The Original Error

Why are there recessions?

Why do firms earn outsized profits?

Why do wages diverge so dramatically depending on where people live?

As a discipline, economics is suspiciously full of anomalies: things mainstream theory says should not happen, but keep happening.

These problems go beyond isolated examples. Over the last hundred years, economists have tried four times to build a theory of the whole economy. Each attempt is impressive and sophisticated. Yet each still fails to explain what actually happens.

This is not bad luck. Something systematic has been going on. The history of economic thought is marked by persistent puzzles, false predictions, and brilliant economists logically arriving at plainly wrong conclusions. These are all clues to an underlying cause.

So why does macroeconomic theory keep failing?

This book reveals a simple, radical answer.

There is an original error. Not a missing detail or an overlooked amendment, but a fundamental flaw in the conceptual foundations - there from the start - quietly warping two centuries of economic thought.

This is a philosopher's investigation into why the discipline's best theories struggle to match reality - revealing the deeper mistake that continues to distort our understanding of crises, growth and inequality.

Something big has been going on. And going wrong.