I have long criticised economics for its lack of realism, and for producing “models” of human behavior that are at best caricatures, and at worst parodies of the real thing. In my recent book “What’s Wrong with Economics?”, I argue that, in their attempt to establish universal laws, economists willfully ignored the particularities of histories and culture. The economist and sociologist Thorstein Veblen brilliantly captured this blindness. In a 1908 ...