ONE year into the credit crisis, its effects are still reverberating around the world. The housing market has once again duped a generation and the prices of oil and food are breaking records like true Olympians. Why do these things happen?
Turning to an economics textbook for answers would be largely a waste of time. Dive into the dense pages of equations and diagrams and you will discover that economics students are still taught to start with the unquestioned assumption that people and companies are rational, selfish, independent economic agents. These are the core propositions of orthodox or “neoclassical” economics.…
