The world of the textbooks

In the thirteen years since this book was first published, orthodox economics has continued unperturbed along its accustomed way. If anything, it has become even more obscure and irrelevant so that we might validly echo Sismondi’s regret of 170 years ago, to see political economy ‘every day adopting a more sententious language, enveloped in calculations increasingly difficult to follow, losing itself in abstractions and becoming, in every way, an occult science’.1