Academic

Our three reviews of Bert Westbrook's Out of Crisis: Rethinking Our Financial Markets (here, here, and here) are getting some attention from economists. See The Economist's View and Open Economics. The latter is particularly sympathetic to Bert's argument:

What we have here, then, is a very alternative narrative of the crisis, one that delves into root causes that go far deeper than economists dare tread. It seems that Westbrook goes even deeper than the Polanyian notion that markets are embedded in a social and political structure. They are also constructed by society and by language. There is no recourse to the simplistic notion that, ?in the beginning there were markets.? Maybe there were markets from an early point in human prehistory, but our markets are just as much a product of our discourse on how economies function as they are a result of institutions.