How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamites (Farrar, Straus, and Giroux), by John Cassidy

 When the financialtailspin of 2008 forced Alan Greenspan to confess that he was mistaken aboutthe unshakable rationality and self-correcting nature of the economy, it was asif a Roman Catholic cardinal publicly doubted the divinity of Christ. As TheNewYorker’s John Cassidy argues so well in HowMarkets Fail, Greenspan was the gnomic pontiff of a pseudo-religion whoselaissez-faire, free-market doctrine was rigged up with mathematical equationsand bunk history to masquerade as a science of human behavior. Alas, thedogmatic faith of recent generations of economists in the inevitablerationality of human actors left “no place for stupidity, ignorance, or herdbehavior”just the sort of human frailties (along with greed) that led theworld economy to the brink.