Quote of the Day

Maxine Udall, Girl Economist:

Now combine carefully fostered distrust of the government, the only thing that might reasonably be expected to stand between us and the private interests of concentrated, unfettered wealth and power, with the myth of an all-wise, all-knowing, beneficent invisible hand embedded in a Utopian free market. Then propagate the myth by a discipline that trains its young: to assume rather uncritically fully-informed, unchanging over time, prudent, industrious, self-interested preferences and behavior; to downplay the "friction" of transaction costs and information asymmetries; to assume that many externalities are or soon will be internalized; that labor and goods markets clear rapidly; that capital is more putty than clay; and until recently that financial markets were both rational and efficient.