Templates for an economic ‘church’ that does not exploit selfishness | Letters

Responses to John Rapley's long read on how economics became a religion, from John Airs, Saville and Barry Kushner, Geoff Naylor, DBC Reed, William Wallace, Robin Le Mare and Martin London

John Rapley quotes the belief of Nobel laureates George Akerlof and Robert Shiller that "storytelling is a 'new variable' for economics, since 'the material frames that underlie people's decisions' are shaped by the stories they tell themselves" (Greed is God, 11 July). Rapley refers to one story that the "comfortable" tell themselves about their privileged existence being the "reward of life in a meritocratic society". Raoul Martinez in his Creating Freedom counters that story with a far more convincing one.

Rapley then quotes the American economist Wassily Leontief, also counselling against the dangers of self-satisfaction, calling for economists "to work more closely with other disciplines". Kate Raworth in Doughnut Economics does just that, offering, for example, a lovely quotation from Janine Benyus, "a leading thinker and doer in the field of biomimicry" who writes: "We are big-brained animals, but we are newcomers on this planet, so we are still acting like toddlers expecting Mother Nature to clean up after us." And the wonderful storyteller Naomi Klein concludes her No Is Not Enough with: "Here is what needs to be understood in our bones: the spell of neoliberalism has been broken, crushed under the weight of lived experience and a mountain of evidence."

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