A well-researched, non-fiction book is years in the making. So, when they start, an author has little idea what the world will be like when it’s published. They cannot know what might happen to make their analyses and conclusions essential to the moment or outdated and obsolete.
Ricardo’s Dream was born when I read an academic paper at home in north London in June 2020, towards the end of the first major Covid lockdown. Written by Warwick political economist Matthew Watson, the paper fired me with the idea to write about the gulf between theory and reality in economics. It focused on one of the field’s most famous ideas: David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage. The theory helped shape, and justify, the hyper-globalization of the 1990s onwards.
By the time I started, Western-led globalization had already been shaken by the twin political earthquakes of 2016: the first election of Donald Trump in the US and Brexit in the UK. The discipline of economics was also fending off challenges from rising stars, Nobel Prize winners, and even a rebellion by its own students known as Rethinking Economics.
It took me, with a lot of help, just over four years to turn the idea for a book into 300 pages of neatly-bound prose you can hold in your hand. At first, the physical object felt magical. Finally, after all the research, writing, and revision the book was a reality.
It was published in November 2024, the same month as Trump was re-elected, a fact obviously not reflected in the text which was locked down long before. Political events in the coming months make the 2010s feel tame.
On the money or out of tune?
In some ways, the timing was spot on. In early 2025, it suddenly became mainstream to talk about a new American ‘oligarchy’ seen so clearly with the lineup of tech billionaires at Trump’s inauguration. Ricardo’s Dream tells the story of how a romantic and sanitized vision of economics blinded smart people to the drift towards that oligarchy in the actual economy. It traces the growing political power of Wall Street, the expansion of corporate rights stuffed into so-called ‘free trade’ agreements, and highlights new voices challenging concentrated wealth and power in society.
US regulators sacked by Trump, such as Rohit Chopra, echoed the themes and language of the book in public comments in January 2025 about how the old economics led to concentration in the economy: ‘They were using models that were based on dreams not reality. They were measuring things that just did not exist in the real world.” So far, so good.
And, yet, Trump’s second term was a challenge – some said an ‘impossible plight‘ – for those critiquing orthodox trade economics. In a blizzard of tariff announcements, the US President shredded much that remained of the neoliberal free trading order flanked by advisors who said that ‘Ricardo is dead’. Trump’s actions show the real possibility that the West might turn the page on neoliberalism and replace it with something worse (hello again, oligarchy). In reaction to Trump, a chorus on social media and in some sections of the press sang the praises of free trade and the ‘important, true, and far from obvious‘ ideas of David Ricardo’s principle of comparative advantage. What do critiques like mine mean in an age when anti-expertise is celebrated, an editor quietly asked me. Was the book totally out of tune?
In a piece in the Financial Times, I took on the challenge and argued that the Trump Shock should push us forward towards a new, progressive economics rather than back to the old orthodoxy. ‘Trying to counter Trump with ‘fairy tale’ economic theories that helped fuel his rise is like trying to put out a house fire with matches.’ Now that large parts of both right and left want to move on from neoliberalism, the focus needs to be on distinguishing between real and fake solutions. I remain convinced that the left needs to embrace a more economically populist approach focused on the interests of – as Adam Smith put it – ‘the great body of the people’. (Political economist Dani Rodrik is good on that as usual on this podcast.)
‘Economics is nothing like physics’
Six months after publication, evolving events and debates continue to touch on some of the central themes of Ricardo’s Dream.
One war of words that caught my eye recently was sparked by Vice President JD Vance’s comment in May 2025 that ‘the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics’. (This is a break from the Reaganite consensus but still a marginal position in a Republican party that is pushing an un-populist spending bill through Congress – the one that sparked the Trump-Musk break up – with tax cuts for corporations and high-earners and reductions in food assistance for America’s poor.)
In response to Vance, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page said he was as ‘economically illiterate as any leftist Democrat’. Markets, the Journal said, ‘are governed by the laws of economics the way the physical world is governed by the laws of gravity’. What a claim! It was too much for Oren Cass, one of the most prominent voices trying to push the American right beyond neoliberalism. ‘Economics is nothing like physics,’ Cass shot back, and thinking it is smacks of ‘blind faith and fundamentalism’.
Cass, in turn, was jumped on by economic commentator Noah Smith who accused those who pen ‘grandiose broadsides against economics’ of failing to engage with specific theories and models that prove themselves ‘in the real world day in and day out’. (Smith must not have read Elizabeth Popp Berman, Binyamin Appelbaum, Tom Bergin or many others then, who rigorously engage with tons of theories and models.) The critics, Smith says, ‘don’t seem like they’ve bothered to think very hard’ about the ways in which economics is different to physics and why it matters.
Ricardo’s Dream is at heart about the subject that some of America’s leading politicos are debating: the differences between economics and physics.
The book begins with Isaac Newton at his family farm shielding from the bubonic plague of 1665 (a forerunner of Covid lockdowns). It explores how Newton’s mathematical theories inspired generations of economists like David Ricardo who argued that their ideas were natural, universal and ‘as certain as the principle of gravitation.’ The book ends with Newton too and a brilliant but often ignored quotation from John Maynard Keynes, perhaps the greatest economic thinker of the twentieth century, which neatly flips the famous story of Newton’s apple falling from the tree to argue against doing economics like physics.
The book includes other largely unknown stories – relevant to the verbal clashes of 2025 – for example that William Whewell, the person who coined the terms ‘scientist’ and ‘physicist’, was a great enemy classical economics and its faulty methods.
More work to do
Contra Noah Smith, Ricardo’s Dream engages directly with a host of economic theories and models related to finance, corporate power, and the costs of climate change. It also acknowledges that mainstream economics has changed for the better in the past decade, but more needs to be done, and that we could be on the cusp of an exciting, new chapter for real world economic thinking. While I don’t share Oren Cass’s politics, I do agree that economics should not imitate physics. We need a more historical, holistic, and human economics.
The world has changed since the idea of Ricardo’s Dream was born five years ago, even since it was published six months ago, but I’m pleased that its arguments are not yet obsolete or exhausted. I hope that, with willing readers, they have much more work to do.
Thank you Nat. Ricardo’s dream helped me understand much that was unknowable to me before. Bravo Nat !!!