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Jens Beckert is director of the Max Planck Institute for the Study of Societies in Cologne. In 2018 he was awarded the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize for his work reinvigorating the social sciences with an interdisciplinary perspective, especially at the intersection of sociology and economics. His research focuses on the fields of economic sociology, sociology of inheritance, organization theory, and social theory. Richard Bronk is a Visiting Senior Fellow in the European Institute at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He spent seventeen years working in the City of London and the Bank of England before teaching political economy at LSE from 2000-2007. His research now focuses on the role of imagination and language in economics, the dangers of analytical and regulatory monocultures, and the epistemology of markets.
How do people make sense of the unknown a perhaps unknowable a future? It is becoming increasingly clear that this question is central to our understanding of economic life. The fine collection of studies in this book is a crucial contribution to this vital debate. * Donald MacKenzie, University of Edinburgh and author of An Engine, Not a Camera * We all have to take decisions with long-term consequences, with little knowledge of what the future may bring. The future is inherently uncertain, so we cannot even estimate probabilities in most cases. The editors of this book have put together a collection of papers by economic sociologists, economists, a psychologist, and an anthropologist to explore the various calculative techniques, narratives, and imaginaries that we use in practice. It is all a far cry from the precise mathematical techniques of the rational expectation world of mainstream DSGE modelling, but none the worse for that. * Charles Goodhart, Emeritus Professor of Economics at the London School of Economics and former member of the Monetary Policy Committee of the Bank of England * Especially when uncertainties produced by innovation are compounded by second-order uncertainties about the reactions of others, what should one do when rational calculation of probabilities based on past data is ineffective in predicting the future? From a diverse range of disciplinary perspectives, the essays in this collection creatively explore the role of imagination a long studied as a source of innovation, but until now neglected as a response to uncertainty. * David Stark, Columbia University and author of The Sense of Dissonance * Economic theory is built on how people make decisions, and in real life all decisions are made under some degree of fundamental uncertainty a people simply do not know what future they face. Uncertain Futures shows that people use works of imagination, or they use narratives, or calculative practices such as business plans, to act in spite of uncertainty. Economics a thanks to Beckert and Bronk a can build upon a much more realistic human foundation than before. A first-rate contribution to the field. * W. Brian Arthur, author of Complexity and the Economy *
Getting to Diversity
What Works and What Doesn’t
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