Definition of success? Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump holds up a copy of The Economist during a campaign stop in Wichita, Kansaa. (Photo: AP/Charles Rex Arbogast) The world’s gross domestic product has grown by 90 per cent from $41 trillionto $78 trillion since 2000. Over the same period, The Economist’s guide to the subject of its name has increased 44 per cent from 250 to 359 pages and in girth from four inches to five inches wide. So the world is growing twice as quickly as it can be explained. Has The Economist’s New York Business Editor Matthew Bishop discovered a potentially Nobel Prize-winning new rule of economics? Maybe not. Still, anyone who took the magazine’s “Pocket Economist” dictionary at its word in 2000 and would like to exhibit the same behaviour with “Economics: An A-Z Guide,” its worthy and invaluable progeny, had better upgrade their duffel to a great coat. So how has the world changed and is its lexicon keeping pace? This tome is strictly about economics so there are no listings then or now for the internet, climate change, sustainability, employee engagement and other corporate issues and buzz words. Nor does this dictionary list many important individuals.So there was no listing in 2000 for Bill Gates, Warren Buffett, Bill Clinton and George W Bush and there are none now for Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and David Cameron. Recommended by Forbes Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan doesn’t rate a listing either, though “irrational exuberance,” the phrase he popularised in 1996 and for which he is arguably best remembered, is a notable new entry. Leadership cults follow much the same rule, so there are no attempted explanations of Buffettology, Abenomics or, God forbid, Trumponomics. There is also no room for “Brexit” between “Bretton Woods” and “BRICs” (another […]
