"I think they are the last bastions of the idea that you can change the world in accordance with a rationally designed blueprint. Modernism in the twentieth century went through areas such as art, architecture and the humanities with the idea that we could rethink everything from the ground up and that we understood enough about the world to do that. I've come to believe that we don't . But people still think that they can analyse and structure economies as if they were a mechanical system and that they can do the same in business. So in the same way that Le Corbusier said - wrongly - that a house is a machine for living in, it exemplifies the idea that a business or an economy can be structured from first principles in the same way.
They are organic entities that evolve over time and operate within a social context. You can't look at them independently of that.
You can't understand how the financial crisis came about without understanding the politics of the relationship between the financial sector and government and the anthropology of the cultures of the organizations, or indeed without appreciating the history of bubbles and financial crisis.
Hat Tip ~ John Kay ( British Economist) on Economics in the Real World, Five Books
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