Rules and Resources

What if the most influential economic ideas of the 1970s were not confined to journals and lecture halls, but became lived dilemmas with consequences you can feel.

Rules and Resources is a collection of eleven standalone short stories that transforms Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences recognised insights from 1969 to 1979 into tense, human-scale fiction: a hospital budgeting model that starts dictating care, a proof that becomes famous by removing one assumption, a town reclassified into "progress," a courtroom fight over whether winners must compensate losers, an environmental footprint traced through supply chains, a bank learning that calm prices can conceal fragility, a flood where constraints make "fairness" dangerous, a benefits case where spending is treated as suspicion, a trade boom that splits wages and invites scapegoats, a crisis war room where procedure becomes survival, and an agricultural training network that turns skills into power.

Each story opens with a brief, plain language paragraph explaining the core Nobel idea that powers the plot, making the book accessible to students, teachers, and curious readers alike.

These stories are inspired by Nobel recognised research, but they are not affiliated with or endorsed by the Nobel Prize or its institutions. They are an invitation to think clearly about systems, to notice the assumptions behind confident claims, and to see what the numbers often hide.