EH: Well, fortunately they have not done that much harm, because their advice has rarely been followed. If you actually trusted self-interest you would never let corporations be constructed; you would never let them have multiple purposes because that is too complicated for the economics models. For many years those economists who followed the dominant ideology didn't pay attention to what we now call economic growth - except for Marx, who was very sharp on this. The English-speaking economists took a long time to focus on this great wonder that industrial prosperity was creating, of making people amazingly well-off. I do believe that if we didn't spend so much time believing in free markets, we would get better results in the monetary system.

Alan Greenspan was in his youth a radical libertarian - Ayn Rand was his teacher - and his belief that if you just let people alone they wouldn't get into trouble did in fact get people into a lot of trouble. So I think that some of the basic ideas of economists have caused trouble. I also think that some of the complaints, like those that we are getting from the Archbishop of Canterbury - "these economists, this model of the world, these selfish people acting for themselves in some sort of evolutionary struggle" - are really justified attacks on the dominant world view of economists, but they are cast as attacks on the industrial economy itself, attacks which are totally unjustified.

I would also say that the effort to separate economics from the moral, the human sciences, is to me an erroneous, a false separation. There is no reason to look at economic virtues, economic goods or economic goals any differently from the way that we look at what we wish from our families, from our governments, from our cathedrals, from our friendships. They are moral questions, there is a good we are aiming at, or a set of goods, there are evils that we wish to avoid. The first and most important question is, what are we trying to do with the economy at all, and economists rarely address that question in any substantial way.