Despite the high salaries involved, employing economists is a cost-effective way for banks, and stockbrokers to secure exposure in the media.

We need to abandon the economist's notion of the economy as a machine, with its attendant concept of equilibrium. A more helpful way of thinking about the economy is to imagine it as a living organism.

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

The second part of the New Right's policy package has been the belief that free-market solutions are always best. It is this latter view which is profoundly mistaken. Markets and profits are crucial, but the pure free-market model itself is deeply flawed.

Keynes tried to show that market economies could settle in equilibrium states in which the labour market did not clear, and in which the level of unemployment was high. He believed that this was due to a particular example of market failure, developed in his concept of effective demand.

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

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.