FT’s Tett wins Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing

Financial Times editor-at-large Gillian Tett has won the George S. Eccles Prize for Excellence in Economic Writing from the Columbia University Business School.

Tett won for her book “Anthro-Vision: How Anthropology Can Explain Business and Life.”

This book explains how anthropology can explain the most peculiar dynamics of human behavior — in business and beyond. Anthropologists spend their lives trying to understand how “alien” cultures think. They do so by embedding themselves deep within unfamiliar communities and uncovering the rituals that underpin their behavior.

Gillian Tett explains how she came to anthropology — via a Cambridge PhD that took her to a village in Tajikistan in the early 1990s. She explains how the experience made her realize the power of anthropology in explaining the modern world. And she describes this power as “the other AI” — not artificial intelligence, but anthropology intelligence.

The Eccles Prize is awarded annually to the author of the best book on economics that bridges theory and practice. The selection is made by a committee of leading Columbia Business School faculty and a member of the Eccles family. The two primary criteria for selection are academic rigor and layperson accessibility.