass of literature in evolutionary biology, psychology, anthropology and behavioural economics that describes human beings in all their complexity. If humanity is to be saved, Neo must be discarded; his conception of a bull run will be a rampage on what it means to be human.Everyman is inventive in constructing ideas as characters. It is breathtaking in the range of its references. There is a literary bravura in the writing, as metaphors, puns and allusions pile on each other in hurried succession, as Neo and his interlocutors are described in tropes drawn from Shakespeare to Borges. The best sections are the last third, where you get less of an indictment of economics but a representation of the kind of unintelligible pastiche of forces our world has become. As Haldar puts it, this era of superabundant information, “the archive felt like a graveyard of meaning instead of a treasure.”Story continues below this adBut Haldar’s Fable works unevenly. Some of the allusions and jokes land; many don’t. The book’s rhetorical power overwhelms its analytical acuity. The blitz of ideas is all dealt in their Twitter versions as it were. The opening intellectual history, where Neo appears as a progeny of Smith, Keynes and Hayek, borders on a caricature of these figures. It is also a punch that does not land. There is almost nothing in Everyman that these figures did not know. Even the benighted Hayek was as much a theorist of common law as he was of markets. That “Neo” is at root of all evil is too simplistic; our penchant for cooperation and sacrifice in the form of nationalism can be more murderous and stand in the way of cooperation as much as Neo’s rationality. The conflict between Neo and Everyman is not a conflict between two types: It is a civil war of the soul within all of us. If Neo is all that limited, why did he triumph? The rhetorical excess in the book makes you wonder, to use Shakespeare, as Haldar does: Doth thou protest too much?The writer is contributing editor, The Indian Express