PREFACE

An introction

Some stories take longer to tell than others. This one started out in 2007 as a contract to write a book. It was to be an account of the transformation of university economics by the gradual addition to its curricula of considerations of strategic thinking – of game theory. After the Panic of 2008, it became a story about a first-order discovery in the wake. In 2016, it morphed into its present shape, as a history of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences. There were plenty of twists and turns along the way, notably the 2008 crisis, the elections of 2016 and 2024, and the Covid pandemic of 2019-23. After all that, The Spider in the Web seems to me to have become the sequel to my Knowledge and the Wealth of Nation: A Story of Economic Discovery (Norton 2006) that, in 2007, I set out to write.