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For this week's KGNU programme, 'It's The Economy', Claudia Cragg speaks with Tim Harford. His first book, the global bestseller The Undercover Economist was a sensation – and has gone on to sell well over a million copies worldwide. In it, Harford looked at the world through the eyes of a microeconomist, from the changing cost of a cappuccino to how supermarkets choose to display the products on their shelves. Now, in a world utterly transformed by the global downturn, Harford is back.

In The Undercover Economist Strikes Back, he turns to the wider picture – to macroeconomics – to help us unpick and understand the complexities of major economies – which, he says, putting you (the reader) in the driving seat.

With a word of advice now and then, the Undercover Economist encourages you to run the show. Along the way you’ll discover what happens to inflation when you burn a million pound notes, why even prison camps have recessions and why Coke didn’t change the price of a bottle for seventy years.

According to The New Statesman's Felix Salmon, 

“Tim Harford is perhaps the best popular economics writer in the world… his new book is nothing less than the holy grail of popular economics.”

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This interview for #KGNU and 'It's The Economy' (a show produced by a team of the station's reporters) is a weekly radio economics and all-things-business program with international reach. This week Claudia Cragg talks to Gayle Avery about 'Honeybees and Locusts' and discusses why all of us in business and the world at large should adopt as many of the traits of the former as possible to discourage the continuing plague of the latter.

In this interview, Avery, who is one of the founders of the instituteforsustainableleadership.com, points out that if only the 23 main principles of SL had been followed into the run up to the Great Crash of 2008, it more than likely could have been avoided or at least significantly minimized. Furthermore, many very successful companies, like BMW for example, purposefully follow SL principles to their very evident and consequent bottom-line corporate advantage. 

The idea is that the honey bee creators, makers and providers lend valuable things for others” to an environment while the locust “takers and predators” are those who, says Avery, “extract value from others without contributing much in return”. The distinction comes from a so-called founding work of modern capitalism, Bernard Mandeville’s Fable of the Bees (which first appeared as a poem in 1705).

The implication for those who may still believe that capitalism, as we see it today, is viable in the long term, is that the adoption of these principles encourages bee-like virtues and so discourages the locusts.

But is that what we see today? The nasty little secret of much of C21st business may be that capitalism not only comes with moral hazards (as often required to meet sometimes greedy and ultimately unsustainable $$$ stockholder demands) but may actually depend on that climate for much of its success.  

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According to Gar Alperovitz, never before have so many Americans been more frustrated with the economic system, more fearful that it is failing, or more open to fresh ideas about a new one. The seeds of a new movement demanding change are forming, he says, and it is this that he discusses here with KGNU's Claudia Cragg for 'It's The Economy.'

But just what is this thing called a new economy, and how might it take shape in America? In What Then Must We Do?, Gar Alperovitz speaks directly to the reader about where we find ourselves in history, why the time is right for a new-economy movement to coalesce, what it means to build a new system to replace the crumbling one, and how we might begin. He also suggests what the next system might look like—and where we can see its outlines, like an image slowly emerging in the developing trays of a photographer’s darkroom, already taking shape.

He proposes a possible next system that is not corporate capitalism, not state socialism, but something else entirely—and something entirely American.

Alperovitz calls for an evolution, not a revolution, out of the old system and into the new. That new system would democratize the ownership of wealth, strengthen communities in diverse ways, and be governed by policies and institutions sophisticated enough to manage a large-scale, powerful economy.

For the growing group of Americans pacing at the edge of confidence in the old system, or already among its detractors, What Then Must We Do?, Alperovitz believes, offers an elegant solution for moving from anger to strategy.