Overview

Digital technology, big data, big tech, machine learning, and AI are revolutionizing both the tools of economics and the phenomena it seeks to measure, understand, and shape. In Cogs and Monsters, Diane Coyle explores the enormous problems--but also opportunities--facing economics today if it is to respond effectively to these dizzying changes and help policymakers solve the world's crises. Mainstream economics, Coyle says, still assumes people are cogs--self-interested, calculating, independent agents interacting in defined contexts. But the digital economy is much more characterized by monsters--untethered, snowballing, and socially influenced unknowns. What is worse, by treating people as cogs, economics is creating its own monsters, leaving itself without the tools to understand the new problems it faces. In response, Coyle asks whether economic individualism is still valid in the digital economy, whether we need to measure growth and progress in new ways, and whether economics can ever be objective, since it influences what it analyzes. Filled with original insights, Cogs and Monsters offers a road map for how economics can adapt to the rewiring of society, including by digital technologies, and realize its potential to play a hugely positive role in the twenty-first century.

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Diane Coyle is the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge. Her books include GDP: A Brief but Affectionate History, The Economics of Enough: How to Run the Economy as If the Future Matters, and The Soulful Science: What Economists Really Do and Why It Matters. She lives in London. Gina Rogers was asked to narrate her first audiobook in 2014 after an author overheard her imitating her Bronx-raised mother at a dinner party. While Gina swears her background in musical theater and television acting has in no way prepared her to speak in accents and dialects, her ability to breathe life into characters has taken her a long way in her career as an audiobook narrator. Outside of narration she teaches Zumba(R) fitness classes and enjoys spending time with family and volunteering at local animal shelters.

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