Economic Id-eology
With wit and clarity, Cassidy provides a compressed history of economics beginning with Adam Smith and leading to the murky behavioral psychology that makes comprehensible the devastating suicidal plunge of bankers and brokers over the edge of reasonable risk. Wall Street emerges as the Id of the national psyche, driven by dark and irresistible forces, and regulation, our Superego, seems the only remedy for the passionate irrationality of which all of us -- financiers, consumers, politicians -- are guilty. Most instructively, Cassidy points to the fact that all markets are not the same or subsumable under the same theory. Economic behavior is, first of all behavior, not mathematics, and requires a more subtle and flexible understanding than classical economics or ideologies can provide.