EH: I agree. If you address one kind of moral weakness, people will find some other kind of way to be weak morally. So it is inevitable that if you solve one kind of problem in a practical sense people will find some other kind of trouble to get into. If you think of a rambunctious teenager, you can keep him at home for a while, but after a while he will climb out of the window, or he will do something at home which will make you wish he'd gone to that party - trash the room or hang himself or something horrible. It's difficult, but that's the nature of this kind of lively human activity, that we don't solve problems completely, or if we do another problem comes.

What is really remarkable about the Western economy is how many problems we seem to have solved quite successfully and quite durably. The main one would be what Keynes refers to as the economics problem: that people were hungry. And when one talks about scarcity in economics, one used to mean scarcity in the sense that it was difficult to live to adulthood or to be fully nourished. We now live in a world - or at least a country - where the poor are the obese, and where almost everyone is reasonably well housed and educated. So this is one set of problems we have done a remarkably good job at addressing. That doesn't mean that we've now perfected society.

SB: Can I ask you a question, Edward? You said in your book Human Goods, Economic Evils that the problem was not so much the economy as economists. I am not here to bat for economics, which is an industry that can look after itself. But it would still be interesting to hear from you what harm the economics industry has done.