Tomas Sedlacek is the the author of the bestselling book, Economics of Good and Evil: The Quest for Economic Meaning from Gilgamesh to Wall Street, and has been described by The Yale Economic Review as one of the “five hot minds in economics”. In his day job, Sedlacek is the chief macroeconomic strategist at Czech bank, SOB. He is also a member of the National Economic Council and a lecturer at Charles University, Prague. Sedlacek was the keynote speaker at portfolio institutional awards last month
“What we have done is become so fascinated with GDP growth we have traded everything for it, including the stability of our economies.”
Tomas Sedlacek
The subject of your speech at the portfolio institutional awards was the fetish of economy. It’s an intriguing title; can you tell me more? Every civilisation, every generation tends to fetishise something. There are many things that bring us joy, many things that are important and many things that are necessary for human life, but then for reasons quite unknown and quite difficult to decipher for later generations, we always pick one.When we talk about the Second World War it was a fetish of our forefathers, for reasons that we no longer understand, for the nation to be as large as possible geographically. Today, luckily it’s a laughing matter, but a couple of generations ago we literally killed each other for it.You can see this also when religion was of such high importance that we would murder each other over the way people were supposed to be baptised: whether you were supposed to immerse them in water or sprinkle them with it. These are things that today make us ask: “What were they smoking back then?”Today I think one of those fetishes is GDP growth. We have all been to 10,000 conferences on economic topics and you walk out and you have this impression that the most important thing in the world is GDP growth, as if there was nothing more important going on in the world. Of course, if you take two steps back and try to look at it in a sober way, you ask: “Why would that be such a big thing?” I’m not against growth, but if you fetishise it and you sacrifice everything else for it, which is exactly what I would argue we have done, it can destroy you.
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