‘The Econocracy’ is basically a modern-day re-telling of ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’, in which the shortcomings of economics – or rather neo-classical economics – are laid bare.

The book’s three authors - Joe Earle, Cahal Moran and Zach Ward-Perkins - all studied economics at the same time at Manchester University and all fell out of love with their course, coming to view it as “narrow, uncritical and disconnected from the real world”.

This led, in their second year, to their setting up the Post-Crash Economics Society for curricular reform, which ultimately evolved into an international network called Rethinking Economics (with 40 groups in 13 countries), dedicated to reforming economic education and democratising economics by transforming the subject “from a technical discipline into a public dialogue”.

The authors define ‘econocracy’ as an economics-based technocracy or a society “in which political goals are defined in terms of their effects on the economy, which is believed to be a distinct system with its own logic that requires experts to manage it”, and ‘The Econocracy’ represents not only their analysis of what’s gone wrong but also how this problem should be addressed.

This enterprise exhibits two paradoxes.

Firstly, it is claimed that the teaching of economics in UK universities represents a form of indoctrination, which militates against independent, critical thought. But if this is really so, then how were our three authors (and their counterparts in others institutions of higher education) able to escape that fate?

The answer seems to lie in what economists would refer to as ‘exogenous shock’: not only did they all come of age in the 2008 global financial crisis and embark upon Economics degrees in the vain hope that their studies would shed light on this phenomenon but when the Eurozone crisis occurred it wasn’t even mentioned in lectures, confirming their growing realisation that what they were taught was only tenuously, if at all, related to the economics of the real world.

Secondly, although Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins present the language of economics as impenetrably technical to the layman, they succeed in making their own economic arguments wonderfully lucid.

They certainly make out a good case that there are serious issues concerning how economics is taught and what is taught, with neo-classical theory exhibiting severe shortcomings in addressing issues such macroeconomic stability, environmental change and inequality.

I would, however, have liked the critique to have been even more wide-ranging and better informed historically (although in their defence one of their complaints is the way in which economics is usually studied without reference to history, politics and ethics).

Thus whilst Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins are correct in arguing that the economy as “an abstract concept … is a relatively recent invention” and that World War Two played a pivotal role in making economists indispensable experts, technocracy and the associated belief that the world is “characterised by knowable, predictable forces” stretches back to at least the late seventeenth-century Enlightenment and the roots of liberalism as an ideology.

Given the depth of these roots, it is difficult to be quite as sanguine as Earle, Moran and Ward-Perkins regarding the prospects for uprooting the econocracy.