Books proliferate, and occasionally sell in very large numbers, which claim to have found the rule, or small set of rules, which will guarantee business success. But business is far too complicated, far too difficult an activity to distil into a few simple commands ... It is failure rather than success which is the distinguishing feature of corporate life.

Even in financial markets, the concept of market efficiency does not hold.

In most Western economies, the general relationship is not in fact between the rate of inflation and the level of unemployment, but between the rate of change of inflation and the rate of change of unemployment.

The reader might reflect that an awful lot of supposing has to take place in order for the quantity theory of money to be true.

By any reasonable criteria, the discipline of economics as a whole, in its present state, is sadly lacking.

But Adam Smith was a philosopher as well as well as an economist, famous in his time as much for his Theory of Moral Sentiments as for The Wealth of Nations. And as he understood so well, society is more than the sum of its individual parts.

The behavior of the economy as a whole, at the aggregate, macro-level, is built up from the individual equations at the micro-level.