The purpose of this book is to call for a wholesale rethinking of the way that markets treat both the labour and natural resources on which we all depend. It re... » 

The purpose of this book is to call for a wholesale rethinking of the way that markets treat both the labour and natural resources on which we all depend. It reveals how economic analysis justifies self-defeating policies that encourage wanton use of the environment and callous abuse of the least advantaged labourers. From Adam Smith to the present day, economic theory has shortchanged the workers most crucial to the functioning of human life and offered skewed views of scarcity and extraction. Perelman will show how this approach has produced a discipline in which its followers' models and representations of the world around them are so removed from reality that continuing to abide by them would jeopardize both human capabilities and nature itself.MICHAEL PERELMAN is a professor of economics at California State University at Chico. His books include Steal This Idea, Class Warfare in the Information Age, Pathology of the US Economy Revisited and Transcending the Economy. «