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

Winner of the 2012 Gold Medal IPPY Award for Finance/Investment/Economics.

"Mainelli and Harris offer an original and insightful look at the big and important long-term issues facing society today. . . . Policy makers need to read this book."—Donald J. Smith, Boston University, author of BOND MATH: The Theory Behind the Formulas

"In this thought-provoking and enlightening book, Mainelli and Harris highlight a point that economists too often forget: that economics is, at its heart, the study of human behavior, and that both commerce and its wicked sister, finance, mean nothing unless they are connected to people and society."—Bill Emmott, former editor of the Economist

The price of fish cannot be right when we have over-fishing, hunger, and ruined seas. 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 ecosystem that is becoming dangerously volatile.

In The Price of Fish, Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris examine in a unique way these intractable and wicked problems—sustainability, global warming, over-fishing, overpopulation, the pensions crisis—and suggest that it is not that these problems are too complex to solve, but that our way of reading them is too simple. Too simple and often wrong. Using models developed by quantum physicists, the authors show a way to making better decisions which in turn point to answers to our most pernicious problems.

Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris are co-founders of Z/Yen, a commercial think-tank in London, England.