David Boyle obituary

The Guardian

17-07-2025

In his 1989 book Building Futures, David Boyle, who has died aged 67 from complications linked to Parkinson's, argued that mainstream economics was failing cities and a new localism could save them. This emphasis on communities rather than large-scale centralised development tied in with the broad theme that David saw as running through his work: 'The importance of human-scale institutions over centralised ones, human imagination over dull rationalism, and the human spirit over technocratic reduction.'
Funny Money: In Search of Alternative Cash (1999) explored local economic systems found mainly on a journey through the US. Exchanging services within community systems run by volunteers can be facilitated through 'time banks'. The idea of the 'time dollar', representing one hour of help, whether grocery shopping or preparing a tax return, was popularised by the Washington law professor Edgar Cahn.
He saw the principle as akin to a blood bank or a babysitting club: 'Help a neighbour and then, when you need it, a neighbour – most likely a different one – will help you.'
David pursued these ideas through the work of the New Economics Foundation, formed in 1986 out of The Other Economic Summit, a body providing a critical shadow to G7 summits to promote radical economic perspectives and voices from the global south. The NEF aims to transform the economy so that it works for people and the planet.
From 1987 to 2010, David was the editor of the magazines and newspapers produced by the NEF and his work there also included establishing a UK network of time banks. By 2008 he and Martin Simon, the chief executive of Timebanking UK, were able to produce the report The New Wealth of Time, showing how the multiplier effect of strangers pooling their efforts could extend to improving public services through organisations.
This drew on another idea important to David: co-production, with one hour from an unemployed single parent, for instance, counting for as much as one from a surgeon or other professional. The principle could be applied in mental and physical health – such as the Rushey Green Time Bank developed by GPs in Lewisham, south-east London – services for young people and older people, regeneration, housing and social justice.
David believed that whenever something is wrong, it is probably too big. He applied his analysis of scale, inhuman and remote organisations to both the state and markets in books including The Tyranny of Numbers (2001); Authenticity (2003), rejecting the corporate and fake in favour of the local and real; two written with Andrew Simms, The New Economics (2009) and Eminent Corporations (2010); The Human Element (2011); Broke: Who Killed the Middle Classes? (2013); and Tickbox (2020), pointing to the pitfalls of dehumanising decision making. The Money Changers: Currency Reform from Aristotle to E-Cash (2002) was a collection he edited viewing money in various ways as a changeable means to an end, in line with John Ruskin's observation that 'There is no wealth but life.'
In 2012-13 David led the government inquiry Barriers to Choice, examining access to healthcare, social care and education. His central finding was that: 'Although people welcome choice in the services they use, there is a minority of people who – for a variety of reasons – are excluded from those benefits, often because they lack the confidence, the information, or the advice that they need.'
The Guardian applauded it for 'pulling the issue away from the old market v state argument and reframing choice as an issue of user power'. David identified in practical detail what could make systems work better for disadvantaged people.
In 2013 he set up the New Weather Institute thinktank with me and Simms to promote a rapid transition to a fair economy that can thrive within planetary ecological boundaries.
Born in Paddington, central London, David was the son of Diana (nee Evelegh), who became a magistrate, and Richard Boyle, an investment banker. An ancestor was Sir John Lubbock, the first Lord Avebury, the Liberal politician who introduced the Bank Holidays Act 1871.
Childhood illness and hospitalisation may have contributed to David's later sense of drive. He was educated at The Hall school, Hampstead, and Clifton college, Bristol, and gained a degree in philosophy and theology at Trinity College, Oxford (1977-80). His own interest in politics emerged in a wish to align Liberal economic policies with the impossibility of infinite economic growth, and a desire to work with Green politicians.
On graduating he became a reporter on the Oxford Star, and went on to edit the Town and Country Planning Journal (1985-88), a pioneering publication that campaigned for planning centred on people and nature.
A voice on what from 1988 was the Liberal Democrats national policy committee, he edited the weekly Liberal Democrat News for six years from 1992 and stood in the 2001 general election.
He believed that economic education could empower people, and in 2019 co-authored Economics – A Crash Course, a beginners' guide to heterodox economics, diverse and non-dogmatic, drawing on multiple schools of thought. Quite devoid of ego, he made the discussion of ideas an adventure, and helped make localism a buzzword across all the political parties. Another framework for the exploration of ideas came from his extensive historical writing, with subjects ranging from Caractacus to Alan Turing.
Through the imprint that David set up, The Real Press, he published five collections of modern folk tales, niche histories, and fiction. His play Passport to Steyning celebrated the West Sussex town that he lived in declaring independence in the face of global warming, and was performed at the Steyning festival in 2018, with many of the characters playing themselves.
Through the NEF he met Sarah Burns, later a textile designer, and they married in 2003. She survives him, along with their sons, Robin and William, his sisters, Fiona, Serena, Kristina and Louisa, and his brother, James.
David Courtney Boyle, political economist, environmentalist and writer, born 20 May 1958; died 20 June 2025