The Price of Fish: A New Approach to Wicked Economics and Better Decisions - Hardcover

Harris, Ian; Mainelli, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1857885716 ISBN 13: 9781857885712

Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing, 2011

Synopsis

THE NEW SCIENCE THAT'S SOLVING THE WORLD'S WICKEDEST PROBLEMS The real world is messy, circular and aggressive. It's full of 'wicked problems' that are not easy to solve in the neat, theoretical ways that game theory or chess challenges suggest - take overfishing, for example. This groundbreaking book sets out a powerful new approach, beyond economics alone and enriched with numerous illustrations, to understand the way the world really works in order to help us make better, long-term decisions. The authors call it 'real commerce', as opposed to the transactional commerce of buying and selling which is only a small part of commerce in the real sense of the world. Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris looks at the complex way in which people, organizations and societies communicate and deal with each other every day since real commerce drives society, politics, the economy and our future. The Price of Fish takes the reader on a journey through areas of knowledge, including choice architecture, systems and evolution, that need to be understood to explain how the world really works.

About this title

About the Authors

Ian Harris is a co-founder of Z/Yen, having previously conceived and launched the award-winning joint venture Charity Share and guided the Marine Stewardship Council towards a Best Practice award for its strategic planning and governance, as well as working to solve other problems of long-term thinking in charities and other non-governmental organizations.

Educated at Harvard, Michael Mainelli is Commerce Professor Emeritus and Fellow at Gresham College (founding home of the Royal Society and former home to Christopher Wren). He is also Visiting Professor at LSE and was responsible for creating the London Accord the world's leading research cooperative into environmental, social and governance investment. He is the co-founder of Z/Yen, the City of London's leading commercial think-tank established in 1994 to promote societal advance through better finance and technology. Over the course of his career, he has worked in economics, political science, seismology, cartography, energy information, research and development, in defense and at the highest level of accountancy.

From the Inside Flap

Now, more than at any other time in our history, the world is faced with a series of vicious and apparently insurmountable difficulties, chief among them unstable financial markets, rapidly diminishing resources and an eco-system that is becoming dangerously volatile.

In The Price of Fish Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris examine in a unique way the world s most abiding and wicked problems sustainability, global warming, over-fishing, overpopulation the pensions crises; all of which are characterized by a set of messy, circular, aggressive and peculiarly long-term problems and go on to suggest that it is not the circumstances that are too complex, but our way of reading them that is too simple. Too simple and often wrong.

Looking to the models developed by quantum physicists, the authors aim to blend four streams choice, economics, systems and evolution in a combination they believe is the key to making better decisions and, in turn, finding answers to the world s most pernicious problems.

Transactional commerce buying and selling is only a small part of the real world of commerce in the larger sense of the world. This book goes beyond economics alone to look at real commerce, and the ways complex interactions adapt and change over time: the price of fish, for instance, cannot be right when we have over-fishing, hunger and ruined seas.

Just as physicists strive towards a unifying theory that makes sense of the universe as it actually is, Mainelli and Harris are taking steps towards understanding the knotty world we live in, not a simple exercise in chess-players logic but an approach which addresses the complex, the cyclical, the hostile and the protracted helping, communities large and small to make better decisions. If we re ever going to solve the unsolvable, the first steps start here.

Edition details

• Publisher: Nicholas Brealey Publishing
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 1857885716
• ISBN 13: 9781857885712
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 335