The price of fish

Now, more than at any other time in our history, the world is faced with a series of vicious and apparently insurmountable difficulties, chief among them unstable financial markets, rapidly diminishing resources and an eco-system that is becoming dangerously volatile. In The Price of Fish Michael Mainelli and Ian Harris examine in a unique way the world's most abiding and wicked problems - sustainability, global warming, over-fishing, overpopulation, the pensions crisis; all of which are characterized by a set of messy, circular, aggressive and peculiarly long-term problems - and go on to suggest that it is not the circumstances that are too complex, but our way of reading them that is too simple. Too simple and often wrong. This book goes beyond economics alone to look at real commerce, and the ways complex interactions adapt and change over time: the price of fish, for instance, cannot be right when we have over-fishing, hunger and ruined seas. Mainelli and Harris are taking steps towards understanding the knotty world we live in, not a simple exercise in chess-players' logic but an approach which addresses the complex, the cyclical, the hostile and the protracted. If we're ever going to solve the unsolvable, the first steps start here.