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This book is not an anti-capitalist manifesto. Being critical of free-market ideology is not the same as being against capitalism. Despite its problems and limitations, I believe that capitalism is still the best economic system that humanity has invented. My criticism is of a particular version of…

But we are material beings and cannot live on ideas, however great the knowledge economy may sound. Morever, we have always lived in a knowledge economy in the sense that it has always been a command over superior knowledge, rather than the physical nature of activities, that has ultimately decided…

Even within the dominant school of economics, that is, the neo-classical school, which provides much of the foundation for free-market economics, there are theories that explain why free markets are likely to produce sub-optimal results. These are theories of 'market failure' or 'welfare economics'…

The economics of Herbert Simon and his followers has really changed the way we understand modern firms and, more broadly, the modern economy. It helps us break away from the myth that our economy is exclusively populated by rational self-seekers interacting through the market mechanism. When we und…

Thus, exactly because finance is efficient at responding to changing profit opportunities, it can become harmful for the rest ef the economy. And this is why James Tobin, the 1981 Nobel laureate in economics, talked of the need to 'throw some sand in the wheels of our excessively efficient internat…