“We’re a planet of six billion ninnies living in a civilisation built by a few thousand savants,” Scott Adams once said — and beneath the Dibert creator's misanthropy is a disarmingly accurate description of how the modern world works. Most of us don’t invent, build, or discover anything of world-changing importance. We live inside systems we didn’t design, using tools we don’t understand, and benefitting daily from the work of people whose names we’ll never know. And yet, we’re quick to criticise those same systems — science, technology, capitalism — that lifted us from the brink of subsistence to a level of prosperity our ancestors couldn’t imagine. It’s precisely this paradox that the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences asks us to confront. It’s also the most controversial of the Nob

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