Politics February 1, 2015

If you like the idea of efficient markets, then Bob Swarup’s Money Mania is not the book for you. Swarup, who has a Ph.D. in cosmology but has spent most of his career in the world of high finance, delivers this scabrous appraisal of those who cling to the misconception that humans are rational: “The dedicated economist is a learned nymphomaniac in theory, his or her virginity still intact due to never having actually met a real human being on their academic travels.” In his view, we are not so much Homo economicus—the ideological construct much beloved by those selfsame