Cogs and Monsters Lib/E: What Economics Is, and What It Should Be

by Diane Coyle, Gina Rogers (Reading)

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.

Audio CD

Published October 12, 2021

About the author

Dame Diane Coyle is a British economist, academic and writer. Since March 2018, she has been the Bennett Professor of Public Policy at the University of Cambridge, co-directing the Bennett Institute.
Coyle's early career as an economist was followed by a period in journalism including being economics editor at The Independent from 1993 to 2001. She was professor of economics at University of Manchester from 2014 to 2018. She was vice-chair of the BBC Trust from 2011 to 2016 and a member of the UK Competition Commission from 2001 until 2009.
Coyle has written nine books on economics.