During the last ten years or so there has been a lot of talk about the coming of a ‘new economy’. Different authors define this amorphous entity in slightly different ways; some focus on new technologies, others on new styles of corporate management and ways of working; or perhaps it is rather a product of a scaling-back of the state or perhaps a consequence of an ever more globalized world. Although the items on this list, or on some longer list like it, may appear quite disparate, what they have in common is an emphasis on the logic of the marketplace, on the interplay between supply and demand. What is new about the new economy, in short, is an emphasis on market forces. Economic markets, we are today constantly told, must be given freer reign – we must ‘get prices right’ and stop pampering and mollycoddling the inefficient, the unproductive and the merely lazy. Only in this way will we survive in the new and vastly more competitive world in which we live; only in this way can we achieve economic growth and lasting happiness.

We are in this way invited to participate in a gigantic social experiment. According to the engineers who have drawn up the plans, our societies are to be reorganized ever more closely in the image of a market.