Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life

“What could happen . . . if more people embraced some anthro-vision? [Tett’s] conclusions are bright and buoyant.” —Wall Street Journal

“Fascinating and surprising.” —Fareed Zakaria, CNN

“Whether you’re marketing Kit-Kats in Japan or fighting the spread of COVID-19 in England, you need a more qualitative understanding of who people are and what they care about. To solve twenty-first-century problems, we must expand our fields of vision and fill in old blind spots with new empathy.” —Melinda Gates, author of The Moment of Life

“Absolutely brilliant.” —Daniel Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow

“A plea to those of us who may be unfamiliar with Tett’s academic discipline to think more like an anthropologist. I think she’s right . . . Tett’s book may be anthropological, but it also embraces a style of accessible economic writing that, sadly, went out of fashion as the mathematicians and their models took over. Anthro-Vision reminds me of John Kenneth Galbraith’s The Affluent Society (1958) and The New Industrial State (1967). Some economists may regard this as a criticism. I can think of no higher praise.” —The Times (UK)

“A book that will turn your world upside down in the best possible way: fun, profound and bursting with important insights.” —Tim Harford, author of The Data Detective: Ten Easy Rules to Make Sense of Statistics

“Tett provides readers with a new intellectual framework—grounded in her deep understanding of anthropology and her path-breaking journalism—that can fundamentally transform how we approach solving society’s most wicked problems . . . I cannot recommend it highly enough.” —Mariana Mazzucato, author of Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism

“A fascinating and compelling demonstration that all of us, especially economists, can benefit from the insights of anthropology: the worm’s-eye not just the bird’s-eye view of how people behave.” —Mervyn King, author of Radical Uncertainty: Decision-Making Beyond the Numbers

Gillian Tett chairs the editorial board, US, for the Financial Times and writes columns for the world’s leading newspaper covering finance, business, and the political economy. She has been named British Journalist of the Year, Columnist of the Year, and Business Journalist of the Year in the UK and won two Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing awards in the US. She speaks regularly at conferences around the world on finance and global markets and has a PhD in social anthropology from Cambridge University. Tett is the author of Saving the Sun: How Wall Street Mavericks Shook Up Japan’s Financial World and Made Billions, Fool’s Gold: The Inside Story of J.P. Morgan and How Wall St. Greed Corrupted Its Bold Dream and Created a Financial Catastrophe, and The Silo Effect: The Peril of Expertise and the Promise of Breaking Down Barriers.