11.29.09
When markets fail
How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (Hardcover)
~ John Cassidy
Just finished (in a rapid browse) this book on the economic collapse. I found it unusually helpful because of the pocket size history of economic theory from Walras to Arrow-Debreu and later, with an unintended portrait of the struggle of economists with their own (lack of ) understanding of the so-called science they have created for themselves, enidng with the ‘brilliant’ idiocy of Greenspan et al. at the current endgame of financial mystification.
The question of the theory of markets requires more histories like this, because the deceptions of the subject are rife, and finally calamitous.
If Arrow-Debreu’s famous result doesn’t generalize to the overconfidence in markets that drives the ideological mesmerization of the current culture we need to know that, and this book is to be commended for tackling the byways of economics that never show up in popular discussions. Most discussion of the question of markets by its ideologues is mental muddle, where not deception.
Clearly we have learned in the last two years that something is awry in the neverneverland of mathematical economics.